dear Hollywood: stop adapting books like you’re mad at them

why manga to anime works and book to screen makes me want to walk into the sea

Can someone explain why 99% of manga to anime adaptations are literal art and 99% of book to live-action adaptations feel like they were written by someone who skimmed the Wikipedia page on the bus?

Because I’m tired. Truly. I’ve watched western studios turn beautifully written, emotionally layered books into ten-episode fever dreams where the dialogue sounds like it was generated by a toaster and everyone’s eyebrows are doing too much. Meanwhile, anime studios take panel drawings and turn them into poetry in motion. Frame by frame. Voice-acted like Shakespeare. Music that feels like emotional injury.

Like, let’s compare.
Anime adaptation process:

• respects the source material

• asks “how can we translate this moment into something even more powerful with sound and movement?”

• adapts tone, emotion, pacing

• takes five episodes just to let a character have a breakdown on a rooftop in the rain

• visuals that look like pain and god had a baby

Western book-to-show adaptation process:

• what if we changed the main character’s entire personality?

• let’s remove half the plot and add a love triangle no one asked for

• cast a 30-year-old man to play a 16-year-old because apparently no one has ever seen a teenager

• “do you think the author will mind if we make the villain a DJ?”

• we have 9 hours of runtime but somehow no emotional payoff

I don’t even blame the actors. I blame whoever decided that internal monologues and worldbuilding can be replaced with a two-minute training montage and a scene where someone says, “this isn’t you, bro.”

And don’t get me started on tone. You read a book with slow-burn tragedy and layered political tension, and they adapt it like a CW show from 2011. Everything’s neon. Someone’s wearing a leather jacket. There’s a dramatic hallway walk. The entire plot is over by episode six and then they improvise. Badly.

Meanwhile anime is out here adapting 300 chapters with scientific accuracy. They’ll stop the show for a full backstory episode about a side character’s childhood pet just to make their death more devastating in episode 74. They care. You can feel it. The reverence. The pain. The budget.

Honestly I think the problem is that a lot of western adaptations are made by people who want to use the book, not honor it. They want the fanbase without the soul. They don’t understand the quiet parts. The pacing. The fact that some scenes matter because they were slow.

Anyway, I’ll be in my room watching the Hidden Inventory/Premature Death intro for the 43rd time and pretending I’ve never been hurt.