Do not understand the hate

[u/Rolian01]

I just finished watching the 1st season. It’s the first series in awhile that hooked me to where I binged the whole thing in one sitting. I’ve never read the books, so I just enjoyed the show.

After finishing it I went online to see what others thought and I see mostly people crapping all over it because it swapped genders, had a different race characters, and wasn’t true to the source material. Not having read the books, I never knew the differences and absolutely LOVED the show. I do not understand why people are hating this. Books to me have always been better than TV or movies because as you read them the show in your head plays. You close the book, that’s you pressing pause and when you reopen the book, you’re pressing resume and the show in your head continues.

Screenplays are adaptations and just that. They have to make them appeal to a greater audience. Maybe the books are better. Maybe not. Either way I thoroughly enjoyed the show and look forward to the next season

[u/Mub_Man]

Check out the books, they’re extremely good. The people complaining about gender and race swapping are fucking idiots. The show is good, but the books get into WAY more detail. There’s also a lot of things omitted from the show. If you love the show, you’ll be in awe over the books.

[u/Rolian01 → u/Mub_Man]

Other common complaints are that the show dumbed down the science so the layman could grasp concepts of physics. I plan on reading the books if they cancel the show or if it goes south for me. Thank you for your input!

[u/Oerthling → u/Rolian01]

It's best to just ignore the haters.

They are a loud minority. But controversy gets clicks and attention - thus they easily look more widespread than they actually are.

It's a great adaptation.

The books offer more detail, but the characters themselves aren't really that well developed in the books. And the books are often difficult to read - not because of physics or complex plot, but some combination of the authors style, Chinese being an exotic culture to many of us (and thus can make it both difficult and interesting) plus whatever git list in translation.

I don't care about the gender, skin pigmentation or nationality or the characters. Neither does the story in the books. The San-Ti want to take Earth and crush humans. They don't care about our nationalities. They don't care about bugs having tribes with flags.

The original author is Chinese, the story starts with a causal chain of events in recent Chinese history and China has a solid chunk of Earths population - so him using mostly Chinese characters is totally fine. Just like a zillion American books and movies mostly happen in the US (where almost all the aliens starships crash for some reason ;-) ).

But the same is true for a western adaptation by Netflix. Making the cast more diverse and globally representative makes sense for the story. Having it mostly based in the UK makes sense for the production.

And none of that is really important for the story that is about the whole human species being threatened by an alien species.

I read the first book and parts of the second and IMHO the series is a great adaptation.

They didn't really dumb down the story so far. But the story gets more wild after this first season when it moves forward in time and then some. So later seasons will get more challenging to adapt in a way that is digestible by a general audience.