Scott Meyer
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How to Explain What's Bothering You
🕑 Added 2023-01-16 08:00:01 +0000 UTCNo, I will not tell you the movie/novel. I don’t want to call out another writer in public like that, even if the odds are the writer in question will never know that I exist. That said, I wanted to discuss this bizarre decision in the abstract, so here we are.
Here’s what I will say:
The character in question is one of the primary protagonists of the film/novel.
In the film, he is painted as a good natured, friendly badass, not an outright criminal or murderer.
He does kill someone in the film, but in self-defense.
I have not exaggerated the murder, or the events in the immediate aftermath at all. As described in the novel, he deliberately inflicts a wound that cuts his wife in half just below her navel. He feels bad and attempts to keep her alive by holding her two halves together. This works well enough for them to converse calmly for eight hours.
Yeah.
I really am unsure what bothers me more, that I’m expected to still sympathize with this character after he does this to his wife, or that in a fairly realistic novel he attempts to fix it in a manner Daffy Duck would find too unrealistic.
Comments
Wim ten Brink
Is this why you only show half of all characters in your comics? You've cut off the bottom half, apparently. :)
Scott Meyer
I guess it's nothing new, but lately I've noticed several adaptations of novels (Foundation, for one) where all the finished film or TV show uses are the title and the names of a few key characters. It's almost as if the creators have some original idea of their own they want to make, but they find it easier to get the project produced if they pretend it's based on something already successful.
Bernie Margolis
I've been on the other side of this way too many times. The most glaring example is the movie, Blade Runner, which seems to be universally beloved. I made the mistake of reading the book it was based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, prior to watching the movie. At that time, it was one of the best books I had ever read. All I could think about when watching the movie was how they ignored the book's theme entirely and reworked it into an action cop flick set in the book's world. The androids in the movie were unambiguously evil and needed to be put down. As I saw it, the book's entire premise was to question the ethics and irony of putting down rogue androids who were simply minding their own business for fear that they lacked the empathy to refrain from murdering. Aside from a quick reference to the existence of electric animals that was entirely meaningless to anyone who hadn't read the book, the movie made no reference to the importance of empathy in the dystopian society that it presented.
