Adaptations

So, there was one thought that has been on my mind for a long while... I wanted to adapt the story we played through together in the Adventurer's Guild Roleplay into a novel. It's not really a priority project for me (I have tons of novel ideas, and I'm working on one of them), but it's something I have been wanting to do for a long while.

Today while I had some idle time, I ended up thinking of a basic outline of how I'd actually adapt the roleplay into an actual novel, because, yanno... There are a fair bit of problems one needs to solve in order to do this kind of thing. Like...

1. A Roleplay isn't really a well-planned story or anything like it. There is no end-goal to a roleplay, and roleplays in general just die when either the playerbase or the staff give up on it, so... The story not only has no end goal, but it also has no closure.
   
2. A Roleplay isn't a single story, but a conjunction of multiple stories told from multiple points of view and that often times contradict one another.
3. Not everything that happens in roleplays is easily available. Some things are done in private, other things happened before one joined, other things were just too unremarkable, yet left an impact in the game in one way or another.

Those are the generic ones I can think from the top of my head, maybe there are more, but that's besides the point... In any case, I kinda needed to solve those in order to try making a story... And well, there isn't really a clean solution for this if you want to adapt the roleplay into a story, there plain and simply isn't... That said, it's not like I wanted to adapt the Adventurer's Guild itself into a novel... No, not really. What I wanted was to adapt the story of my character, Hikari, into a novel. That seemed a lot more feasible.

As I thought of the details of the story, I ended up realizing that almost everything that was core to the roleplay had disappeared in the process... It felt a bit sad because there were so so many things I enjoyed there, but at the same time, they just felt like natural cuts, really. They were things I was getting rid of because they didn't really add anything to the narrative I wanted to tell.

Essentially, what the story ended up shaping up as, was a story focused entirely on Hikari's point of view. The people that were particularly close to Hikari still appeared and interacted with her... The rest of the players were either scrapped altogether or became nameless NPCs.

Basically every plot of the game was also scrapped, because quite frankly... None of them were particularly relevant to Hikari herself. Usually I'd just use the game's events as an excuse to drag Hikari into some side plot and develop her own story throughout the course of the game's gameplay. She was extremely participative in basically everything that happened, and yet none of it was particularly relevant for her. So at this point I figured there was no point in using big wars or whatever for the sake of developing Hikari when I could use much smaller and self-contained things that would not derail the story I actually wanted to tell.

I also had to change the base concept of Hikari, because like... She was an Alchemist Magical Girl, who later lost her memories and became a priestess, who later became a goddess... Her concepts were kinda all over the place, and part of those changes were just made for OOC reasons anyways, so I decided I could very easily change her to a priestess from the getgo and make things a lot easier on me.

Other stuff that I needed to change was the power level, because... Well, we had some players that could destroy the universe if they wanted... Hikari herself became a Goddess and she wasn't particularly OP in any way, so like... I definitely needed to curb the power level of the story to make a sensible novel.

And then there is the fact I just don't like writing about fights in general, and am not very good at it... Yet Hikari consistently participated in battles all the time, because that was just a strong part of the Adventurer's Guild concept. But uhn... I didn't really need the guild itself to be a particularly relevant part of the plot, so I could just... Take her away from the battles altogether. Hikari doesn't need to fight in order to make a novel about her, I just need to adapt some thingies here and there.

And after going through all those changes, I just kinda realized... "Wow, that's nothing like AG, is it?" I mean, I surely went through tons of changes in order to tell the story I wanted... And at the same time, it was totally like AG, and anyone that read my stories in the game would definitely recognize the aspects that I was pulling from when making the AG-based novel... It's just... It wouldn't really be an AG adaptation, it would be more of a loose adaptation of the story of a single character within the AG world.

And then... There was also one problem that I kinda wanted to leave for last. There were also some really remarkable character-defining occurrences that I absolutely wanted to portray in a novel... That were done only in PMs. Those moments were extremely personal and really special to Hikari, and since Hikari was a big self-insert, those moments ended up also being very important to me... But well, they're private, and they involve more than just me. It's not really something that I could put in a novel without asking the involved parties, because those things happened to them as well, and it was also important to them just like how it was important to me... It's a big complication.

So well... I just kinda wanted to throw all those thoughts out there I guess... I mean, I just started realizing how hard it is to adapt something into a different medium. AG and Novels may both be written stories, but the nature of Roleplays and Novels are completely different, so you end up needing to make TONS of changes to make things work out... To the point that the essence of the Roleplay may very well be lost.

I mean, I'm just thinking about it now, but this already happened with me before. I made a novel loosely based on the Magic Association roleplay... Except it wasn't. While the premise of the novel was to play around with the Magic Association (Heroes' Guild) concept and how throwing a "normal mage" into the middle of a bunch of OP characters ends up leading to crazy things... What ended up happening was that I told a love story between a girl and her fairy familiar while basically ignoring the entire original concept of the novel... It ended up getting so far from its original concept that I actually wanna rewrite the whole novel while excluding this concept altogether and working with something else so as to not detract the novel from the love story I'm trying to tell.

I wanted to close this blog with a line of thought... Just how much work goes into adapting things? Like... Professionally. Adapting books into movies, for example. Just how much do you have to cut? What parts need to remain? What parts need to be completely changed? At what points does it ruin the essence of the book and become something else entirely? Those are interesting questions to think about. We usually just bash movies that make a poor adaptation of a book, but they honestly have a pretty hard job, and I'm starting to understand why things might not always come out in a way that we expect or that might please us, they just don't have the means to tell the story in the same way that the book originally told.

... Though I'm not saying stuff like Eragon and DBZ Evolution are forgivable. They're not. I'm fine with loose freeform adaptations, but not with garbage disguised as a movie.

Oh well, that's all I had to say on the topic~ *rolls out*