*deep breath*
Okay. So here’s the thing. I’ve been through this before with a little fandom you might have heard of called…Twilight. And I know it seems like I’m going off on a tangent here, but stick with me because I see so many parallels between the two, and unfortunately there’s a very real possibility that what happened to Twilight could happen with ACOTAR.
As a teen and up through my early twenties, Twilight was my obsession. I loved that story and those characters so much. I read the first book so many times that my copy is literally falling apart. I read and wrote fanfiction. I made playlists. I daydreamed about it. I made friends because of it. It provided an escape from my crippling social anxiety that made high school a miserable experience for me. And I was SO excited when they announced back in 2007 or whenever it was that we were getting a movie. I had such high hopes. I followed all the preproduction news like a girl possessed. I would come home from school and immediately get online (this was before tumblr and before I smartphone with 24/7 access to the internet) because I was DYING to hear the latest news.
And then Kristen fucking Stewart was cast as Bella. Really that should have signaled the beginning of the end to me, because it is literally the stupidest fucking casting decision anyone has ever made ever. You literally could not find an actress less like Bella Swan than Kristen Stewart. But still I held out hope. They could still pick a good Edward, right? Well. Along came Robert Pattinson. Honestly, it was all fucking over at that point, but to add insult to injury we then had to deal with Catherine Hardwicke’s shitty, jerky-camera, blue-green cinematography, Carter Burwell’s horrible fucking 90s-esque TV teen drama score, and a lead cast that openly mocked the movie, characters, and even the fans themselves in just about every interview. Literally the only good thing about that movie was the soundtrack (not the score, the actual songs from bands like Paramore and Blue Foundation). At the time, though, I clung to it because it was the only movie version we were going to get, so it was better than nothing, right?
So, it became this huge sensation, and other people, people who’d never read the books or weren’t fans of the books, started watching it. And seeing what a shitty fucking movie it was, they mocked it, but they didn’t stop there. No, then they started mocking everything related to it–the books, Stephenie Meyer, and, of course, the fans. Millions of who were teenage girls. And let me tell you, as one of those teenage girls, it was horrible. It was so horrible to watch this thing I’d loved for four years of my life, a series I’d obsessed over, been comforted by during some hard times, and made friends because of, to be made into a total joke. But even worse than that was when those people mocking the film and books started turning their attention to the fans themselves, calling us stupid, immature girls and women for having the audacity to unabashedly enjoy a “silly” fantasy romance series.
And now, here we are, ten years later, getting the news that another wildly popular fantasy romance series, with a primary audience of teenage girls and young women, is going to be made into a movie. And I am terrified. Everything that happened with Twilight I can see happening SO EASILY and quickly with ACOTAR. Because here’s what’s (probably) going to happen. They’re going to take a complex story with complex characters and strip it down to its most basic parts to make it easy for the masses to consume, and they’re going to completely butcher it. They’re going to get shitty casting and cheap production. And once they release this steaming pile of shit they call a movie into the world, all the people who haven’t read the books and don’t get how we, the book fandom, could possibly love the series so much, they’re going to mock it. And they’re going to mock the fans and insult our intelligence and say we’re “setting feminism back 5,000 years” and all the other shit people say when something deemed traditionally feminine, like a romance story, is suddenly wildly popular. And they’re going to turn one-time fans into antis. Or some people will leave the fandom altogether because they can’t handle the negativity. And it just makes me so, so sad, because I love this fandom the way it is right now, and honestly, even if the movie was being produced by a GOOD film company, I don’t know how they’d really be able to do the books justice.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that sometimes no movie is better than a shit quality movie, and I’m really going to miss the book fandom the way it is, without all the baggage and shit that comes into the picture when an adaptation completely sucks.
Another really good point for the person who asked. This is why we don’t really want a movie
Hmm.. I mean you aren’t wrong, but I would also like to point out that in some instances, the movie can be entirely forgotten.
Let’s looks at the Inheritance Series by Christopher Paolini. They made “Eragon” the first book into a fucking movie and guess what. The entire fandom has elected to ignore it and pretend it never existed. Because it was so bad, we just decided we don’t want to include it in our fandom. And back when the series was super popular, just like sjm series are now, we hated the movie but moved on.
Hell, we even wrote a petition that was blasted on the official Inheritance website to reboot the Eragon movie. (Don’t think it will happen)
Seriously, go look up Tags for Eragon. You won’t find a lot going back to the movie, everyone just collectively agreed that we don’t wanna associate with that piece of trash called a movie. Haha.
I mean I really hope that’s not the case for ACOTAR, but…. if it is, there is always hope that we are better and just pretend it never existed.
Thoughts on the ACOTAR movie
Published
foxboylucien 