 I don't actually know of us the largest shirt grant, but everybody keeps telling me it is, so I'll just go with the press people and we'll work it out that way. What it has done, though, is the Government of Canada, basically, has finally recognized that my studying the Lord of the Rings for an entire career is a good thing. And how can you argue with that sort of thing? So I've been working with Tolkien stuff and teaching Tolkien for my entire, it's literally my entire career, ever since 1985, Brad, when he started on with me. And one of the things that, of course, became really interesting for me was the period of time between 2001 and 2003 during the release of Peter Jackson's three films, because suddenly I became way more interesting to people than I had been before. And people started asking me questions about things which just meant I went back, read the book several times, which I've done since then anyway, and had a couple of really, really good experiences in the classroom looking at the adaptation, my favorite of which, and it's just an anecdote I love to tell, is one class where we decided to end it on a Sunday by going to our library and watching all three extended versions of the movies together. First of all, by the end of it, I hated Elijah Wood. Every time he appeared on screen, I just started giggling and breaking up laughing. But the funniest part of that story for me was that, like hobbits, the people in the class decided to bring a lot of food. First of all, it's not allowed in that room, but that's okay. And what we brought, good stuff, fruits, vegetables, all kinds of things you should be able to eat, which is fine, but we had tables full of it. And after 11 and a half hours of viewing a movie, I didn't ever want to see a piece of fruit again for a while. So that's when I decided to eat nothing, but carbs and junk. And it's worked out well for me, but I want to talk about the movement from this, which is, as far as I can tell, the covers, slip covers of the very first editions of The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954 through 56, to this, which are the slip covers of the extended, first extended versions, not the Blu-ray versions, of Peter Jackson's film, made sort of interestingly to look like book covers and show us again why he was very, very concerned with fidelity in the adaptation of these books to this, which was the cover of the first of a series of games, a multiplayer online game called The Lord of the Rings Online. It's now had, I think it's five modules, I'll go through them in a minute. But it is, oh, I shouldn't have said it's not, let me go back a little bit. It's from this to this and to this, because I will emphasize that the game has licensed the books, not the film. Actually, it seems when you're playing it, like it's licensed the film, but that's a whole other thing. It's actually only done that. So we have, it's gone from the books to the film and to the game, I'm gonna show how some of those things work together, I hope. What you're gonna see in the background, because I kind of make boring slides, there's all point form stuff, so I figured you'd need pictures of the back before the actual slide appears, and that's what this is gonna be a lot of. I was also trying for the most garish presentation. So at the end, you'll have to decide if that actually worked out. There's a couple of book covers, obviously. Questions that I wanna talk about are the standard questions in adaptation studies. What is the source? What is being adapted? What is the adaptation? The problems with fidelity studies, and I will tell you right off the bat, if you get involved with adaptation studies, the first thing you're going to read about are the problems with fidelity studies. So we'll spend a fair bit of time on that. That just looks good. I'm gonna be talking about The Lord of the Rings Online and Expansion, depictions of Middle Earth, fidelity in the game, and in a nod, my only nod to what this conference is actually about, genre expectations in the game, audience. All right, so these are screenshots from The Lord of the Rings Online. You see the nice pastoral hobbit-like setting, the Shire, which, by the way, I think actually draws a lot more from the Peter Jackson films than it does from the books themselves. That's one of the areas where the licensing obviously didn't matter to the people who put it together. The question of the source from Brent Westbook. The absolute given of all adaptation studies is comparison. No one writing about a film adaptation as an adaptation writes about only the movie or about only the novel or the short story, the television show, et cetera. The first thing to keep in mind is when you're in adaptation studies, you're always comparing. And you're comparing what's been adapted to where it came from. And this causes all kinds of issues in adaptation studies itself. But the other thing this quote does for us is to show us that the bulk of adaptation work so far has been the move from novel to film. Almost all of it. There's certainly some, particularly in Shakespeare studies, from play to film and only recently have people started talking about other kinds of adaptation. And this includes things like Linda Hutchin talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which is an adaptation of all things, a ride. And it's not really an adaptation of the ride because nothing that happens on the Pirates of the Caribbean movie happens on the ride. If anybody on the ride, they've been on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride? Yeah, it's not a lot like the movie. You know, I didn't get a lot. But that's what happens in the case of the source. So we do look at the source extensively and I will do that today. And then I'm gonna find out later on that I don't know if it matters. We'll see. All right, so what's the source? Obviously, because you're all sitting there, what's the problem here? The source is the Lord of the Rings, the novels, okay? Except that there's all kinds of other source studies that goes into Tolkien scholarship. I wanted to spend with this kind of thing. A set of critical essays on Tolkien and the study of his sources. Source scholarship does not generally come across well in the literature. In fact, source scholars keep criticizing source scholarship. But this is the stuff that comes, you know, which myths he was working with, which legends, which books he read when he was young, according to his letters, all those sorts of things. This is the same kind of thing. We got a collection of what's called sources of inspiration, which is even more directly related to Tolkien's own life. Of course, Tolkien laid his life rather bare in his collection of letters, which is very readable. And for me, it's a great set of letters because most of the time I identify with this man, most of the letters he wrote from about 1944 onwards were apologizing to his editors that he was late. To me, that just rang true, right? And I said, I can be great too, because I've done that innumerable, innumerable times. Of course, it does read the problem of, if you want to talk about genre studies, have we lost that forever? The collection of letters? I mean, are we ever gonna have the collection of emails between two authors? Yo! Yep, I agree, you know, that kind of thing. I'm not sure. Possibly. This is Brie. Oh, that's me, by the way. Can you see it standing in the middle? I think it's a likeness. All right, let's go straight to these. These are the ones we always think of. The Lord of the Rings, published between 54 and 55, late 55. Oh, that was 56, anyway. And then the Lord of the Rings, second edition in 1965. Oops, we already have a problem. What happened in the second edition? The reason for the second edition of The Lord of the Rings was not Tolkien's intense desire to correct anything. It was the desire from Tolkien and his publishers to avoid the pirate copies that had been released in the United States. And so what he does change a number of things, not a lot, in order to have people by the real versions. Right? Of course, this causes the problem with what the source is because some things were in fact changed. And by the way, it's not even as bad as what was changed from The Hobbit. As if you're familiar with The Hobbit's textual history at all, there's a crucial moment in The Hobbit which informs The Lord of the Rings directly where Bilbo finds the ring and has the riddle contest with Gollum. If you've seen the recent movie, you will have seen that in person. Real footage of what happened. And, but what happened was Tolkien never liked the original version. So in order, once he realized he was going to write The Lord of the Rings, in order to make the thing work, he had to change the original version of that story. So already in a problem with textual history. And if that weren't enough of a problem, Tolkien didn't write just these things. He wrote The Hobbit. And by the way, the bold highlighted ones are simply the, generally speaking, the most important ones. The things, the ones that people know about or refer to often or can find all of that. All of these other texts were, in fact, related to his world of Middle Earth, every single one. And they're summarized in a number of different areas. You can find different versions of them. And then we have Christopher Tolkien, who is JRR's son, who is probably the most negative person you could imagine about people paying attention to his father's work. What he did do, however, is publish a lot of the stuff posthumously. I can't even imagine his father liking that, but you know, whatever. The first one was The Silmarillion, which is not licensed by Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson has the license only to, well, he now is The Hobbit. But at the time of the movie, The Lord of the Rings, he had The Lord of the Rings texts themselves only. And that included all the stuff, all the appendices at the end from which he drew. But a lot of the appendices originated in the Silmarillion cycle. So there's textual problems there as well. The bunch of more, I'm not gonna go through them all, but they're there. And if you're not finished reading Tolkien stuff and his work on Middle Earth, there's this little collection. None of these are short, by the way. And these go through, this is Christopher Tolkien, going through the text, explaining things. They're mostly scholarly, in the sense of explaining the sources, up to the peoples of Middle Earth. And in the middle of that, Christopher Tolkien published these four volumes, which is a history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. And this matters for a number of reasons. First of all, if you ever teach a course in composition where it's about and all about creative writing, use these, because it outlines an enormous, great, exacting, sometimes stunningly dull detail, how the writing changed from the very first days until the time it was published. The very first volume is especially interesting, because what's clear from the beginning is that Tolkien had no idea where the story was going. None. He started writing before he knew it was going to happen, and it becomes good. And there's some really fascinating insights as to when the story actually changed. Of course, what this does, if you're an adaptation scholar, is do what adaptations themselves do, is that once you've watched the film, The Lord of the Rings, it's probably impossible to go back and read the books, if you had read them before, and remember what you thought the characters looked like, what you thought they sounded like, what you thought the interactions were, but especially the looks of them. Well, this makes it even worse, because Aragorn, the mighty future king of Gondor, started off in The Return of the Shadow as a hobbit who wore wooden shoes, because he'd been tortured. Well, I can't go back and read about Aragorn and the mighty without seeing this relatively ridiculous sort of idea. And this happens throughout, right? You just mystified with how this happened. You also become mystified at how he ever decided what their names were going to be, because until the final copy that was created, very close to when it was, Frodo was known as Bingo, a rather unfortunate choice of names, and Aragorn was known as Trotter, not Strider. And Trotter and Bingo together do not have the same connotations to me at Frodo. But anyway, and it goes all the way through to the very end, when you actually see Tolkien becoming more sure of what he was doing, but there are changes and changes all the way through. What this also does, and we'll get into a little bit later about what Christopher Tolkien was actually doing with these things, and in some cases what he was looking at is the original pages and in effect trying to read underneath the pencil or the pen markings. So the whole idea of the palimpsest comes into play here as well. All right, there's the fellowship. You get to meet them several times in this game. I'm gonna talk about that in a minute too. Well, we can end up with the film adaptations. You know about these. And of course, the question is, what's the source that Jackson used? And we know he used the novels. We know he used the appendices at the end of the novels was just plain thing. We know he used the prologue and the introduction. And we also know that he dipped into the material that he had a license for. And he's mentioned it several times. He lays it all out, of course, in a series of appendices of his own because knowing that Tolkien people apparently read appendices, he decides to create extended versions which have extensive interviews, extensive documentaries about how the thing was put together, extensive justifications for what they did in order to satisfy the people like me who went in expecting a faithful release, if you will. And we get the fidelity in a bet. But there's also the theatrical releases versus the extended editions. And those of you who've picked up these things know that it was a shorter version that I got released in the movies which didn't stop people from being in agony because they had to go to the washroom before it was over. And then it just got lengthened because what he had done, unlike most filmmakers, was film things from the beginning that were not to be included in the theatrical release and they would go on the final one. So my source for studying the Jackson films is the extended editions, partly because they annoy me less. Right? I'm not gonna argue, I'm not gonna deny that I understand, and we're gonna talk about this in a minute, that adaptation studies has real problems with people who look for the movie to be like the book. And that's what I did when I went into this. So it's what, and I do that in some of the other cases as well. So we'll get into that discussion as well. And then to all the special features. We've just started this cycle. I wasn't gonna include this slide except, oh, this should be 2012, not 2002. And we're gonna have a Hobbit movie. Every year we had one last year. There's two more to come. Anybody utterly bewildered how we could have three Hobbit movies? Yeah. I mean, if the Lord of the Rings was three movies, shouldn't the Hobbit have been an eight minute documentary? You know, just a little short to come at the beginning. Or, you know, conversely, if the Hobbit is three full length movies, the Lord of the Rings should have been 12, 27? I'm not quite sure. But we do know that Tolkien is doing, or Jackson is doing, is again revisiting all the textual material at the end of the books. So he's going to be bringing apparently a lot of that into play. And that's where the legendarium, which it's called, comes in. What we don't know is whether he's managed to get licenses for any of the other stuff that Tolkien published. I was trying to find out, I don't think so. And then we have the game adaptation that I'm talking about. There have been lots of games on the Lord of the Rings, tons of them. But the only one I'm working with is the online multiplayer game called The Lord of the Rings Online. It's a subscription based game. Link is free to play now. And if you would want to get up and see how it works, and if you're having trouble defeating some monsters, email me, I'll get online with you. I'm at level 85, right? And I am now renowned in Middle Earth for being able to kill orcs from horseback. You can't get there until about level 80. So I've gone all the way through. I'm waiting for the next expansion. Just call me. So all of what happens is it'll come into your area and I'll just tell you to stay out of the way because you're going to get killed. I'm not. But you'll get the points for wiping out the monsters, okay? That's called, of course, power leveling as anybody in the hobby knows. It's up to the writers of Rohan and it's only gone as far as probably part of the two towers and it's gonna keep going until probably well after I'm deceased, as far as I can tell. So what is the source of the films? Well, one way is what Jackson has the rights to. That's obvious. The source of the games is what Turbine has the rights to. And by the way, they only have the rights to the books as well. But the other parts of the source is what Jackson had done before. This does come into play in some of the commentary about the Lord of the Rings because what Jackson seems to have been relatively obsessed with is monsters. And you can see when you watch the Lord of the Rings movies that he really, really liked monsters and ugly things. To the point where in the Return of the King, you could argue that it becomes objectionable because the ugliness becomes deformity. But then it's objectionable in other ways anyway. So I don't think he was too worried about that. And what Turbine had done before, and this is where I come into play here, because they're big games before were both multiplayer online games. One called Asheron's Call, which one in versions one and two. And the other one was Dungeons and Dragons online. And a little bit about Dungeons and Dragons after I have a drink. The great source of all role-playing games is Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons came from the war game community. It was basically a bunch of battle games, tactical battle games. Dungeons and Dragons online is a long time attempt by publishers to move the Dungeons and Dragons physical role-playing game, paper and pencil role-playing game onto computer systems. There was a lot of things lost when they did that, but what they did manage to do is retain a number of very formal features of the role-playing community. The formal features are one you level. It's all based on leveling. As you level, your characteristics increase, or I shouldn't say that, your skills increase, the kinds of weapons you get better, the kinds of armor gets better. Although it's rather curious that I played one female character in the Lord of the Rings online, part of the whole ethos of the fantasy role-playing market is that men are dressed in huge bits of pieces of armor. They're built like trucks. Women are scantily attired. And it seemed to be that as I went forward, the better I got as a character, the skimpier my outfits got, but they had higher armor ratings. I had the most armored bra ever. And it could just take off. Nothing got through that, including the rest of the body. I find that amazing. All right, so the Dungeons and the Dragon has a number of formal properties. The one it was missing for a number of years before online communities became prevalent was the role-playing aspect where we all got together across the table and played and ate chips all day. Online, you do this. You form what are called guilds and fellowships and all those things in order to beat up things together. In some games, it's crucial. It's becoming less and less crucial as we move along in the hobby because not many people want to play with other people anymore, it seems. It just doesn't happen that way. Nick and I were talking about that last night. The idea of, you know, I will go and play a multiplayer online game solo. The fact that I can do so means that they've forgotten what multiplayer online game means. But, you know, you can because they realize that we just don't, a lot of us just don't have time to do that anymore. All right. What is being adapted? From Thomas Leach, given the myriad differences not only between literary and cinematic texts but between successive adaptations of a given literary text and for that matter, between different versions of a given story in the same medium, what exactly is it that film adaptations adapt or are supposed to adapt? And this is a big question in film adaptation work. What are you actually trying to make happen in an adaptation? They do it a lot, obviously, so they should know. And filmmakers do know. Number one, and the one that keeps being harkened to in adaptation work is the story. But it's not all the story. Very, very few, if any, adaptations contain the entire story. So it's a selective story. Well, if I'm an author and you go and decide which part of my story is worth putting on screen, which part isn't, I'm gonna tell you it's not the story. It's part of the story. That's the one thing that comes up. Linda Hutchins talks about themes, characters, duration to focalization. Where does the story come from? By the way, it's not normally part of a game's issue because mostly through games, we, they're focalized through us, the player. But movies, of course, can shift back and forth. They can be first person. They can be multiple third person and all that sort of thing. Westbrook's comment I thought was quite fun. People are, and he was actually referring here to my fair lady, when they're trying to adapt Britishness. And there are ways to do Britishness. We all know what they are, I think, because we've watched British movies and they're supposed to be British. Well, the reason this became interesting for me, I think it's funny for one thing. But the other thing is that in both cases of two very popular adaptations, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the actors were intentionally chosen, well, because they weren't American. They were British, right? And so, they are working on adapting that. It doesn't happen in the game. The spirit, this term came up early in adaptation studies with George Bluestone, and it just keeps coming up. The notion of the spirit. What is the spirit of the movie, of the book? What's the spirit of the Charles Dickens book? What's the spirit of a Jane Austen book? And nobody defines it. They say, this is what you should try to capture when you're making a movie. Now, as a Jane Austen fan, I think I know what the spirit is, but you don't have to be a fan of a book to make a movie about it. In fact, there's one person I know, former student who went to write a screenplay was told when the director found him reading the novel, and told him, David, you have a choice. You can either write the screenplay or read the novel. You can't do both. So, he didn't care what the original story was about, but this notion of the spirit is one that keeps coming up. And certainly, Jackson and his team were trying to do that. And in their own way, in different ways, the producers of The Lord of the Rings online are definitely trying to do that. We'll see how. Middle Earth and its things. Anybody go to the tour that went around of the paraphernalia from The Lord of the Rings movies? Anybody go there? I did. It was research. I got there. But they showed you all the stuff that they'd created. And most of the stuff you didn't even see in the movie. But they had these very carefully crafted letters, documents, you know, dishes, and of course, swords and armor. They had real sword makers, real armor makers there to make sure this stuff was authentic. Because we all know that what JR Tolkien did was do a lot of sword building and armor creation. I don't know what's authentic too, although medieval times, I guess, that kind of thing. And the other thing you are trying to adapt, and this has become interesting later on is audience expectation. What's to be adapted in the game? The story. We do it through a series of epic quests which we'll come to in a minute. Themes, yep, characters, yep, they're all there. They don't do anything, but they're there. Duration, time becomes a big problem in the game. I'll get to that. Focalization does not take place. The spirit of the game is there primarily in the creation of the world. We'll talk about that when we get to the bottom of this slide. Audience expectation, which is in game mechanics, game genre, at least as I will call it, for this particular purpose, which is what I call the retail genre, which is the stuff you find on the signs in your store shelf and game environments, especally, especally, espiically. I added that word last night, how can you tell? The hetero-cosm, the places of Middle Earth. So I got a bit on Hutchins look at this to begin with. All right, from Linda Hutchins theory of adaptation, Nintendo's 3D world of Zelda has been described as a highly intricate environment. Sorry, I didn't want to break this. With an awesome cast of characters, a complicated economics, a broad range of landscapes and indoor scenarios, and an elaborated chemistry, biology, geology, and ecology, so that its world can almost be studied like an alternate version of nature. Similarly, Disney World visitors who go on the Aladdin ride can enter and physically navigate a universe originally presented as a linear experience through film. What gets adapted here is a hetero-cosm, literally an other world or cosmos, complete, of course, with the stuff of story, settings, characters, events, and situations. To be more precise, it is the res extensa to use Descartes terminology of that world, its material physical dimension, which is transposed and then experienced through multi-sensorial interactivity. The hetero-cosm possesses what theorists call truth of coherence. Here, plausibility and consistency of movement and graphics within the context of the game. Just as do narrated and performed worlds, but this world also has a particular kind of truth of correspondence, not to any real world, but to the universe of a particular adapted text. That's the hetero-cosm. I'm gonna go back and forth to this concept because this is the big thing that we see adapted in Lord of the Rings Online. They can't do much with characters. You put them there, they have their names, we meet Elrond, we meet the members of the fellowship, we meet Gandalf, we meet everybody you can imagine and more to talk about how Turbine expands that experience, but really it's about the world. The reason I know that people play the Lord of the Rings Online is because it takes place in Middle Earth. They want to go and see the places. They want to see what these people imagine as being part of Rivendell, part of Lachlorien and then the other places in that world that you really don't see much in any other place. And this fits in well with Amhachan's comments on the hetero-cosm. So we'll go back to that. Prode on Sam and the Boat. The Ring, by the way, means you gotta click on them. There's a quest there, which is good. Because the one thing that multiplayer online games have taken away from you forever because of hacks to World of Warcraft is actual discovery. You just have to go and find things in these games. Now they have elaborate maps that take you right there. So it goes, you know, go find Frodo. And by the way, he's right there. Even an idiot can get there with a system. So Albert Cran and Dennis Kutchen. Adaptors cannot transpose or transfer a novel to the screen. They must interpret, reworking the precursor text and choosing the various meanings and sensation they find most compelling. Then imagine scenes, characters, elements, et cetera, that match their interpretation. So I bring this idea up mostly because where adaptation studies is moving increasingly is towards the study of intertextuality, not towards the study of fidelity. And the idea is here that the adaptation becomes a hybrid. They become a mutually self-supporting set of texts with the source. And it ideally is mutually self-supporting because as you're watching the adaptation of a text you know well, or so the theory goes, you're constantly bringing into it elements of the source, whether or not you like them. And then when you go back to the source, you're going to be bringing back to the reading of the source or the viewing of the source, whether the source happened to be elements of the adaptation you just experienced. And they're mutually self-supporting. Now, when adaptations for studies first started, a lot of that became all about what did the filmmaker do right or wrong? Later, as you would expect, it became more about look, how can we judge these things or if not judge them, at least analyze them on their own terms and of their own accord. I'm going to have the problems with fidelity studies. But before we do that, how are we doing here? Hmm, I was going to show you some scenes from a movie, but you can go watch it if we don't have time to actually watch them. But I'm going to show you a couple of things. One is, I didn't want to show you anything that I thought was just plain stupid. Because that would have taken too long. There's a lot of them, I think. But there were a couple of really interesting choices that Jackson made. And for those of you, how many of you know the books and the films reasonably well? How many of you have no knowledge of these things whatsoever? Have never heard of them? Okay, so this is the time to kind of nod off a bit, if you haven't already. There's a moment when, at the bridge of Khazadoum and Maurya, Gandalf confronts the Balrog. Balrog is this big, fiery, old thing. It comes from an earlier age. And in the books, what happens is that Gandalf loses the battle, kind of wins. He breaks the bridge, the Balrog falls. The Balrog, he has this whip with him, fiery whip, because we all want one of those, and latches it on to Gandalf's leg and pulls him off the bridge. And as Gandalf is being pulled off the bridge, literally he screams fly you fools and then he disappears. He dies. He comes back, but he's dead. In the movies, what Jackson does is actually have Gandalf latch on to the ledge, onto the bridge itself, because in movies you can do that. Have you ever noticed that? No matter how far you fall in the movie, you will find a handhold somewhere. It doesn't matter that you've fallen 25 feet and your fingers should break completely, you're still on there. Even if they're slippery and blood covered, you're gonna manage to make it. But what Jackson does is have Gandalf, the whip from the Balrog is no longer on his leg and he lets go. Which, from an adaptation standpoint, works, except I'm not sure what the purpose is, but it really means that Gandalf, in effect, commits suicide rather than is killed, which changes the whole nature of the resurrection later, I think. I was always going to show you a scene that happens as faithfully as I can imagine from book to film to game. And this is a very simple one where the Fellowship of the Ring leaves Rivendell and starts a big quest. And in all cases, it's, well, it's done a little bit differently. It's mostly a matter of just watching them go. And in the game, you get to do that, which is really kind of silly because you can't do anything about it. You have to just wait through it. It takes about 15 minutes and you're kind of waiting. Can you people just go? Now, the funny part in the game is that even though the Hobbits and the Fellowship have left Rivendell, you can go back to Rivendell later and they'll still be there. And you can go back again and they'll still be there. So from a standpoint of the duration, the chronology and the time, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Okay, I'm gonna go through a few things quickly here. Adaptation studies and fidelity. Right. You're gonna stop me soon, aren't you, Brett? Okay. Okay, I'll just go through this really fast. How's that? Cases popular or venerated sources. I wanted to talk a bit about adaptations of the Bible, but that's kind of a heavy topic. So I'm gonna go on to stuff that I've read more than the Bible, like Gone With The Wind. Yeah, well it's not true actually, but you know. Gone With The Wind has a great case study for adaptation studies because even at the very beginning when they were making, when David O'Sullivan was making the movie, he was keenly aware of how if he did anything wrong, he might be destroyed. Even to the point where he had this long, long wait until he found who was going to play Scarlet O'Hara. And if you wanna have some fun, read about that and how he managed to manipulate the press in order, because you know, things have changed so much, right? He managed to manipulate the press into making this a big, big story. He knew Clark Gable was gonna play Rhett Butler because there was nobody else who could, but he didn't know. And he went through every major star in Hollywood to find out who should play Scarlet O'Hara. Generally speaking, people from the Southern U.S. wanted a Southern woman, right, seems to make sense. So he did the only expected thing and take somebody English. I guess he wanted to display Britishness or something, but then he had to learn some kind of an accent which apparently wasn't all that bad. But Vivian Lee was brought aboard and there was a great deal of uproar about it. But this is the kind of thing. When you get a popular text, right? The notion of the fact that we shouldn't do fidelity studies, which is what a lot of adaptations work is about or has been about for the last 10 years, disappears completely. In the Harry Potter sequence, right? People went to the Harry Potter movies after having been just rabid consumers of the books and they knew what they wanted. One argument in adaptation studies scholarship is that the first Harry Potter films, the first two, were far too faithful and they suffered as a result, which I understand and I can even agree with, except that my daughter, who was a Harry Potter fanatic back then, watched the first one and refused to go to any of the others because most of the stuff that they had in there, she didn't like and they left out all the stuff she cared about. So what happens to the argument about excessive fidelity, which Tom Sleach makes in his book, Film Adaptation and Discontents? Twilight, I can't comment on. I put it in there because it was another major, major success where people were lining up to get it and they were expecting fidelity. What they got was a really kind of bizarre story of the stars. But I kind of stopped reading Twilight after the first book and I couldn't get myself back to it. It's a little bit what happened to me with Grey's Anatomy. I watched the first season and when the second one started, I sat down and said, I just can't. I just can't do it. Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, of course. These are the taxonomies of adaptation types we try to go through, but I'm not going to. If you want to hear about them, ask me later. The different kinds of adaptations, if you will. And then I'm going to skip ahead because it's late to the very end. Totally got a lot. This is the Epic Quest idea, how Turbine expands the story of the Lord of the Rings. They take the very first part and chop it into a number of stories that do not occur anywhere in Tolkien, but they keep expanding on the world in relative, some of them do. Some of these do appear in very, very limited fashion, sometimes only a sentence in Tolkien's works, but they do expand these. I'll show you the expansion of the place. This is an example, the Mines of Moria, which is an important chapter in the Lord of the Rings books, except it only takes about two days for the Fellowship to get through. There's tons of stuff happening here. There's entire communities, towns, little cities. This is the place that was before the books actually, before the time sequence in the books was basically destroyed. A place called Forochel, which is in the north, which only appears in a very short segment in the books and Turbine expands these things dramatically. All right, they expand the characters, people you never hear of or you just barely hear of in the books, get expanded and so forth. I'm gonna end with a very short comment on the notion of paratext, which I think is at play here significantly. Actually, I better not go through this. This is too long. But essentially, what I'm arguing is that in the game in particular, I think what happens is that the source material becomes paratextual. Essentially, the source, no long, I don't know anybody who won't play the Lord of the Rings game because it's not like they thought the books were. I do know people who are upside of the movies. I know people who like the movies better than the books, by the way. But I also know people who are, the commentary is always, does it do this the way it's supposed to? Nobody I've seen playing the game thinks about that at all. I think what happens is that the source material, as you get more and more immersed in the game, simply becomes something that's surrounding the game, which I paratextual rather than anything else, which is kind of a curious thing for a source of this, a popular source to do. And the other point I make is the expectations that people have when they bought this. This is a AAA game in the MMO, the multiplayer online genre. They have formal characteristics that people wanted. It was designed and announced and sold as an MMO. It was supposed to compete with World of Warcraft. That's why it's the way it is. So the expectations of this bookstore genre, if you will, dictated precisely how the game was going to differ, how it was going to be adapted from the books. Basically, the formula that Turbine decided on was Tolkien fandom, knowledgeable and conservative, plus MMO fandom, equally knowledgeable and conservative about their MMOs equals a lot of bucks. But the gut was not quite as enthusiastic as they were hoping for. All right, I have a summary that goes into my basic take on it, which is that I understand that adaptation studies is all about rejecting fidelity studies. Increasingly, people are coming back to fidelity studies, but they're doing it in part for the same reason I am, because as much as I understand that, I much understand that the adaptation is a hybrid. When you're dealing with a story I care about, I simply don't give a damn. I want it to be the story I wanted. I want fidelity, and I'm not alone in that. And with popular works, that's what we get are a lot of people who want strict fidelity, which is impossible, but they want it anyway. And that's the phenomenon we need to study more. Thank you.