“this is an inaccurate adaptation” okay but is it good “this didn’t happen in the book” does it make sense in the context of the new work though “they totally changed the plot” and is the new one good or bad “it’s completely different” not what I asked “they changed all the stuff I like” then I get why you wouldn’t be into it but I’m asking about its own artistic merits “this character is meant to be blonde” I couldn’t give less of a fuck
The specter of the hypothetical animated adaptation hangs low over the head of The Locked Tomb’s fandom. So much of the discussion is “how can we bring this element from the books?” “how can we do what the books did here in animation?” and the simple, true answer is that we can’t. No one can.
TLT’s presentation, its meaning, hell, its literal characters and plot are so fundamentally tied into its nature as a series of paper novels or audiobooks.
About those audiobooks, the only existing adaptations we have of TLT—I know we all love Moira Quirk, but she did so much more than most people realize. Her character voices, her cadence, her putting-into-words of certain visual elements (“struck-through” for the names of the dead in HTN’s Dramatic Personae) etc., all done for the sake of putting something new into the story, and making up for what Tamsyn had done that had to be left behind.
If TLT got animated, would it have Dramatis Personae? No!
Would Gideon’s narration be the same? No! It probably wouldn’t even be there during most of Harrow.
Would we be put into Nona’s shoes, trying to figure out the identity of characters we’ve already met because she doesn’t have the perspective to describe them familiarly? Nope!
But there are other things an animated adaptation could do. Some ideas I’ve seen that I like:
- Total change in animation style for each POV (e.g. modern shonen anime for Gideon, 80s shojo anime for Harrow in the Mithraeum, claymation for Harrow’s river bubble, animated children’s drawings for Nona, live action for John flashbacks)
- Color of the shots indicating perspective during the Harrow the Ninth storyline (i.e. cool colors like Harrow’s eyes in the river bubble, sunlight gold like Gideon’s in the Mithraeum)
- Gideon narrating directly to the audience, a la “Yep. That’s me. You’re probably wondering—”, for the duration of Gideon the Ninth, only for it to become heartwrenchingly clear in the final scenes that she was speaking to Harrow, and now Harrow is speaking back (I especially like this one, not only because Holy Emotional Gutpunch but also because it’s a perfect homage to Gideon’s second-person narration in the HTN book)
- (This is my own actually:) Nona the Ninth being shot entirely from Nona’s eye level perspective (start with a claustrophobic shot of her stuck in the shirt, Worm With Problems, and end with a series of shots that alternate between her POV, overheads showing her from outside, and Alecto’s body’s POV as Nona walks towards it)
- OR, Harrow’s Mithraeum scenes being shot from first-person, to trap the audience in her horror and grief at being stuck in her own mind, body, and perspective (imagine the show-only fan reactions to the POV returning to where Harrow was last seen lying down, only to realize that everything is in Gideon’s anime style)
- Episode-to-episode opening sequences serving as meaning puzzles like the poems, Dramatis Personae, birthday list, even potentially the John chapters
If anyone has an idea for how to communicate Nona’s language thing in animation, I’d love to hear them :)
I would love to see Nona filmed like a (live action) children’s show - but only in the foreground, for what Nona directly experiences. In most shots, the background contains glimpses of the rest of the world, gritty and realistic. Think Sesame Street if it were an actual NYC street, with real people walking through, real violence and distress and joy and daily life peeking in through alleys and the occasional escape from ‘set’ into city.
I love all of this, and I want to toss my own animated Nona adaptation idea into the ring: a very fluid animation style that goes from more desaturated, gritty, and representational during more serious scenes, to more exaggerated, bouncy, and experimental during happy scenes, shifting with Nona’s mood. Characters stylized in ways that emphasize the things Nona finds most distinctive about them. Gore that shows people bleeding colorful cartoon stars as well as realistic blood. That kind of thing