They can do it, why can’t we?

Anime adaptations stick close to the source material, and when they don’t, the fans say so loudly. That expectation barely exists in the West, and I want to talk about why.

I used to make videos about the major comic publishers and their animated and live action adaptations, and how rarely any of them actually tried to honor what came before. Some of that is ego. But look at what comes out of the East, and South Korea too. Yes, there is filler. Yes, concessions get made, because animation and a page are different mediums and you cannot carry one over to the other untouched. I’m not pretending those problems don’t exist. What I’m pointing at is the baseline intent. The attempt is to stay faithful, and when a show deviates, the fanbase pushes back about which arc got misrepresented. Shout out to those fans, because that pressure is the reason the standard holds.

In the West you get the opposite. You get people defending a loose adaptation by asking why they’d want to see the same story again. I have never understood that. Honoring the source material is what made people fans in the first place. If you expect an audience to follow an IP across mediums and keep spending money on it, their expectations are not unreasonable.

And a lot of these adaptations read like a completely separate script that got an IP bolted onto it after the fact. The names carry over, maybe a costume, and the source becomes something lightly referenced while a writer or director leaves their own imprint on it. Meanwhile some of the most popular arcs in comics still have never gotten a proper adaptation.

This is the approach I adopted at Rippaverse. We won’t be perfect, and concessions are real, because I’m saying this from experience. But you can respect the source and keep it as accurate as the medium realistically allows. That’s all fans are actually asking for.

Rippaverse books ship direct: https://rippaverse.com

#Anime #Manga #Adaptations #Comics