On Movie Adaptions and Writing Fantasy

Honestly, I am a bit tired of the current trend of adapting any big YA fantasy novel (actually, series) into movies. I mean, first of all it's unoriginal and a safe bet to get money. Lord of the Rings was really popular, so they adapted Harry Potter, and then because of that you have Twilight and The Hunger Games and others to a lesser extent. They've got built-in fanbases who will pay money. But I sort of wonder what it does to the authors of the works, especially of the less-than-successful (not just commercially, but storytelling-wise) adaptions like The Golden Compass, City of Bones, Eragon, and Percy Jackson (which somehow managed to have its sequel made which I haven't seen, but it looks like they attempted to fix problems from the first one). Everyone just says the movie was bad and goes back to reading the books, and critics frown at Hollywood. As they rightly should. It's not that these books aren't worth adapting, although they may not be suited to the big screen, but they are just misread for more focus on special effects, etc. And often it depends on how much the studio cares about the story--LOTR, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games were more well cared for than some others.

An interlude here, as I wish to complain about journalism surrounding these things. I'm a huge children's/YA fan, but it's not just the sometimes condescending tone towards these fanbases that bothers me. (Then again, the tendency for some fanbases to get so focused on romance in terms of the physical attractiveness of actors does rather annoy me. As does those who expect movies to be just like books, because that's understandable but silly.) It's the comparisons. Twilight was the next Harry Potter and The Hunger Games was the next Twilight and now Divergent is the next Hunger Games. This is extraordinarily tiring because not only does it inspire people to think of the industry as churning out retreads, but it just dumbs it all down. The comparisons happened because of just one aspect of the titles in question (popularity, teenagers/love triangle, dystopia) and doesn't take into account the whole thing. I mean, I personally like Divergent more than The Hunger Games because I connected to it more (though I did think there was a bit too much romance, but at least it wasn't a love triangle). I like the concept better, and the fact that not everyone has to die allowed me to connect more to the characters. At any rate, the success of great leading female characters does make me cheer, though I do occasionally worry that the publicizing of romance degrades their actual characters a bit. At least The Hunger Game survived the shipping to become well-loved by members of both genders, and hopefully not just because of the violence.

So back to me and my own writing, which does happen to be fantasy. Most of my stories involve some sort of fantastical or science fiction concept. This does often happen because I think "Wouldn't it be cool..." but over time I have become a bit more sophisticated. I've realized that I use these concepts to explore things between characters that I imagined being hard to discover on Earth, and also I would be terrible at writing a traditional high school story, not having gone to a traditional high school myself. I admit to being a rather sheltered individual, so imagining going places and exploring them with people I want to know better form the basis of many of my stories--and the ones that haven't, I have taken my characters and really explored them based in some of my own experiences growing up. That is first and foremost what my books are about. The concepts and plots center around putting characters in certain positions.

But to the generalizing eye, that's not what I'm doing. I'm writing another children's/YA (seriously, it really is on the borderline between the two) fantasy trilogy. There would be a lot of cool stuff I would absolutely adore to see made into film. But I just am worried that those things will dominate, in both book descriptions and possible movie deals.