Why Do Story Changes Annoy Us So Much?

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Why do you care if an adaptation is accurate? I don't owe anyone an explanation for my preferences, even though I have reasons for my preferences.

[00:00:12]Okay. Okay. Okay. I'll get into it, but not for the sake of the people who play devil's advocate and ask stupid questions about why people get annoyed when adaptations of great stories get botched. Why can't we swap male and female characters? Why can't characters be a different race? Why can't a filmmaker just overhaul the plot? The most basic answer is that you can, and people are free to like or not like changes that are made to a story. No work of art is owed praise and approval.

[00:00:42]And if people just happen not to like it, well, that's their business.

[00:00:47]>> That's all, folks.

[00:00:50]>> But if you want to dig down further, let's go ahead and talk about the reasons why people reject changes to great stories. And I'm talking about this in the context of the big kurfuffle over Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey, which is currently divided between the this isn't book accurate crowd and the you're bigots for complaining this isn't book accurate crowd. Some people like to look at a piece of art and just see the art itself. They don't care about the historical context and they don't care about any previous art that it was based on. They just want to enjoy the piece of art for its own sake. And that's great.

[00:01:20]That's a totally legit way to look at art. People who look at art this way are more likely to say, "Why do you care so much about story changes?" If you're one of these people and you want to understand a different point of view, let me explain the concept of verimilitude. This is a fun word that means a work of art presents something that is plausible. The logic and the rules in the world make sense and the pieces come together to build something that feels like it could be real even if it's not. People who enjoy Vera Similitude care about attention to detail, and they're put off by changes that don't serve the story first, such as notes from a movie studio or the political leanings of a director. When an adaptation gets too many details wrong, these errors pile up, and the weight of them can end up breaking the story. This is going to affect how people feel about race swaps, gender swaps, and the presence of anything that doesn't belong in the world being presented on screen. There are reasons why people like great stories. The characters are interesting. The plot is compelling. The world is fascinating. If you change anything, you run the risk of removing or mangling the things that made people love the story. So, adaptations have to be done with care and thought. When an adaptation is done of a great story for stage or screen, there's two general approaches. The first is what I'll call immersive realism, and the second is the land of makebelieve. Whichever path you choose for telling the story, the plot, characters, and world need to make sense to the audience or they're going to reject it. Story choices made for aesthetic reasons result in art, and story choices made for ideological reasons result in propaganda. People instinctively understand the difference, even if they have better things to do than learn a bunch of fancy vocabulary from critical theory to discuss it. With realistic storytelling, the world and characters are brought to life with attention to detail and faithfulness to the source material. Whether that's a historic or fictional setting, when good performances and a strong story are supported by highquality stagecraft, the results can be amazing, as they were in my favorite example of immersive realism, Master and Commander, Far Side of the World. This film is based on the book series by Patrick O'Brien and it painstakingly recreates life in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars down to the buttons on the uniforms and the way the characters held their musical instruments. When an adaptation is going for immersive realism, anything that doesn't fit within the world will stand out. If the uniforms had been made of polyester, or if Captain Aubrey had been a black woman, and if the film were made today, there'd be a pretty good chance of that happening. audiences would have rejected the result because it would have yanked them out of what they expected to see and instead involuntarily pushed them into the world of ahistorical propaganda. If you want to detach a story from rooted immersive realism, then the path you want is to enter what Mr. Rogers called the land of makebelieve. When I saw the puppets on his TV show, I knew they weren't real people, and the actors didn't even really try to disguise their voices that much, but it didn't matter. We were in the land of makebelieve where it's purely about story and not really about any particular setting. Our imaginations were happy to fill in the details because the storytellers were inviting us to do that. Audiences of all ages instinctively understand this framework and they will go along with it. Here, I'll prove it to you.

[00:04:40]I'm Batman. If you don't believe me, just wait till my kids get home. I'll go up to them and say, I'm Batman. And then one of them will say, great. I'm Catwoman. and the other one will say, "Great, I'm Poison Ivy." And then we'll go out in the backyard, I mean Gotham City, and we'll have a nice rumble. But had I approached the kids and said, "Yaba daba," they would have stared at me like I was an idiot, rightly so.

[00:05:03]Because that's not what you expect from Batman. But even though I'm a middle-aged, arthritic mom, as long as I'm wearing this and I walk up to the kids and say, >> "I'm Batman."

[00:05:13]>> We're gonna have a great time. And for the duration of the performance, everything is plausible. It would be supremely stupid for me to put this mask on, go up to my kids, yell yaba daba do, and then lecture them about how they're bigoted against caveman representation in Batman films. They wouldn't want to play. They'd be annoyed with me. And frankly, they'd be justified. There's a theater company here in Britain called the Lord Chamberlain's Men. They're the only allmale Shakespeare company in the country. And what they try to do is recapture how touring theater companies worked back in Shakespeare's day when women were never on stage. The sets, props, and costumes are minimal, and they really don't try to conceal the fact that the female characters are being played by men because it doesn't matter. To be pretentious, and quote Hamlet, the plays the thing. The performers express their parts so well that I don't need to look at the actors and see lavish sets and women playing women. If anything, I enjoy the performance more because there's no superficial clutter for the actors to hide behind. It's just about the play and it's just about the characters. And I enjoy the fact that these performances invite me to use my imagination to do the rest of the work. But if this same company tried to do a production that was grounded and realistic and had lavish sets and costumes, I would be hopelessly distracted by the fact that Juliet is being played by a 30-year-old dude in a dress with a baritone voice and a 5:00 shadow. I hated Disney's recent desecration of Snow White. But for all the many complaints I had about this film, I didn't care about the colorblind diverse casting because it was quite obvious that this film didn't exist in any particular cultural or historical setting. It was in the land of makebelieve, resembling the pages of a kid's story book more than any real place. A far more delightful example of this style of storytelling is the 1997 film of Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. I rewatched this recently and it's even better than I remember.

[00:07:12]Brandy is so sweet and perfectly portrays Cinderella's good character, gentleness, and intelligence. The dude who plays the prince is totally charming and not only has a perfect tenor voice, but one of the best smiles I have ever seen. And we get Whitney Houston at her peak playing the fairy godmother and Bernardet Peters absolutely chewing up every scene as the wicked stepmother.

[00:07:35]Does it make sense that a black queen and a white king have a Filipino son?

[00:07:39]Yes, because we're in the land of makebelieve. This is a delightful colorful production that's just about the story and nothing else. So, the colorblind casting actually adds to the fantastical feel of the story as much as the unrealistically clean streets and the costumes that are made of modern and not medieval materials. When you're in the land of make believe, anything goes and as long as the performance is good, the audience will go with it. But what you absolutely cannot do is lead the audience to believe that what you're doing is a production that is immersive and grounded in reality and then all of a sudden break that reality by injecting things that just don't belong. Nobody believes that Black Snape and Black Helen of Troy are characters who were invented because no other actors fit the part better and the stories are made stronger by replacing the original characters. Everybody knows that this is about the personal politics of the filmmakers as well as diversity requirements that are imposed by the studios and by organizations that give out awards. And if filmmakers were just honest about that, nobody would have a problem. You can like the artistic choice or not like the artistic choice, but nobody likes being lied to and then being gaslit and bullied after you go, "No, I don't think you're telling the truth about your motives here."

[00:08:55]Pretending all these race swaps are artistic and not ideological choices is a lie. So embarrassing that I put it on the same level as when I walk into the kitchen and one of my daughters has her face completely covered in chocolate and crumbs and the cookie jar is on the floor and the lid is off and it's empty and I go, "Oh, did you eat the cookies?"

[00:09:14]And she goes, "What cookies?" I'll respect filmmakers who just admit that they're doing race and gender swaps because they think it's good for representation. There are people who sincerely believe that this kind of engineering is good for society because it promotes acceptance. And then there are plenty of other people though who feel that this is patronizing and that diverse groups of people deserve their own stories rather than being given the handme-downs of mainstream culture. It's possible to have different feelings in this area without calling the other side names. Artists, be proud of your art and honest about your artistic choices. Even if some people aren't crazy about your choices, they'll respect you for your integrity. We're seeing all of this play out in the buildup to Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, which I think has made the mistake of not being clearly rooted either in immersive reality or in the land of makebelieve. You'll notice that absolutely nobody is making these kinds of complaints about the upcoming Masters of the Universe film, which features flying vehicles, magic swords, a giant green talking tiger, and a dude with a skeleton face. Because this movie signals in every way from the color palette to the costumeuming that it's in the land of makebelieve. It doesn't matter that Duncan, who was white in the cartoon, is now black. First off, this is Idris Elba. Of course, I want him in a He-Man movie. Second, he has the mustache and the helmet, which I would say are far more critical parts of his look than his skin color. He's also Tila's adoptive rather than biological father, so nothing is broken by this change. On the other hand, Nolan's Odyssey is weirding people out because in some ways it looks like they're trying to create an immersive realistic world. They shot in real locations. They built a real boat. They're wearing armor and using practical effects. But then lots of stuff keeps yanking me out of that grounded realism, like Anne Hathaway's 1960s wardrobe and I have to admit, her heavily botoxed face. I don't like scrutinizing the personal appearance of actors because usually when people do this, they're just being petty. But we do now have a problem where so many actresses have had so much work done that they all have this weird fish face that didn't exist until about 10 years ago. It's hard to look at someone who has a face that can only be achieved through the use of modern technology and see someone from the past. This issue sticks out even more if you compare the way actresses look now to the way they looked just a few decades ago. Between the natural beauty of the past and the eerily chiseled faces of today, I know which ones I prefer. Not just because it makes me sad that women feel so much pressure to alter who they are to fit a very, very narrow mold of beauty, but also because natural appearances are going to be more plausible in a historical setting. We have a bit of the same issue with Elliot Paige being in this movie. I always like it when actors and directors come back to work with each other over and over because the performances just get better and better. I also wish Paige and everyone else a life of peace and joy, but this is a person who has undergone major surgical and pharmaceutical transformation. And it just wasn't possible for anyone to look or sound like this person in ancient Greece.

[00:12:16]Things get even trickier if Paige is supposed to be portraying a warrior.

[00:12:20]This is someone who is 5t tall, slim, and has delicate features. It's not a plausible casting choice for a veteran of the Trojan War. It's not totally certain which character is being portrayed here, but it's most likely a warrior in the afterlife where the souls of humans exist as like mere shadows of their once mighty selves. So maybe having a once tall and strong warrior portrayed by someone who isn't large and robust will work. But this seems a little sticky to me even then. Like feminists might object to the idea that a character who is a diminished and broken man ought to be played by someone who was born female. And supporters of the trans community might be annoyed by the idea that a character who's now half the man he used to be is being played by a trans man. Whatever your politics are, this just didn't seem like a very good casting choice. Okay, now that I'm done jumping on the cultural third rail that is gender, let's move on to something even more controversial. Boats and armor. That's not a triam. That's a Viking long ship. I don't understand why you would bother to go to all the work to build an actual boat and then make one that is 2,000 years and 2,000 miles removed from the correct setting. I also don't understand what the costume designers are going for. They've done enough of their homework to make this armor Greekish, but it's oddly sleek and modern. And you can even see the black spandex bodysuits a lot of the actors are wearing underneath. Like, is this supposed to be a detailed recreation of the ancient world or is it a styled minimalist production? Like, pick one because you're wobbling back and forth between the two and it's making me dizzy. I don't know why the distinction between immersive realism and the land of makebelieve is so hard for filmmakers to understand lately when they do story adaptations. Like people used to get this and that's how we ended up with really fun movies like Cinderella, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, and even more serious fantastical adaptations like Baz Lurman's Romeo and Juliet. Back when Kenneth Brana did his adaptation of Much Do About Nothing, nobody minded when Denzel Washington played a Spanish prince because one, Denzel Washington, and two, they were wearing leather pants. This was not a realistic production. This was a fun, delightful, modern take on a classic.

[00:14:43]And everyone understood that by cues in the costumeuming and casting. But today, we end up with stuff like Black Snape in the new Harry Potter adaptation, and if the rumors are true, Lady Voldemort.

[00:14:57]And then in this Christopher Nolan version of the Odyssey, we've got a woman who is a black subsaharan African woman portraying Helen of Troy despite the fact that she's explicitly described in the text as being indigenous Greek with fair skin, light hair, and light eyes. And if you think to the world of ancient Greece 3,000 years ago, subsaharan African people just wouldn't have been around. Yes, by the time you get to the late Greek world and the late Roman world, you've got a bit more moving around and so it wouldn't have been impossible. But in the time frame that this story was written, it's it's just not there. So the reason why people are just looking at this and going, "This just feels odd." Is that having a black Helen of Troy is the equivalent of putting on the Batman mask, kicking the door in, and yelling yaba daba doo.

[00:15:46]People are going to be confused, and you shouldn't be angry with them about that.

[00:15:50]If Christopher Nolan really wanted a black Helen of Troy, then maybe what he should have done is just completely detached this story from its original cultural setting and moved it to Africa.

[00:16:01]Like, he made it pretty clear that he didn't want any Greek people represented in the cast or crew. So, it would have been less offensive to just say, "Hey, we're not doing this as a Greek story at all. We're taking the plot, we're moving it somewhere else, and we're doing something new." I think audiences would have been a lot more forgiving and even possibly excited about that. In the meantime, I'll just escape the tedious state of film making by dusting off my VHS tape of Cinderella and soaking up the good vibes from the '9s when people didn't pretend to be too stupid to understand all this. Come on, Brandy.

[00:16:36]Let's go to the ball.