Why Disloyal Adaptations Are Better — The Last of Us

I think the main reason why the last of us is the best video game adaptation of all time is because it's disloyal to the original which is a silly thing to say right because most adaptations fail precisely because they're disloyal that isn't the case with the last of us though case in point when we have the opening scene of the scientists speaking ominously about the cordyceps it's a brilliant Scene It crowns the zombie outbreak not as something magical like how the Walking Dead zombies work it makes them feel like a realistic threat that could happen in our world laying out precisely how cordyceps are very real fungus could have often become communicable with humans it gives you chills it's a brilliant scene but it's also something that we never had in the game the same can be said how the cordyceps now have a hive mind and if you upset one zombie all others in the local area will swarm you as if they're psychically connected and then you've got the new very creepy mouth tendrils which are way scarier than just being bitten normally by a zombie be from the game or how Tommy is now a war veteran or how Henry now has so much more depth to his character because of a morally great choice he made you've also got how Joel is now concerned for Tommy's safety in episode 1 foreshadowing his later appearance when in the game Tommy isn't even mentioned until he stumble across him halfway through it's so interesting to see an adaptation make so many changes yet for nearly all of them to work just so well and feel like outright upgrades from what we got in the game like I'll come out and say it the show is simply a better written story than the game was and that's not to knock the game but it really does feel like that was the first draft and the show is draft two it's where the writers have optimized it in thousands of little ways that individually don't really mean much but they add up to a huge overall Improvement a great example is an episode one when Joel and some people are burning bodies and one of them is a kids this woman simply can't touch the body because she's too too upset by it quite understandably then Joel Just picks it up and dumps it on the fire without any emotion on his face this was a scene we never had in the game yet it does an incredible job at informing the audience of Joel's core wound in the story he is so traumatized by his daughter's death he is emotionally dead inside the part of him that's nurturing and cares for the well-being of children it's just gone what is a very interesting thing to note is in the game while this was always Joel's wound it was never showcased to the audience to this extent at the start yes we see he's reluctant to take on Ellie and yes we saw Joe crying over his own kid in the prologue and yes his broken watch is symbolic of the wound but we never actually saw the full extent of Joel's wound on display in the game's beginning this like 90-second long scene here I'd argue is a huge Improvement of what we got in the game on that front if you're giving a character an arc where they've got a big internal problem they're dealing with it's always a good idea to fully demon straight the extent of that problem near the start as that gives us a baseline to the growth that they're about to have then there's another change they made as they're escaping the city in the game Joel and the crew expertly quickly slaughtered the guards when they're captured it's not a bad moment not a bad moment at all but in the show the moment plays out wholly differently with Joel freezing at gunpoint than having a PTSD flashback to when his daughter was killed then turning into a maniac and savagely beating the guy to death with his bare hands I don't know about you but one of those two scenes is clearly better than the other the scene in the game was fine it was a fine cutscene with some okay action the scene in the show instead did a great job at showing not just the true Savage potential Joel's got within him but by How Deeply traumatized he is by that fateful event 20 years ago now these two changes are they vital moments where the story wouldn't work without them no remove them and the show would still be perfectly fine but the show would be lesser for their loss as they do a great job at characterizing Joel making him all the more complex and compelling to the audience when I Heard the Last of Us was getting adapted my initial thought was it's basically guaranteed to be quite a good show because unlike other games like Sonic or Mario where you're going to have to create a wholly new story because the originals was quite lacking say what you want about Super Mario 64 but when it comes to that game storyline the word gripping doesn't exactly come to mind that's not the case with the last of us because the game as is already told a story with a great plot and great characters that would work perfectly if copy pasted into a season of TV if Faithfully adapted with no changes made they didn't need to make all these changes with how the cordyceps now spread through the flower which was a lovely Touch by the way or by fleshing out Joel's character in the way they did it wasn't necessary the show would have been fine if it were merely faithful but because they dared to deviate they dared to be unfaithful to an extent in many moments that's what made this what I reckon to be the best video game adaptation of all time so Neil druckman the guy who wrote the game he was heavily involved in this Show's production and I think the fact he was given a second crack at telling the same story is really the dream for a lot of writers it naturally is the case where when you write and release a story you're going to retroactively realize oh damn I could have done this better oh and that too God what a missed opportunity if only I could go back in time and fix it that's the case with this channel every time I see any old video of mine I cringe with self-hate because of the obvious ways I could have made those videos better inevitably I'll see this one in two years time and cringe at this too for the same reasons this is a rare time where a Creator gets a chance to revisit a creation 10 years later and apply not just the many lessons they've learned on the craft since then but for that entire decade that story has been mulling over in their brain with all kinds of insights and small little things that could have been just that teeny little bit better if given a bit more foreshadowing over here or a little bit more optimization to the characterization over there let's also not forget that if you write something and then re-read it the next day you are in no state to judge its quality because you're so close to the work you are unable to view the fresh eyes needed to accurately discern its value you're better off leaving it for a couple weeks then coming back imagine how useful it is to review your old story not 10 weeks later but 10 years later and then also throw in how the world reacted to that first draft that being the game in what was the mother of all test screenings where millions of people gave their feedback which he could then use to make draft to like it's no wonder why the Last of Us show is a better written story than the game because of course draft 2 turned out to be better than draft one also before we crack on I'd love to give you guys a recommendation I just saw philosophy tubes play The Prince and it's the most insane take on Shakespeare I have ever seen and in a good way this might be for you to process my love you are inside of play it completely breaks the conventions of what a play even is and if you love plays or just generally unorthodox stories that execute things in very fresh ways I couldn't recommend it more to you and if you like you can watch the whole thing right now on nebula the sponsor of today's video me and a few hundred other creators have clubbed together to create nebula because there are so many kinds of videos we'd love to make but can't because they're the sort the algorithm suppresses there you'll find exclusive videos on creative writing for me hello future me and tail Foundry uh both of those guys have their own ongoing series ever if you're a writer I've no doubt you'll love them as much as I do Lindsay Ellis also released the Lord of the Rings video there recently like if you haven't checked out nebula yet please do because it's a Haven where we creators can let our creativity loose and upload all kinds of fun videos that would never work on YouTube it costs 50 a year which is absurdly cheap and I'd happily pay far more than that just to see philosophy tubes play okay but if you click my link in the description and grab nebula there you'll get 40 off that already low price so it's actually 30 a year if you use my link it's totally ad-free a major chunk of your subscription is given to the creators you watch based on how long you watch them and I get paid a fairly big sum if you sign up with my link so you're supporting me while you're at it it really is just a fantastic site and I don't want to spoil anything but I've got some very big videos in the works that I'll be posting to nebula before the end of the year if all that sounds good to you please do click my link in the description and check out nebula today anyway back to it personally I did not like the last of us too I made a whole video on that one a while back where I break down how precisely they messed up with the story structure and broke many key rules of Storytelling you can check that one out by clicking my link in the top right of the screen but I'm waiting with curious optimism for season two of this show because while key moments of that story will doubtlessly follow the game I can't help but feel that the same thing that happened with the first game's adaptation will happen to the second games they're going to be so acutely aware of why precisely people didn't like that second game story they'll know every mistake they made meaning they can address those mistakes in draft two that being the show do I think season 2 is going to be a better written story than the last of us too it's almost guaranteed to be but if I were a betting man I put a fair bit of money on how come season two people are still gonna hate Abby's guts just as much and still want to see her dead I won't tell you why that is because spoilers nice shot one of the examples I mentioned earlier of job being concerned for Tommy's well-being because he's been radio silent for weeks that wasn't in the game in the show though this is the reason why Joe wants to go west to check on his brother this again I'd argue is an improvement over the game because for the first part of the story his motivation wasn't very firmly established in the game it's even slightly at odds with his core wound as he's protecting and escorting this child despite how he's emotionally detached from ever caring about kids again don't get me wrong he feels an obligation to test this was a dying wish and this functions this is a functional aspect of Joel's character but just because it works that doesn't mean it couldn't have been just that little bit better in the show though oh no that's not the case at all because Joel wants to go and check if Tommy's okay and it just so happens this girl needs to go west anyway so they may as well go together seeing as they're headed in the same direction it works better if you ask me at Joel's motivation for what he does in the beginning section of the story where he's yeah get to warm up to Ellie it makes more sense than the show than it does in the game we also get another optimization of the story where instead of Robert stealing guns from them he cons them out of a car battery in the game Joel and has having their guns next never really served much function other than guns are worth a lot it may as well have been a big Briefcase full of gold he nicked it would have meant the same for the story but having it be a car battery while being a very minor tweak works better because it reinforces Joel's larger goal of making sure Tommy's okay because he needs a car to reach him it's also cool World building because of course car batteries are highly valued Commodities they expire after a couple years and the apocalypse happened 20 years ago there's also something very interesting here to be said about the fact this is between two mediums there's a reason why the so-called video game adaptation curse exists because it's very hard to take a story that works great in a game then convert that into a great movie or in this case a great show because what works well in one medium May not work at all in another so much so if you did make a perfectly loyal clone of the game in the form of a TV show crucial aspects of what made that original great won't manifest themselves on screen because those qualities only works well in the interactive medium of video games it's effectively guaranteeing your adaptation will be a worse story than the original because the first was fully exploring the strengths of its medium meanwhile the adaptation was not it was this Show's willingness to break free from the game shake off all the limitations of that medium and then exploit all of the strengths of the visual medium that is what made it not just a great show but a great adaptation say what you like about films like Starship Troopers is it a good film hell yeah it's great fun but is it a good adaptation Hell No in fact it directly satirizes The Source material it's being made from if you have a story it generally doesn't bode well when the person making it actively loathes the IP they're working under oh wait Ryan Johnson what are you doing in a game for the most part you're limited to one point of view in a novel a show or a film though that's not true you can swap around as much as you like and Float as many people as you like I'm not saying you can't be playing as one character in one Mission and then another in the next you obviously can do that because many games do but this is still a limitation of the gaming medium The Only Exception I can think of here that shakes this off is Grand Theft Auto 5 which has the ability to swap characters be a key mechanic of the gameplay in the last of us if you're starting a mission as Joel you can be damn sure you'll be ending that mission as Joel meanwhile in the show we'll follow Joel for a part of the scene then swap to covering Ellie as she walks away from him and enters a creepy basement if you want a POV shift like that it's so much harder to execute in a game than it is in a show it's also hard to justify flashbacks that don't include any of the established characters in the game in a show though that shackle is off you can do whatever the hell you like so again the creators let the creativity loose here by giving us scary flashbacks to a biologist's perspective of the outbreak or giving us a scientist perspective on a show 40 years earlier on his predictions or spending a huge amount of time fleshing out bills and Frank's relationship it's showing us perspectives that we never had in the game because the game could never reasonably justify such a huge amount of gameplay being dedicated to flashbacks of these minor characters another example that comes to mind is a fairly small one but it's when Joel kills the guards and they have these fancy assault rifles in the game the characters just leave them behind they are this frustrated a lot of people because why wouldn't they pick them up like all you have is a crappy pistol Joel and is a perfectly good assault rifle just there grab it you fool only for gameplay reasons you can't have them pick it up because that is the best gun in the game and if you gave that to the player from the word go it would make For Worse gameplay because now one of the major progression mechanics that have slowly Gathering and upgrading fancier and fancier weapons all that's ruined now because there is nothing for them to work towards in the show they had no such limitations they weren't working in the same medium they didn't need to worry about compelling gameplay or progression mechanics so of course they deviate from The Source material here and have him grab the weapon because it plugs an annoying hole the original couldn't plug because of the restrictions of its medium one of the changes I love the most though above all others is how in episode 2 there is such a very very long time before we have a confrontation with a zombie and the tension is massively done in the game once you leave the safe Zone you run into infected almost immediately here the show really takes its time the characters talk and hint to all of the horrible things the infected can do as they Trek through the city building a mystery around them that makes us fear them more we're told there's a short dangerous way in a long Safe Way the characters choose the same way and then we're given a lot of uneasy scenes where we expect something nasty might jump out at us but it doesn't we hear one screaming in the distance later we see a pile of them writhing in a way humans never would this confirms the Safeway is anything but safe and they must go the short dangerous way then when they see the outside of the museum which they've got no choice to go through and it's smeared in ominous fungus and then they find a fresh body inside the tension ratchets up as far as it can go like for all this time we've never actually seen a zombie up close in the game none of this is the case the characters are never confused as to what route they're taking through the city there is no long Safeway or short dangerous way we just see the building in the distance say hey we're going over there and then they go over there as like as the crow flies towards it what they did in the show makes for far better television than being faithful ever would have here as we see the characters being just so apprehensive about getting close to the infected doing all they can to go around them so when they've got no choice but to go towards them and confront and the clickers it's such a tense scene because the show has set up the foundation for great tension it's done a fantastic job at building the Mythos of what these monsters are because if these veteran badasses Joel and Tess are that wary of them they've got to be something terrifying this is a total deviation it's completely unlike the games where when the player meets the zombies they actually kind of love it because now they get to have some fun combat there's something interesting here for any video game writers watching because this highlights a pretty tricky problem those writers have so you want to make this big monster absolutely terrifying to the player alright cool gotcha the problem is if you've got fun combat mechanics in your game the player is not going to be scared at all when the monsters come along rather excited because now they get to have fun blowing them away you may be building up how spooky and scary this monster is with all of your cutscenes and all of your dialogue and various logs the player May pick up throughout the level but all of that hard work gets undone by the fact the player is having just such a fun time blasting away these supposedly scary baddies they're anything but scared when they encounter them the phrase for this is Ludo narrative dissonance where the characters might be terrified in a cutscene but that very same character is leaping in gung-ho right at them whenever the player has control over them The crucial thing is what the game did and what the show did are both great choices for the mediums they were working in it would have been a mistake if the game had the same approach as the show with this slow building tension if the player went by for 30 whole minutes in this action game without any kind of combat they're just soaking in the vistas they'd have gotten pretty bored because games have got to be interactive in some way and that's not to say some very clever game makers couldn't have toyed with that and somehow made such a sequence work but different mediums do have different strengths and what works well in one will not work at all when transferred to the other I remember watching an Alfred Hitchcock interview a while back and he said something pretty close to this that's quite interesting here and no it's not that one about bombs being beneath the tables it's something else entirely because when it comes to adaptations of books he said this when adopting from another medium view make large changes I read the book twice perhaps and never look at it again and start from scratch because if you look at a book and you try to translate it it's very hard to do good literature does not make good pictures that's been shown again and again I think the reason Hitchcock refused to pay too close attention to the novel is because it's a bad idea to be wholly faithful to the original you can be entirely respectful but you'll be doing it at the cost of telling a lower quality story than what you could have otherwise told if you read a novel 20 times then every line of dialogue every paragraph is now ingrained in your head so much so you're going to have a very hard time deviating from that version of the story and sometimes that can be great as a scene would work perfectly if directly adapted with no changes made but sometimes that's terrible because there are so many kinds of scenes that work well in novels but then work terribly in the visual medium like um Naval gazing for example uh in Naval gazing a novel is basically just the character thinking for pages on end and while such a scene could work okay in the book it would simply not work at all well in a film sometimes you have a visual that works great on the page but on screen it's laugh out loud hilarious with how stupid it looks if you get too respectful you'll create something like Stephen King's The Shining not Stanley Kubrick's The Shining but Stephen King's version where he was so disgruntled with what Kubrick made he set out to create something truly accurate to the book where every single last scene and sentence is adapted and it's complete with chroma keyed characters floating on wires people being hit in the face by sentient child swings and it was an absolute travesty of Television however with all this talk of deviation being good there is a massive elephant in this room because obviously you can get too disrespectful how this often comes about is what the one doing the adaptation believes they could have done a better job than the original Creator did and when people walk around believing themselves a superior writer than the original you will end up with something like the Halo show that made a huge number of changes that corrupt the law and violate the characters yet if you just kept those things accurate to the games and books they would have not just worked great for the show they would have worked better than the alterations you swapped them out for it does not take William Shakespeare to take Master Chief and flesh him out in all kinds of interesting ways where he still feels very much like the stoic badass super soldier from the games who never takes off his helmet but to add all kinds of layers of complexity to his psyche give him PTSD that would have been such a natural addition or have him be crippled by loneliness because he was a Child Soldier he never had a childhood and he doesn't have any social skills because of it but God does he wish he did deep down because then he could actually speak to other people and develop connections yes Chief was never oozing with complexity in the games but a good writer could have taken the classic Master Chief and the fleshed amount being a great protagonist for the show with a handful of respectful additions added that give him so much more depth for it they did not do that with the show I don't know who this guy's supposed to be but he ain't my master chief he is just some guy who stole his armor and likes to have sex with captive spies wait hold on that's a war crime you had Master's Chief the hero of humanity commit a [ __ ] War crime like that's the worst character assassination I've seen since Luke Skywalker tried to murder his own nephew in his sleep I think most of the time when adaptations are unfaithful to this extent it's because the Creator had a level of hubris so high they believed themselves a more skilled writer than the original was so they make pointless changes because in their messed up pathology they think if there is a deviation from The Source material it is therefore a good change because it's a change they personally made you have the elements straight from the original work and the elements you've personally introduced good writers when doing adaptations assign a higher value to the elements from The Source material bad Writers Do the inverse they make bad adaptations because they put a higher designation of worth on the stuff they've invented themselves meaning a ton of great stuff that should have been directly adapted wasn't there are a lot of adaptations out there that have been ruined in the name of satisfying the acute narcissism of these writers and I can't help but think that Amazon's The Wheel of Time is one of them there was so so many changes they made that weren't just pointless they work worse in the show than merely being faithful would have there are so many elements like the magic system being totally changed in a really fundamental way making it less interesting than what we got in the books and they also changed the ethnicities of the characters and again it breaks the law meaning the world makes less sense for it the protagonist's home Village is a very isolated fantasy Town they've had almost no contact with the outside world over the past Thousand Years therefore if you think that through logically you think well of course they'd all be the same ethnicity because of course they would be the gene pool is very non-diverse in this rural remote part of the world and immigration is definitely not a thing in these parts in the books that's exactly how it is everybody was described as having dark hair dark eyes and we can infer that pretty obviously everybody except for Rand the protagonist is black but in the show nope screw your world building Mr Jordan I have a diversity quota to meet and I'm ticking off every bloody box in it and I don't care how much I have to ruin your wait what's that I can do a Game of Thrones did and still include a wide range of cultures and ethnicities by having them come from different regions of the world oh we could begin with everyone having the same ethnicity at the start because they're all from the same region of the same country but as we venture to new lands we see all sorts of people in this diverse complex world and thus the world would have incredible very similitude and representation for it and what's that that's actually what Jordan did himself already in the books and The Wheel of Time is already a very diverse Series where many minorities represented and it even includes someone who is non-binary which is unprecedented for a fantasy series written in the 90s and all they have to do is just be [ __ ] faithful to the source material and I would have kicked off my entire diversity quota and then some nah I have an ego the size of Mars therefore if I made a change from The Source material it must be better than what was in the original because I'm just a better writer than the original Creator was in fact I'm the best writer in the world I've been holding that one for quite a while guys in case you couldn't tell um but as Aristotle said and I've gone from screaming about diversity quotas to quoting Aristotle like what even is this video essay like I've peaked like that's it guys uh this channel is only going downhill from here please dislike unsubscribe and just anyway as Aristotle said all virtues lie between two extremes and if you're looking to adapt a story there is one virtue that you definitely need on one side is respect on the other disrespect oddly you need to be halfway between these two points to make a great adaptation don't be too enslaved by the original else you'll guarantee the original will be the better story because you're failing to capitalize on the strengths of your medium but don't be too disrespectful because there's a reason why the original story is so beloved because the characters like Joel are so complex and dark because the moral questions explored were fascinating because the way the game began and especially how it ended was anything but forgettable and when you cast those things aside you are annihilating potentially great things about your adaptation if you throw things away like the already incredible music not giving Joel the same powerful wound where his daughter died in his arms or not including the very creative idea of the cordyceps infection in lieu of some other more generic caused by the zombie outbreak not only will the fans revolt and then angry British video essayists will scream at you you will make a bad adaptation because you've crossed a dangerous threshold you've let your ego get in the way of what is best for your story it's okay to cast all the aspects of the original like necessary even but the reasons why you cast these things away are everything here they are truly everything the most common reason why should largely be because that would translate poorly to your new medium another potential reason you simply don't have the run time in your film show to fit in all of this excess stuff from the original Source material but another potential justification location in the right circumstance is because there were glaring existing flaws in the original as it was and you're not changing merely optimizing these elements to make it run a little bit smoother as a story no adaptation I've ever seen has pulled off that last one better than the last of us show but if you do use that last excuse as a justification to make all of these alterations that is a very slippery slope to go down because it's so easy to let your ego get in the way and suddenly you've been way too overzealous with all of your changes if you're doing an adaptation the in the absolute best case scenario you're working alongside the original writer and the original writer is someone who has a good understanding of what makes for a great story in this new medium evidently not someone like Stephen King and so they come on board because they above anyone else know exactly what to cut and add while still keeping the soul of the story perfectly intact in that specific situation It's oddly fine that they're disrespecting the original Creator because they themselves oh that person and and so they won't be disrespecting them because they have hubris they'll be disrespecting them in the same way we all cringe at our past selves because we are intimately familiar with every mistake we've ever made and they're guaranteed to tell a more refined story because they're not only a better writer than the originals was seeing as they're the same person only older but nobody anywhere is more qualified to know said writer's mind to know exactly what the themes and the characters are exactly what the story is out to say if you guys haven't already please check out nebula by clicking my link in the description you'll find so many exclusive videos from your favorite creators there I recommend you start with either my video on World building and games or check out philosophytube's very good play the prince it really does help me pay the bills whenever you use that link so I really appreciate it if you do anyway thanks for watching keep writing and I'll see you guys next time on the closer look

Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 232,634

Keywords:

Id: 6bQXnU_2NCw

Length: 30min 48sec (1848 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/frnacispain]

Mediocre neither enter into glory nor sorrow. Some scenes are like the originals, but the issue of the actors is very lame and I don't see any relationship between them, rather it's forced, it's like they just met or something similar, there's no magic that the original game did. That is my position currently.

[u/GutsyOne]

It’s not that great of a show. If we didn’t play the game, it would be mediocre at best.

[u/HourInvestigator5985]

I still don't see why Joel would care for Ellie at this point.

The show did a terrible job in this regard IMO, and I think a big part of it is how much different Ellie show acts from the Ellie game.

there is many issues with the show, and i rly dont understand how its getting such high rating cause its rly not that good.

[u/JayCee1321]

The show is a soulless version of the game, and I'm getting real tired of the idea that "video games are different media" so people feel like they need to change a strong story (or retcon it because Neil didn't get his way the first go around.)

[u/henriprocopio]

There are many things to say, perhaps I'll make another more incisive comment about each topic of the video, but in summary, the series may work for those who don't know the game.

When I watched the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I liked it, I found it entertaining and it held my attention. I had not read the book, but when I did afterwards, wow... the book is much better than the movie, jeez. It's so much better that it made the movie look like shit, really shitty.

Anyway, series gave more background to Bill, Henry and other secondary characters, but the main ones, Joel, Ellie and Tess were totally retconned, horrible what they did with them. The links show why.

My rating for The Retcon of Us show is 4/10.

[u/arvigeus]

There are things to like, things to wonder why they changed, things to say meh. But what objectively proves the show is inferior was the ranch scene. Up to that point in the game, Joel never talked about his emotions. Yet the player could perfectly understand his mental state and why he acts that way. In the TV show, because Joel is rather meek, they had to spell out how he felt. They just didn't have the time and the right direction to establish his inner struggles. Instead, they laugh together, and bond like friends, with occasional "you are not my family" to remind the viewer that Joel is "cold".

[u/BirdValaBrain]

One of the worst takes I have ever heard. I seriously cannot understand how someone can play the game and watch the show and say the show is anywhere near the same quality, let alone better.

[u/beanerthreat457]

Why loyalty is bad

My sorry Dark Angels fan ass: Loyalty it is own reward heretic.

[u/OriginalUserNameee]

Didn't he make a 2 hour video saying how terrible part 2 is? This should be interesting