I've decided that I've absolutely had it with people who continue to post about how bad they thought the Sozin's Comet book was. It's gotten to the point that I've decided to provide a few examples of just how untrustworthy adaptions can be, both for Avatar and a few other well known stories.
Avatar: The Burning Earth
This was a video game that was released several months ago. It was basically book 2 turned into a game. The graphics were terrible, the dialogue horrific, and most notably, the ending was changed - the final battle scene took place in a different place and ended in victory for Aang and Katara.
The Lord of the Rings
30 years or so ago, back when the Lord of the Rings was just a modestly successful fantasy series with a small but fanatically loyal fanbase (sound familiar?), a summary was published of the series. Entitled "The Battle of the Ring" it was basically just a 50 - 60 page summary of the story that managed to go ridiculously into detail with some parts of the story and was hopelessly vague on others. Characters like Golum and Sam were omitted entirely, things like battles and how frodo gets into Mordor were only given a couple of sentences at most by way of explanation, and the ending differed. Instead of destroying Sauron, throwing the ring into Mt Doom simply stripped him of his powers. The book then devoted a page to describing how Sauron was to be eternally locked away in some kind of spiritual prison. Fans of the series universally hailed the book as lame, not to mention stupid, since the books had already been around for several years. Who was the writer of this lame summary? J.R.R Tolkien himself, the author of Lord of the Rings the mystery of why Tolkien wrote a summary of his own work as bad as that went unexplained.
Years later, LOTR was graced with another adaption, this one epic. Still, as great as the LOTR movies were, it is worth noting that while most of the key events and endings were the same, many key plotlines were changed, charcters omitted, generally the things you need to do when you are converting 1600 pages of novel into 7 and a half hours of movie. Nevertheless, it had the effect of ensuring that people who had read the books (as I did) found it to be a very different story when retold.
Star Wars
Several months before Star Wars, episode III, Revenge of the Sith was due to be released in theaters, a novel by the same title was published. Revenge of the Sith, the novel, contained the same overall storyline and key events as the movie, but that was the only thing about the two that was similar. Dialouge, battles, several key events, and a number of other things were all completely re-written. Several events that never happened in the movie were created and inserted. In many ways the book was even better than the movie, but the point is that once again people who had read the book prior to watching the movie found a what can only be described as a different story entirely.
Harry Potter
As anyone who has both read the books and watched the movies knows, the first few movies were more or less exactly the same as the originals, as the series continued and the books got longer, more and more adaption was required.
Other Avatar
Sozins Comet is not alone in appearing in book form; there was a five page summary of the second half of the season 2 finale in an avatar book I picked up in a bookstore once. Barely explaining the main events, it was a sad attempt at storytelling that was so lame I almost cried.
The dictionary definition for "adaption" is this: "somthing that has been adjusted in order to suit an alternative purpose".
I have not read the Sozin's Comet book, but I did have a look at the opening pages, and somthing stood out to me:
It did not say "written" by David Bergantino, it said "adapted" by David Bergantino.
I am not saying that any of the major events in the book will be different to the actual show, I'm really just hoping this will shut up trolls like Truepanda.
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