Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendë
Tolkien is not alone. Alan Moore never watches the adaptations of his work. Even though some of them are awesome. That's just how it is when someone else's mind is putting their vision of the world and characters you created into another format. If writers were unhappy with this prospect they would not sell the film rights, and the end result is we would probably have half as many films to watch. The problem with Tolkien being involved is to put it bluntly, he was dead.
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I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think the issue lies with the question of
how the original authors viewed their product to start with.
Did they see their work as a primarily a commercial product in itself, a means to a living? If so, they probably wouldn't be all that fussed about a muffed adaptation that misses the mark of the source material completely.
Is that what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote his books?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendë
I think that you cannot be driven by what any deceased writer would make of an adaptation because you simply cannot ever know what they would think. It's what you think that's important. Even your own vision that you gain from reading the books is wholly different to what Tolkien himself will have seen while writing late at night in his study - it's the nature of subcreation.
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No, we here cannot know for a certainty what Tolkien would have thought. However, we do have things that he'd said and written before his death that may guide us. Those are, or course, open to interpretation, and in the end this is likely a never ending debate.