I just realized that I seldom write/read fanfiction of books, and when I do, it’s because they’ve been adapted to multi-media. Like, when I was into the LoTR and Hobbit fandoms, my baseline was the movies. When I got into Hannibal, it was because of the TV show. Harry Potter–the recent video game. Even my most recent story, set in the Song of Ice and Fire, is based on the series.
The only time I’ve had the book-version in mind, was when I was looking for stories on Arya/Jaqen H’ghar.
Everything else, I imagined the assets and events used in the shows/movies.
It’s the same with drawn media. Manga and comic books don’t inspire the urge for fanfiction in me, but anime and movies do. I had no interest in reading Marvel fanfiction until the movies came out. I only got interested in fanfiction for Haikyuu, One Punch Man and Chainsaw Man when I saw the anime.
The type of media I tend to write for is video games and the ones I read from are TV shows. I have no idea why, but I just thought it was interesting how certain media can make my brain latch onto the IP more creatively than others.
How about you guys? Any media preferences as well or maybe you have other factors in play?
I would actually be interested in those paragraphs if you still have them :D It always fascinates me how much different certain stories are once translated and how sometimes you can’t get a full sense of the story because of cultural nuances.
I only watch foreign movies or anime with subtitles now, but growing up, I actually started with dubbed over anime in my native language, Filipino. I am absolutely certain a lot of nuance was lost in the effort of translation, but at the same time, I can’t watch the anime I grew up with, subtitled XD
There are a few anime I can’t actually try in the original Japanese. I love the English versions so much. Or ones that, even when I can watch it in Japanese, I still enjoy more in English. One is Yu Yu Hakusho. It might be that I love Justin Cook’s voice, but I really enjoy the whole cast. It might be the one anime I’ve actually watched more than I’ve read the original manga. (And I’ve read that manga a lot too.)
The paragraphs! They are a bit bigger now, because you said you don’t know as much about YGO. Hopefully this makes sense!
To add more card games in, they made up a lot more… stuff. The plot was almost always about a card game tournament, so it was unnecessary. Anzu (the token female teammate), is known for being the “friendship speech girl” because of the anime. To be honest, some of the ways they do it really do make her seem like an idiot. In the magna, the entire friend group had those moments.
Fleshing out minor characters in the anime also went wrong. They were made flatter (which is why they seem even more two-dimensional to me in the English version). They shoehorned more romantic subplots in, when the only major one in the manga was Anzu’s crush on Atem. (Manga!Yugi’s crush on Anzu stopped coming up at all after a while.) Shizuka was only a plot point as Jonouchi’s sister. The manga never had her be someone else’s love interest. The anime had to make her the crush of both Honda and Otogi.
I’m all for an adaptation expanding on minor characters, but not like that. I know why they wanted to do something. Even in the manga, Honda is given very little to do as the story goes on. Then they brought in Otogi. He had a short arc about him (between card game tournaments) and then he was in the same place as Honda. They had nothing to do but be cheerleaders. Like Anzu. Except in the manga, while Anzu had her rather pointless crush on Atem, she was often used for the mangaka to inform the readers about something. Anzu would think through the situation from an outsider’s perspective. It wasn’t a great role for a character, but it gave her a little more purpose than poor Honda or Otogi.
I also started ranting about the anime filler arcs. Those made later things a lot more confusing. Because they still stuck to the manga, just added more events between things. You can’t have someone learn the same lesson twice and have the character not seem like an idiot for regressing. Not without showing why they lost that progress.
I wanted to like parts of some of the filler arcs, but because they didn’t decide to diverge from the manga after… It lost the point.
(One of my projects is a rewrite of the manga, with growing canon-divergence, just with keeping in mind the latter manga and putting those facts right at the start. I’m now like a fountain of opinion on this subject.)
I admit, I had to google some of the characters to refresh my memory of them (I think I’ve only seen 1 or 2 episodes of YGO 😅 I bought some of the cards as a kid but that was because they were so shiny and pretty :D). It’s a shame they felt they had to add more romantic subplot to make it more “interesting” --I always find it shallow when adaptations do that and it usually comes at the cost of character relationships.
I suppose that’s part of the struggle of anime adaptations. The business seems so finicky. It’s tough for developers to figure out which arcs to include when they don’t have the guarantee of another season. So they end up cutting filler content, but then some plot points don’t make sense without it, and so they include filler–but now there’s less episodes for plot. Then the characters suffer, because some arcs take a while to develop, but they still have to justify an animator drawing them in, so they get shoddy characterization instead. I imagine it’s far easier to have characters return to status quo, like a sitcom. So they end up learning the same lessons all over again.
Thanks for the write-up! It was interesting to read. Good luck on your project! :D
There was another anime adaptation which actually started at the beginning of the manga, instead of going immediately into card games. They did the same thing there: added another girl to the main cast, then made one of the boys revolve his entire character around being in love with her. I hate it.
Romance has to be put in everything somewhere. I don’t have anything against romance, but I do have something strong against it being shoehorned in.
I’ll never understand how they decide what to do with adaptations. A lot of the time, I think they should just make their own original story that is “inspired by”, instead of saying it is an adaptation. They could fit what they wanted in better like that. Oh well. Some anime is good despite it. Some are even better than the manga they came from. It really depends.
Agree heavily on the romance thing. Two of my current fandoms just got on the romance train and it was pretty disappointing. 😅
It’s even more frustrating when the producers are obviously using the existing IP for their fanbase and reputation.