So, the other day, I was watching a fan-edit of the recent Disney+ mini-series Obi-Wan Kenobi adapting it down to movie-length, since it had originally been intended to be a movie rather than a six episode show. (Yes, I know, I know, questionable at best. But I do have a Disney+ subscription, and had already seen the mini-series, so...) Seeing only one half of various planting-and-payoff scenes really left me thinking about something that I'd already been thinking about lately, vis-Ã -vis the title of this post, "connecting tissue." (And yes, this will eventually circle around to my own writing insecurities.)
I've noticed that a lot of times different versions of the same material (whether a fan-version like that edit or an official adaptation of an already completed novel or other work, or a simultaneous treatment of the same story in two different media), although the same story beats are covered, the connecting tissue is radically different. Sometimes this is because the setting has changed (compare, for example, the different material in West Side Story compared to its original, Romeo and Juliet), sometimes it's just because of the difference in media (for example, a narrative style that spends a lot of time simply explaining things behind the action requires creativity in adaptation) and sometimes it's because the adaptor has their own purposes in the adaptation that are not representative of the original in one respect or another. (I feel sure that the movie of Starship Troopers would be an ideal example there, since the book was pro-military and the movie was not, but to be able to actually say so definitively I would have to actually read the book, and I will pass, thank you very much.)
The adaptation that has been most on my mind lately is the series streaming on Netflix right now under the title The Untamed (which I suspect is not an accurate translation of its actual title, which is different from the original novel's title) and its original novel Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. (I've mentioned this on the blog before already, and will definitely mention it again, 'cause I'm ever-so-slightly obsessed right now. 😅 ) Now, I'm not done reading the novel yet, because the final volume of its official translation won't be published until next April. (It remains to be seen if I can even wait until December for the next volume, or if I'll hunt up a fan translation to read the parts I'm so desperate for.) But one thing that strikes me about it is how different much of the connecting tissue is.
The story takes place in two time periods: the five-ish years leading up to the hero's death, and the events taking place after his resurrection thirteen years later. (Not a spoiler; his death is the opening of the novel, followed immediately by his waking up alive again after thirteen years.) In both the live-action drama and the novel, there are a few significant story events in the present and then we dive into the past for some backstory on the characters and their history. (In addition to the two versions I've experienced, there's also an animated adaptation and a graphic novel adaptation, but I have not watched/read them, so I don't know if they followed that formula, though I'd expect they do. I might see if they've been translated into English once I've finished reading the novel, though. I'm very curious about the other ways adapting the material was approached.) The live-action show takes the approach of doing the entire past sequence in one exceedingly long go, whereas the novel sprinkles bits and pieces of the past into the present, as appropriate to the present context. (Some of these bits and pieces take up about half a volume of the novel, so they're not insignificant spans.) In addition to drastically changing the way the audience perceives the characters (the secret enemy mastermind whose identity you only learn in the final episodes of the show was exposed about halfway through the second volume of the novel, for example) this has radically changed the tissue connecting the characters. Surprisingly, while the show did not feel padded in the least (despite its 50 45-minute episode runtime), there's actually a great deal of padding there, and most of it is fleshing out the relationships between the characters in the past, giving greater characterization of the supporting cast than the novel has time for. (Also, in some cases, giving more full coverage of events the novel couldn't show, since it never leaves the hero's side, aside from summations of events he didn't witness.) Various other changes were also made (primarily replacing the romance between the two leading men with longing glances and homoerotic subtext, an unfortunately necessary change due to the stance of the mainland Chinese government towards LGBTQ+ content), especially in enlarging the roles of the female cast, but it's the the expanded content with the entire supporting cast that really sticks with me, the extra connecting tissue. For example, so far in the book, in looking at the relationship between the hero and his adoptive brother, it kind of feels like his adoptive brother always found him something of a nuisance, whereas in the show, it's clear that they were as close and affectionate as real brothers: sure, they quarreled and got on each others' nerves (well, mostly it was the hero getting on his brother's nerves, really), but at the end of the day they would also have given up almost anything to help each other out. I think that's the relationship we're supposed to see between them in the book as well, but because it doesn't spend as long dwelling on it (after all, that's not the relationship we're supposed to be focusing on!) and showing them getting along happily, it doesn't come through as clearly. (This could also have to do with the translation; while all translation risks the loss of nuance, the little I know of the subject suggests that Chinese is especially going to lose a lot of nuance in translation to other languages. Anything live-action doesn't lose as much in translation because the actors' performances are in their faces, bodies and voices, not just in the words they're speaking, so there's more there that survives the translation process.)
Thinking about all that extra material surrounding the various characters in The Untamed/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation puts me in mind of a similar-yet-different case, that of Sailor Moon. That seminal '90s magical girl IP is an unusual (but not unique) case: it was being simultaneously developed as both an anime and a manga. (Manga being the name for Japanese graphic novels, for those who aren't nerds like myself.) As with many in the West (most, probably), I saw the anime before reading the manga. (Though I didn't see it when it was first brought over, thinking it looked stupid. And, honestly, it kind of is stupid, but a glorious, wonderful kind that's very lovable.) After loving the show, I decided to read the manga, and was astonished by how short it was. (It doesn't sound short, I suppose, being about twelve volumes long, but...Cardcaptor Sakura's twelve volumes covered three seasons of very uneven length--about two and a half seasons, really, with only two story arcs. Sailor Moon's twelve volumes covered five full seasons, each with its own story arc.) I was also very disappointed by it at pretty much every turn, because it spent so little time with the characters. Everything was just rushing willy-nilly towards the next fight, and no time was set up on the connecting tissue letting us get to know and care about the characters; only the heroine got much time devoted to her, and even she wasn't as fully characterized as in the show. A recurring villain on the show who spent a long time throwing monsters-of-the-week at the heroines before finally being dispatched in a truly epic fashion was killed at the end of his first appearance in the manga; in fact, all the henchmen who had been significant opponents in the show became the monsters-of-the-week instead...and yet in the case of the henchmen of the first arc, the manga expected us to feel considerably more sorry for them than the anime did, despite doing literally nothing to give them any personality! If it had spent more time on them as characters, giving them more tissue to connect them to each other and to the heroine's boyfriend (who they had served in his previous life), maybe we would actually have felt sorry for them, rather than just being told we ought to feel sorry for them.
On the other hand, sometimes adding extra connecting tissue may be a bad thing? When The Untamed increased the amount of time the audience spent with two of the female cast, that only made their eventual deaths that much more painful. (Though at least restructuring the story meant that their deaths were at about the 2/3 mark rather than closer to the end, as I have a sinking feeling that both their deaths will end up in volume 5 rather than volume 4. Getting almost all the tragedy out of the way by putting all the past events together was helpful in that regard.) Though whether that's a good or a bad thing is perhaps subjective: I mean, I know some authors actually want to make their readers cry, and certainly moving the audience can't be bad as such, but...I dunno, maybe it's just that I'm a weakling who doesn't like feeling bad.
I've been mulling over a lot of this lately because of my current writing project, in which that connecting tissue--the material that's so necessary both to flesh out characters and bind them together--is a big question mark on the current outline for the story. For pretty much all the characters who have a side-story (the ones the hero can romance), all I have for that side-story is "dunno what it's gonna be about" or "something to do with them commiserating over this thing they have in common" and no clue about how to go about writing that connecting tissue, or how to draw the characters closer to each other as the side-story progresses.
This is, of course, because I've really bitten off way more than I can chew, agreeing to co-write a visual novel with dating sim aspects when I don't even particularly play dating sims, let alone know how to write one, and the unfamiliar setting isn't helping, though I do at least feel a lot more comfortable in the setting than I did when I started, thanks to all the research (and all the examples I've consumed).
I'm about 13k words into the script at this point (counting notes and speaker notations), and really feel like I'm doing a miserable job of it. My collaborator (who is the other co-writer, the project lead, and more) said they thought it was acceptable, but...I don't feel like it is, and I'm terrified of when I get past the bare-bones structure we have planned already and reach the connecting tissue that I just have no idea how to fill in.
And I feel like this has actually led rather well into this month's suggested question:
September 7 question - What genre would be the worst one for you to tackle and why?
There's actually a lot of "worst" genres for me, but this one I'm trying to work in right now--a subcategory of the romance genre--might be the actual worst. As an aroace person who never had a romantic relationship to have the "no, this is not for me" epiphany from experience, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don't know how to deal with writing romance, or even people in relationships. I basically only know what I get from media I've consumed, so I basically see romance in two very disparate stages: hornyhornyhorny and so-established-as-to-be-boring. I know that real people don't actually see romance in only two shades--lust and taken-for-granted--but that's all I ever get of it from popular culture.
I feel like I need to exclusively write stories featuring no romance whatsoever even in the background...and yet I really kind of want to write about beautiful people who fall in love with each other and happily manage to connect and maintain their connection. I don't know why, but...
(Before I started thinking about all this, I'd have said that the worst genre for me to tackle would be horror because I'm so easily frightened, but at least I know what fear is, and what scares me. I could probably write quasi-decent children's horror if I had to. Realistic modern war as a genre would also be abysmal for me, but historical war and sci-far war are genres I've dealt with from time to time.)
