Scene from Into the Spider-Verse where Miles gets a 0 on a true/false test and catches on the only statistically possible way he could have done that was if he knew all the right answers and deliberately chose the wrong ones, meaning he's intentionally trying to fail out of the class and quit.
This is, however, a multiple choice test with four possible answers per question, so it's far more possible to get 0 correct answers due to actually being that stupid.
The books: every woman is described tits first, to the point where we basically know the cup size of every single one and barely learn anything more about them.
The show: the women are actual fully fledged characters, with autonomy, wants, desires and actual storylines.
The show took everything good from the books and cut out all the dross.
Tl;dr, just read the bottom paragraph. It's a book, it's kind of hard to prove my point unless I cover the plot.
It ended with her ascension to godhood how does that serve Quentin or any other male character. Quintin is not privy to like 90% of what she went through.
His lesson in that book also does not stem from her in any way. His lesson is that "The hero is not rewarded, the hero pays the price." His series arc is about how magic will not solve his problems.
Her arc is about the need to be special, addiction, and learning to live with the trauma she's endured. It is clearly meant to be a commentary on what women go through and how men (Quentin) view their pain as a alluring quirk rather than the truly horrific thing it is.
From Quentin's perspective, she's this ethereal despondent character but her own perspective is far more gritty and real. She practically tells him nothing about her thoughts and feelings and her arc ends with her accepting the trauma as a part of her, and that this horrific event doesn't need control the rest of her life.
It's about overcoming the trauma she endures and how in order to move past it, you sometimes have to grow and change to make space for the trauma, represented in her ascension. This quite literally cannot be in service of Quentin's growth, because he does not have a traumatic event on the same level as Julia to apply this lesson to. Her ENTIRE HALF of the book is about her overcoming that. That's why I either think you didn't read it, or you somehow didn't understand how a character with just as much narrative weight in the story had her own growth unrelated to a man.
It's been a really long time since I read them, but that was not my impression at all. It actually seemed to me like the women were the fully written out characters with wants and desires, who uncovered truths, while the main protagonist was mostly depressed and along for the ride because he had actually read the books and wanted to help his friends.
The Magicians is the only book series where I will unequivocally say that the show/movie was better than the book. Every change they made for the show was the right decision.
Same. I rewatch the show way more than rereading the books. But they both offered different stories that I genuinely enjoyed. The character growth of the show was just unmatched though
As far as for the intention of adapting it, yes. I always hold it up as a great example of adapting the spirit of a story over trying to recreate scene for scene.
Tbh I did the same thing with the books, which is why I never checked out the show. Like, I enjoy stories with a protagonist who is not in fact objectively a heroic figure in the narrative, but that one just took it a little too far in making him so completely unlikeable 😅
The books are very different plotwise, they essentially don't follow the same story at all besides hitting a few of the same notes. Also for some reason they swapped Penny and Quentin's personalities in the show? That said I loved the show despite its flaws and the books were alright too.
I haven't read the book, I just watched the first season of the show, but I heard someone describing the author of the books as being upset that Chronicles of Narnia was so popular despite having unrealistically positive outcomes for the character and wanting to make a "similar, but bad stuff happens to people instead" version, which kinda made sense about the tone of the material.
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u/MrCobalt313 12d ago edited 12d ago
Scene from Into the Spider-Verse where Miles gets a 0 on a true/false test and catches on the only statistically possible way he could have done that was if he knew all the right answers and deliberately chose the wrong ones, meaning he's intentionally trying to fail out of the class and quit.
This is, however, a multiple choice test with four possible answers per question, so it's far more possible to get 0 correct answers due to actually being that stupid.