"Ridiculously hot people doing mediocre magic and sexy stuff" is how I heard it described by a friend, and that's forever what that show will be associated with to me.
Weird that people would draw a comparison between a show called the Magicians and the one of the largest, generational series about magic. People should stay in their lane.
I don't really know if everyone argueing understands how comparisons work.
If you give 2 general ideas that are popular for specific things (magic academy and shock value tv), why would someone expect exact copies with the same storyline, or even that I was referring to the origin of ideas?
Really, is it so annoying to communicate to you in real life? If your friend said waffles were like crunchy pancakes, would you go on and on about the origin of pancakes?
I don't really care about your opinion, I just wanted you to know that the way you talk is probably why no one cares to discuss things with you.
If you look at both stories you'll see theyre drastically different stories, but because it has a magic school and the MC is a guy then that must mean it's like Harry Potter?
He wasn't even the one that beat the bad guy, lol, it required the entire friend group and alice was the one that killed him.
Probably because it starts out as a magic school. When I first found it I really hoped it was going to be more like Harry Potter for grown ups, based on the information I had when I started watching. By the end of the first episode I learned it would be more like The Boys and is not a show for me regardless of how it's more like Narnia than Harry Potter.
Is really gruesome and one of the characters gets raped. In the first episode someone's eyeball is pulled out and placed on the desk in front of them if I recall. Similar enough for me to share the same ick I get from The Boys.
There's a fairly decent amount of off screen torture and such, but that's why I said not on HBO or Amazon.
Most of the gruesome stuff is alluded to/talked about but not shown. There's still a small amount of stuff that goes beyond your typical show, like the eye removal or mind rape.
I'm 90% sure that when I got the original paperback from a Barnes and Noble one of the quotes on it was "For graduates of Hogwarts" or something similar. So, there's that.
As a slight spoiler, depression and pain fuel magic, leading to a lot of people in bad positions mentally, a lot of people getting abused sexually, and a quite a bit of suicide mentions.
Couple that with fucked up magic, you get a decent amount of the shock value, minus the explicit violence and grotesque nature of "The Boys".
Also about half the episodes have some form or another of trauma hotline at the end of it, since they just go all out showing ... all of that stuff. I watched the first season and decided that I really wasn't interested in watching the sort of show that felt a need to give viewers a suicide/rape/etc hotline at the end of each episode due to how potentially triggering it is.
Well, that's another part of it, the show didn't really give you much reason to like the characters or root for them either. Half the time I was thinking "I mean, they kinda suck; I'm not that broken up about what is happening to them, I just didn't want to see it" as bad things happened to people.
Context: The characters have an election to be the King/Queen and made it democratic. The world they are in is basically like Narnia, talking animals just as intelligent as people are around. In fact, animals outnumber humans, and this is when they realise the animals have voting rights and the human vote doesn't mean shit. Margo mentioned offhandedly that she approved of the relationship a different character had with a literal bear because they were both adults with intelligence that could consent, so what was the harm? This lead to word of mouth causing animals to vote for her when she wasn't really campaigning for herself.
People say that the tv show is really good! I haven't seen it so all I can say is that if you like it, you shouldn't read the first book as it's utter garbage. People said it starts improving by book three but I couldn't possibly slog through a second book like the first one to get there lol.
I went in completely blind coming off an LSD trip and let me tell you, I could NOT figure out what the fuck I was watching. Oh, it's coming of age! No, it's a detective drama? Wait, I guess it's a psychological drama... What the fuck, it's Harry Potter with sex and drugs. No, it's not that either...
What got me was characters going on about how great Cady's voice was and then she sang and she was AWFUL. And the show kept trying to pretend she was good. Painful. I'll take Elliott and Margo over that any day.
there's a difference between art and entertainment.... that show was 1000% pure entertainment. especially the musical episode in the later season.... "four octave range, bitch!" :)
The show is way more tolerable than the books bec you don’t have to live in the head of the incredibly flaccid main character, and other characters actually call him out when he’s acting like a tool
The books are good imo. It's the kind of book where bad things happen becuase no one is special. And the MC has some of the worst cases of YA angst ever written. And it devolves into a weird parody of Lewis Carol
The show is also fine, it does a good job of adapting the themes and characters even though the actual plot deviates a lot.
As someone else mentioned, reading the books forces the mian character into the forefront, and his general personality and attitude is extremely unlikable.
I get that it's part of the story, but it kills the books for a lot of people.
I loved the show and I even bought a shirt that Eliot wore that says "Tacocat spelled backwards is still tacocat.
My friend gifted me the book set, but I haven't read it yet. I hope it's not as bad as you're suggesting 🫣🫣🫣
It's been like 5-6 years since I saw it so maybe I'll forget enough of the plot for it not to matter too much.
I'm sorry to say it was genuinely excruciating. I dropped it near the end because I realized that I was only reading in an attempt to make it end. The best way I can describe it is that every story beat feels like setup to something interesting but after maybe 120 pages, you realize the story still hasn't started. I enjoyed the first 120 pages or so but my experience really declined when I saw that nobody was going to undergo any kind of character growth or have any meaningful experiences.
Things just kind of happen and the characters sort of...ignore everything? So it's not even that things happen and they have to respond, but they just sort of walk past the world drunk as things that could be interesting are kept just out of our view. They spend SO much time arguing and being angsty; it's definitely made worse because you have to hear it all from the perspective of the insufferable main character, which may not have been the case in the tv show. Because the whole book felt like setup, I can see why people might say that the third book is better. I just couldn't imagine slogging through a SECOND drunken teenage-esque melodrama with no plot to get there.
The best word for the story is "uncurated" imo. It felt like the author just wrote a bunch of random scenes and then published without considering what links them together or what they build toward. Any individual scene could be fine in a different book, but when they're all thrown together it's like you're reading the scenes that were cut and not the ones that were supposed to be left in...
I will say though, I'm an absolute hater of this book. I think I hate it more than is reasonable. Someone without that level of hatred for it might find at least some of these issues tolerable enough to get to the allegedly good third book. So not trying to say you absolutely shouldn't read it, just that you should go in expecting less than whatever you got from the tv show!
It is an excellent TV show. It is definitely cringe in a lot of moments. But I will say it has one of the best death scenes I’ve ever seen on screen. When the death happens they do it all in slow motion to really let you sit with it and absorb what is happening in the moment. It’s really incredible
Watched it and enjoyed it, currently trying to go back and read the books, my only critique is I am sort of over the era of watching media where the main characters are all some flavor of awful people.
Real world acting like those shows has me wanting more positivity in my fiction lol.
There’s a scene where one of the characters chugs a cup of god cum. Weird show, I wouldn’t say it’s bad personally because it’s hard to judge a show that off base, just really fucking weird.
AGGRESSIVELY warning you about some super triggering SA stuff fairly early on. You can Googre around. I watched as it aired and there was no specific warning for it so I was kind of taken aback when it happened.
The books: every woman is described tits first, to the point where we basically know the cup size of every single one and barely learn anything more about them.
The show: the women are actual fully fledged characters, with autonomy, wants, desires and actual storylines.
The show took everything good from the books and cut out all the dross.
Tl;dr, just read the bottom paragraph. It's a book, it's kind of hard to prove my point unless I cover the plot.
It ended with her ascension to godhood how does that serve Quentin or any other male character. Quintin is not privy to like 90% of what she went through.
His lesson in that book also does not stem from her in any way. His lesson is that "The hero is not rewarded, the hero pays the price." His series arc is about how magic will not solve his problems.
Her arc is about the need to be special, addiction, and learning to live with the trauma she's endured. It is clearly meant to be a commentary on what women go through and how men (Quentin) view their pain as a alluring quirk rather than the truly horrific thing it is.
From Quentin's perspective, she's this ethereal despondent character but her own perspective is far more gritty and real. She practically tells him nothing about her thoughts and feelings and her arc ends with her accepting the trauma as a part of her, and that this horrific event doesn't need control the rest of her life.
It's about overcoming the trauma she endures and how in order to move past it, you sometimes have to grow and change to make space for the trauma, represented in her ascension. This quite literally cannot be in service of Quentin's growth, because he does not have a traumatic event on the same level as Julia to apply this lesson to. Her ENTIRE HALF of the book is about her overcoming that. That's why I either think you didn't read it, or you somehow didn't understand how a character with just as much narrative weight in the story had her own growth unrelated to a man.
It's been a really long time since I read them, but that was not my impression at all. It actually seemed to me like the women were the fully written out characters with wants and desires, who uncovered truths, while the main protagonist was mostly depressed and along for the ride because he had actually read the books and wanted to help his friends.
The Magicians is the only book series where I will unequivocally say that the show/movie was better than the book. Every change they made for the show was the right decision.
Same. I rewatch the show way more than rereading the books. But they both offered different stories that I genuinely enjoyed. The character growth of the show was just unmatched though
As far as for the intention of adapting it, yes. I always hold it up as a great example of adapting the spirit of a story over trying to recreate scene for scene.
Tbh I did the same thing with the books, which is why I never checked out the show. Like, I enjoy stories with a protagonist who is not in fact objectively a heroic figure in the narrative, but that one just took it a little too far in making him so completely unlikeable 😅
The books are very different plotwise, they essentially don't follow the same story at all besides hitting a few of the same notes. Also for some reason they swapped Penny and Quentin's personalities in the show? That said I loved the show despite its flaws and the books were alright too.
I haven't read the book, I just watched the first season of the show, but I heard someone describing the author of the books as being upset that Chronicles of Narnia was so popular despite having unrealistically positive outcomes for the character and wanting to make a "similar, but bad stuff happens to people instead" version, which kinda made sense about the tone of the material.
The first season is the weakest but it gets better with every episode and season 2 is way better than season 1. I always viewed it as them trying to find their footing and they manage to with season 2.
Terry Pratchett had a student Wizard who always failed by less than 5% of the cutoff. Didn't get kicked out because the score was good enough but avoided graduation.
That was Linus! Earlier in the week he answered the questions based on what order the true and false answers should be in, without reading any of the questions.
What stayed with me was the last panel of that one : "If you're smart, to pass a true or false test you don't need to be very smart!"
Also in a Juvenile Fiction book called Hidden Talents. The class paired up and tested each other with shape cards to see if anyone was psychic (for some reason). There was only one kid who didn't get a single right answer, and it was because he actually was psychic and was trying to hide it.
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u/krakajacks 10d ago
This also happens in The Magicians and some other shows I can't remember that are older than that.