 Okay, so obviously fantasy has been a while, both in book form and comic books and as fairy tales and as movies and television, all that stuff. And as movies and television, it's never been that big is the main thing. So during the 80s, we had movies like The Animated Lord of the Rings, Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, The Black Cauldron, Crash of the Titans, Star Wars, you know that sort of thing. While it is science fantasy, it's in space, it definitely leans way more on the fantasy side of that because it's about chosen ones and such. And when I say fantasy in this context, keep in mind, I'm mainly talking about stuff that is balls to the wall fantasy, like heroic epic fantasy that's like in a different world from our own and has tons of epic battles and magic and that sort of thing. I don't mean stuff like even say Harry Potter, which while it has a lot of those elements, it's basically just our world and it's a hidden part of it or other, you know, plenty of other movies with like magical elements, which those would be fantasy, yes, but that's not really what I'm talking about. And then we went into the 90s, we still had some bigger ones, only now it also went to TV because we had stuff like Hercules and Xenowarrier Princess. And then we had movies like Dragonheart and Quest for Camelot. Now the thing about all of those is that even when they were successful, they usually weren't mainstream. They were still kind of a niche and they were still kind of cheesy and dumb. Like if you've ever seen Xenowarrier Princess, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Or hell just look at Kevin Sorbo and Hercules. His performance was ridiculous the entire time, but admittedly it was kind of enjoyable and it fit with the tone of the show. And then Lord of the Rings came along and a lot of that changed. You know the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies are phenomenal. Even people who weren't really fans of the books and who weren't really into fantasy loved them because it was a story that took itself 100% seriously and it had a proper budget and everything and it had, well it just worked out really well. You know it has some issues with the adaptation and all but that didn't bother most people. They were great movies and they made a lot of money. And so there were a lot of people that tried to capitalize on that with let's say mixed success. Like they also tried to adapt books like the Disney movie Chronicles of Narnia movies which they definitely took away from the fairy tale feeling of the original books and tried to make it a little bit more gritty and grounded. But still for kids and so they had epic battles and everything and I'm not trying to talk bad about it. I actually like those movies but they were quite a bit different and those were also pretty successful and then you had stuff like Aragon or The Last Airbender movie or even original stuff like Knights of Bloodsteel. You remember Knights of Bloodsteel? Of course not. No one does. That show was fucking terrible. The other fantasy adaptations for whatever reason they just didn't work that well. And a lot of other really popular fantasy books or comics or other things were just never adapted and I think they're kind of for the same reason it's because of just length. You know there's if you have a 900 page book it's going to be very difficult to smash that into a two hour movie. And if you do that even if you manage to successfully get it made you're going to wind up cutting a lot of stuff which will upset fans or you're going to wind up just doing it in a confusing way which will upset people who aren't really fans and who don't really understand the story or some combination of the two. And so the solution to that seems pretty obvious. We'll just make it into a TV series or a mini series. But the issue with that is budgets. You know TV shows work with much lower budgets than movies do. That's just it's just a fact. That's not great a lot of the time because sometimes that means that stories which are really cool and could use better visual effects or something get left by a wayside but it's just how things work. And finally we got the Game of Thrones show and that changed everything. It was a massive massive success and well it had the stuff it needed to it needed to succeed. It had decent budget and everything. And now there's a lot of fantasy shows that are kind of trying to ride on their coattails. You know and they are usually not the cheesy dumb stuff that we're used to and they're certainly not like for kids or anything either. They're taking themselves seriously and they're trying to be super dark and gritty and epic and all that. So we have stuff like The Witcher like The House of the Dragon like Wheel of Time like Kings of the Wild like Cursed and stuff like Nightfall which isn't really fantasy but it's definitely going for a fantasy vibe and it has you know big battles and everything so it's very clearly inspired by that sort of stuff. As an aside go watch Nightfall it's on Netflix it's a good show. And speaking of Cursed in a way that show really inspired this video and I can't explain exactly why because it was just a show that came out on Netflix about six months ago and I just thought it was fine. Yeah a lot of critics hated it they said it was terrible but I just thought it was alright overall. You know it's an adaptation. When I first watched it I thought it was an original story but no it's an adaptation of a comic book which is in and of itself an adaptation of Arthurian legends. But at the same time even though there's a lot of Arthurian inspiration you could kind of just change a couple of the names around and most people wouldn't even notice because it changes so much stuff. I think the overall idea for Cursed is really good you know it's not about saving the world it's just about this girl who gets caught up in a shitty situation and tries to go save her people. You know her name's Nimue and she's trying to save the Fae from being wiped out by the humans particularly this genocidal crusading group of humans who think that they're against God's will and yada yada yada that sort of thing. And a lot of the problems with it I can acknowledge like a lot of the small writing bits are weird like sometimes the dialogue is odd and sometimes there's just small moments where characters act stupid or where something weird happens like the blood bucket scene for example like in one of the first episodes King Uther asks Merlin to make it rain and Merlin makes it rain and the servants like stands out in the rain with a bucket and it fills up with water and then he brings it to King Uther and he tries to drink it and it's full of blood and I'm just thinking did how did they not notice it was blood before he drank did it turn into blood as soon as he tried drinking it I it just small things mostly but most of the issues are like directing slash filmmaking issues like the fact that the villains wear red robes while they're running it about like Friar's robes just bright red and that's not a very that doesn't seem like great battle attire because it's not armor or anything and they're like just charging in against people who are wearing armor and it looks kind of silly like I understand what they were going for they wanted something that would visually stand out but I think if they were wearing red armor it would be better and then there's stuff like fast cuts during fight scenes and sometimes director or cinematographers choose like weird camera angles to shoot things from and you know overall it's a mixed bag the acting is really good some of the time like you know Catherine Langford is pretty solid and I think the guy that plays Merlin does a good job but other than that it's ranges from just like passable to kind of bad and wouldn't the fight scenes are good some of the time and the rest of the time it's like I mentioned before fast cuts all over the place the villains are sometimes really intimidating and even though they're evil you can kind of see how they would get to that point and why they're like this and in fact there's one little girl who becomes a villain who I think is pretty good but most of the time they're just evil for the sake of being evil and if I'm being honest my thoughts on the Witcher are kind of similar you know there's stuff in there I loved I loved Henry Cavill as Geralt but I didn't love most of the other actors and I loved most of the fight scenes but not all of them and I think that the story is really confusing and the timeline could have been shown to the audience better and I know people are gonna bitch about how um if you read the books you would understand this I didn't read the books guys and I shouldn't have to in order to understand the show if you have to read the books in order to understand what's going on in the adaptation it's a shitty adaptation and while I'm on the subject I don't think that the world is presented very well because I have looked into the lore of the Witcher and it's kind of interesting there's some stuff in there that helps to set it apart from other just standard European medieval fantasy stuff like the conjunction of the spheres or conjoining of the spheres whatever it's called I think that's a really neat idea the show doesn't do a very good job of explaining what that is or how it happened like okay so it seems like this is just a standard world that has humans and elves and dwarves and some other magical stuff in it but there's not much that's communicated about it to the audience that would help it stand apart so it just doesn't do a good job with that and so overall yeah the Witcher show is just kind of okay now what I'm getting at with this is that books are mostly solo projects like obviously when you publish one professionally or traditionally I should say you have to go through an editing process and the publishers will sometimes change stuff if they don't like what it is but for the most part it is just one sometimes two people who work on this thing and then once they are satisfied with it they put it out there whereas film and television is collaborative you know a lot of things have to line up for it to work you have to have a good writing team because it is a team of people it's not just one or two it's a whole bunch of them and you have to have a good producers that know because the producers have final say over scripts usually and they have to know what works and what doesn't you have to have good directors to make sure the actors work and to make sure that the general feel of how everything is shot and how everything is set up works well you have to have good actors like I said you have to have good fight choreographers and visual effects artists and costume designers and set builders and all of this stuff you have to it all has to line up and that's the thing about Game of Thrones is that a lot of things had to go right for that show to wind up being the success it was it had good source material it had people that knew how to properly adapt to that source material and you know things to cut things to alter things to add it had to have a competent casting crew and it had to have HBO money behind it to make sure all of that had the proper funding to make sure it worked and also the fact that it was so dark and the fact that it was so subversive and went against the grain of what we expected from fantasy at the time that attracted a lot of people to it and so all those people watching allowed the budget to stay high and it also just attracted people to fantasy in general you know if you're someone that got into reading fantasy because you liked the Game of Thrones show welcome aboard I'm I'm happy more people are into this hobby now because all that means I have more people to talk about it with but the fact that there's so many more people there and the fact that we've seen fantasy adaptations work on the big screen or small screen I guess whatever colloquialism you want to attach to that but the fact that there is an audience for it and there can be money made is why we're getting so many adaptations that are in the works right now stuff like Kings of the Wild or the Wheel of Time show or the Lord of the Rings show that are gonna come out soon and my prediction honestly is that most of them are gonna be bad to okay like we're not gonna get very many good ones like I think the Lord of the Rings show is going to be bad I really do because it's taking a storyline which no one really cares about and it from what I've seen it seems like the people working on it are trying to make it kind of dark and edgy which is really not what Lord of the Rings is like it's a little more PG or PG-13 and its tone and so I just think that even if it's a well put together product it's just not going to be that be that engaging for most people I think House of the Dragon is gonna be okay for kind of the same reasons like they're taking something that's just sounds kind of stupid on paper it's like the Targaryens hundreds of years before the main story like okay they were just sure there's some stuff in the lore there that's interesting but I don't think they're gonna be able to do that much to make an entire show out of it but it's definitely going to be well put together and everything so maybe we'll get some fun battles and stuff out of it who knows and I think that the Wheel of Time show and the Kings of the Wild show are going to be good because Kings of the Wild is a pretty simple story and even if you're not a huge fan of the source material if you just understand how to do decent humor and decent action I think it'll be a fun show because for me at least the humor in the action is what carried me through the books so much whereas Wheel of Time I think is going to be good because you can tell that one has an okay budget not an amazingly high one because I think the Lord of the Rings show is sucking up a lot of that money but it does have an okay budget and we're probably going to get some decent sets and costumes and visual effects and all that important stuff and you can tell that the people working on it definitely love this source material and they seem to know a lot about how to carry it over and how to carry over the general feeling and tone even if some of the details are changed so I genuinely believe that the Wheel of Time show is going to be good and that's the thing you need filmmakers who like the source material who understand the source material and who are good filmmakers because you have people who are good filmmakers and don't understand the source material or vice versa then it's just not going to come out being super great over the next couple of years we're gonna get oversaturated like that's just it's going to happen I'm sorry and because of that people are gonna get tired of this audience is gonna shrink even if hardcore people which I'm willing to bet if you're watching my channel you're probably a little more hardcore than the average fantasy television watcher but even they will probably start getting tired of seeing similar stuff over and over again the audience will shrink and then people will move on to the next fad you know it's just that's just what happens there's patterns in what's popular and what's unpopular it changes over time like member a couple of years ago everything was trying to be similar to Twilight because Twilight had blown up so much and then that faded away like that that's just going to happen it's inevitable but if you want to help try and prevent that sort of thing here's a here's a little bit of advice from me now this is gonna go over some of the same points I made in my fixing the biggest problems with science fiction and fantasy video which you should check that out if you haven't but basically in that I go over some of the issues with fantasy and why it feels samey to a lot of people who aren't that into it and even people who are into it it just feels kind of like the same thing over and over and so in order to avoid that I would say number one change up the setting like you know medieval western central Europe is I mean it's just been done a lot I mean even if you alter it a little bit if you don't do a good job of conveying how different it is then well you it's it's not gonna feel different like like I said with the witch earlier it's it's just not gonna work for the average person and Game of Thrones actually avoided this trap by they did a couple of things to avoid the trap basically even the core area of Westeros where we spend most of the series they go into just so much detail on it that it feels like a real place and it doesn't just feel surface level and then they also spent parts of the story in other areas which were different and a little more alien like the Night's Watch and the Wildlings or Dorn which has more of an Iberian feel to it than a western central Europe feel or across the narrow sea stuff like Meereen and the Dothraki like these are all alien cultures alien places and so that helped the show feel a little more well-rounded and it helps it feel like yeah there's there's other stuff out here this isn't just more of the same so if stuff like Mistborn and a number in the ashes ever gets green lit and that and adapted then I think that will help to maybe not stop people from getting tired of the genre but to help mitigate it because those are both different you know Mistborn has much more of a post-apocalyptic feel to it and Ember in the ashes is more Middle Eastern inspired than European so it's a lot different and I would also say in terms of plot go beyond save the world like I said earlier that's one area where I think Cursed worked really well I think that the story of watching Neemway just try to save her people worked really well and even though like I said I'm admitting there's other issues with that show the overall core concept I think is really neat and beyond everything else I think just just don't be edgy you know you can be dark that's fine but it has to serve a purpose you know just putting in a bunch of random extreme violence and a random murder and random rape just just don't do that some of it's fine but for the love of God just don't but if I'm being totally honest I don't think most of this advice is going to be taken I think that we're gonna get some stuff that feels pretty boring and samey for a while and then a bunch of executives are gonna scratch their heads and wonder why they're not making as much money so they're gonna pull the plug on it and move on to something else I I'm not particularly happy about that hopefully we can at the very least get the full Wheel of Time series before that happens but I'm pretty sure that's what's going to happen special fangs to all my patrons you guys are the best and special fangs to my $10 and up patrons including Aposavalanan, Ava Tuma, Brother Chantoties, Christopher Quintan, Deanna Dahim, Ambus, Emily Miller, Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Ruta-Coba, Madison Lewis Bennett, microphone, Sad Martigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, Vacuous 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