Adaptational Appearance Change

With many appearance tropes going to the TRS lately, I wonder if Adaptational Deviation that relates to changes in characters' appearance, such as Adaptational Dye-Job, Adaptational Hairstyle Change and the like, should also be looked into. Changing a character's personality, relationship with others and allegiance usually causes significant changes to the story, but how is "Alice is blonde in the source material but a brunette in the adaptation" noteworthy?

Yeah, when Adaptational Hairstyle Change popped up as a draft I was honestly a bit weirded out, but it got a lot of positive attention and hats so I wasn't brave enough to be like "but why tho".

It is sort of a hornets nest once adaptation centered tropes wiggled their way into the system. It makes some sense when there is very clear parameters involved with what has changed and how it would affect the work, ie Adaptational Attractiveness and the way a homely character is remade into being played by a model, but tropes like Adaptational Relationship Overhaul just doesn't feel very concrete other than "something is different."

Yeah, I honestly get wary of any Adaptational X tropes in TLP (the last one I saw and thought was unnecessary was Adaptational Weapon Swap) — they feel overly pedantic. Not every minute difference between a source material and an adaptation need to be pointed out.

Adaptational Hairstyle Change is definitely one of the iffiest, because if it does have a reason said reason is contextualized by other "change" tropes (eg. she now has cornrows because she's black in this version, or she has a buzzcut because of Xenafication, or she has straight hair instead of '80s waves because the setting isn't the '80s anymore). By itself there's no real reason to note "she has bangs in the movie".

Adaptational Dye-Job is actually broader than much of the usage suggests, and I would think the name and the image contribute to thinking it's about hair color change. The description alludes to medium constraints (easier to pull off a bright, colorful, flashy costume in animation, which is why Movie Superheroes Wear Black) but I never see it used in that way.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 10th 2022 at 11:12:46 AM

I think this is a two-part problem. First, the problematic subtropes already mentioned all seem to fundamentally be "appearance tropes." Second, these are supposed to be subtropes of Adaptation Deviation, but they do not seem distinct enough, conceptually speaking, to be split into their own tropes. A Weapon Of Choice being changed can have narrative or characterization meaning, but if the weapon being changed is not a Weapon Of Choice in the original then it has no narrative or characterization meaning and so is not an actual trope. (Just giving a hypothetical example.)

A lot of these are superficial and should probably be cut. This seems worthy of TRS, imo.

Edited by WaterBlap on Feb 11th 2022 at 1:38:45 PM

Adaptational Dye-Job is usually just used as "someone has a different hair/eye colour in the adaptation". The description actually says:

Live-Action adaptations of an animated/cartoon source material having their colours muted, or (conversely) animated adaptation of a live-action source material having brighter colours are just possible justifications for this trope, but apparently not essential to it.

None of the examples in Adaptational Weapon Swap seems to indicate that their original weapon is their Weapon Of Choice, so they also read like random, incidental changes (e.g." he used a sword in the original, now he has an axe"). The description already states that this change is usually to reflect an Adaptational Personality Change, so I don't see why it can't just be noted in the latter (e.g. "he went from an Ideal Hero to a Blood Knight in the adaptation, and his Weapon Of Choice is changed from a sword to an axe to reflect that.").