TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Can a Hard-to-Adapt Work be "hard to adapt" because of Values Dissonance alone?

Go To

number9robotic (Experienced Trainee)
#1: Aug 4th 2024 at 6:31:58 PM

I tried asking this in the "Is this an example?" thread a few times and got no bites, I think this might be a more complex issue, so I'll present it here. Basically, I know that Hard-to-Adapt Work usually is based around works that don't translate well to other mediums due to the limitations/abilities of the media, or due to a premise that lacks appeal or carries way too much of a risk. However, I'm wondering about whether or not "a work that is functionally not hard to adapt into another medium and has an inherent draw to it, but is fraught with really problematic content that's a pain in the tuchus to deal with" counts.

In this case, I'm specifically thinking about The Taming of the Shrew, which is popular for performances and adaptations because it's William Shakespeare, but just about every production I've seen addresses having to get past a hurdle of the fact that the original play is really uncomfortably misogynist — if you haven't read/seen it, much of the intended comedy comes from a guy "taming" an unruly woman through constant physical/mental abuse and humiliation until she finally becomes submissive to him as a form of rightful comeuppance — to a degree that it probably wasn't okay even in Shakespeare's time. As a result, basically every performance/adaptation from the last century or so has had to significantly tweak the story and framing in order to maintain Shakespeare's script, but not make it sound like a sincere endorsement of spousal abuse... which is tricky because that's kind of what the play is all about.

To be clear, I don't want to say that any work with Values Dissonance inherently qualifies as a Hard-to-Adapt Work, especially if they don't actually receive any adaptations in general. I just find a work like this particularly interesting because like everything else by Shakespeare, it's truly Adaptation Overdosed, but the controversial premise has always been something working against later adaptations, and everyone's gone about it in different ways (some performances exploiting the wording of the script to pass off the "women should always obey their husbands" speech as sarcastic, some add in a bonus scene where Kate just ditches Petruchio after said final speech, etc.), so I'm wondering if something like this would indeed fit the spirit of the concept.

Thanks for playing King's Quest V!
Aquillion Since: Jan, 2001
#2: Aug 6th 2024 at 7:28:44 PM

Yes, that would clearly fall under Audience-Alienating Premise, which is one of the main examples of a hard-to-adapt work given in the trope description. If Values Dissonance has made the premise an audience-alienating one, then the work is often going to be hard to adapt.

I guess the caveat is that there's an implicit assumption here that non-adaptations (eg. straight stage performances of the original Taming of the Shrew) are "grandfathered in" to an extent. If values have shifted to the point where nobody wants to watch / read / follow the work at all even in its original format, then it seems odd to describe it as "hard to adapt" - this is technically true, but only because it's hard to publish at all!

But I think that that's often a valid assumption. And in particular movie adaptations require broader appeal because they're more expensive and are (and have to be) aimed at a larger audience, which means that a book or play that has been subject to Values Dissonance might be still publishable because doing so is cheap, but that nobody wants to invest the huge amount of work and money necessary to produce a film based on it just to see it flop because the premise is considered dumb today.

Edited by Aquillion on Aug 6th 2024 at 7:29:39 AM

number9robotic (Experienced Trainee)
#3: Aug 6th 2024 at 9:09:47 PM

[up] The issue is that Audience-Alienating Premise requires proof that a work actually bombs and did poorly, which Taming of the Shrew is a bit muddy on — it evidently has stood the test of time and is considered a well-known and studied, merely "controversial" rather than outright "panned" work (it is Shakespeare, the quality of writing itself is still well-respected). However, it is still very controversial and there's signs that it was met with heavy resistance since day one (John Fletcher wrote The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed, a sequel in which Petrucio gets subject to a role-reversal by a second wife, released a decade or so after Shrew when Shakespeare was still alive), and scrutiny has only gotten heavier with the rise of feminism in the 20th century. Pretty much every modern adaptation/performance of the play (of which there are many and make for a substantial wikipedia page, so it's not like it's completely buried as a dud because of its premise) has to tweak its subject matter by either framing its content as ironic or twisting the script in a way that downplays the problematic elements through omission or updating the setting/context, a degree of alteration that isn't seen as "necessary" for other Shakespeare adaptations.

Edited by number9robotic on Aug 6th 2024 at 9:16:39 AM

Thanks for playing King's Quest V!
EmeraldSource Since: Jan, 2021
#4: Aug 7th 2024 at 12:06:00 PM

The focus of the trope is on adaptations in order to highlight complexities of different mediums and formats. A reboot/remake will have similar hurdles but is ultimately different in approach. Values Dissonance by itself is probably not strong enough because a lot of people just word it vaguely as "People are more sensitive to mental health 20 years later" rather than something more concrete.

That said, Shakespeare works in general have proven to be exceptionally flexible with a tradition of maintaining the original dialogue even in very modern settings. That is sort of a defiance of a Hard-to-Adapt Work in that the ubiquity and versatility of Shakespeare lets them get away with things you couldn't with, say, Agatha Christie.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Aug 7th 2024 at 12:06:12 PM

Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.
Add Post

Total posts: 4
Top