What matters most in an Adaptation?

The ideal adaptation is faithful at least in spirit if not the details to what the original was, and also an entertaining and/or interesting piece of art on it's own.

There is of course a popular sentiment that if you can only be one of those then being the latter is far more important, regardless of the Fanboys who can't see the adaptation's innate value.  

I however can see the value in something that is the opposite.  

For example as someone who considers the main point of any dramatized medium to be the art of Acting, there are many scenes in certain books I'm a fan of I'd love to see performed by talented actors even if nothing else about the presentation of the product is at all entertaining or engaging to viewers not already into that source material.

There is one type of adaptation that is commonly viewed with the opposite priority, historical films.  You see I seem to be the only person who's willing to look at Historical films as simply adaptations where History is the source material.  The History Buffs YouTube channel will trash perfectly entertaining films for being "bad history" but praise the boring Gettysburg movie for being so ridiculously accurate that they brag about using actual Civil War re in-actors they didn't pay for their service, but to me the utterly uninspired performance by the actor playing Lee guarantees it can never qualify as entertaining.  Never mind how the Agora video shows he doesn't know History as well as he thinks he does.

The Patriot is not a history lesson and was never meant to be, it's basically a Comic Book Superhero movie set during the American Revolution.  If Mel Gibson's character at least had the same name as the person everyone says he's based on I'd understand all the nitpicking about his family and the slave or not status of the people working his plantation, but he doesn't, he's a fictional character inspired by more then one real person.  The movie is not pretending there was no slavery, it shows a slave being treated like disposable property by his owner and subjected to racism by one of the fellow protagonists.  (And all my points about The Patriot are somewhat also applicable to Braveheart).

Lots of our greatest purely fictional myths started as inaccurate depictions of History to the point where the real History is lost, from Troy to King Arthur.  Instead of acting like inaccurate films are the reason Americans don't understand history, just try educating people on the real history without being a pretentious prick about it who shames people for enjoying things.

Now to a slightly different topic.

There is something else I've noticed about the way some adaptations are critiqued by people that are way too invested in the source material to judge it fairly.  They often claim a certain Theme or Subtext or Moral is absent from the adaptation because of specific details they were looking for, that I absolutely got from that adaptation even though I watched it with no knowledge of the source material and no reason to expect it to be there.

One example is RikaDot's video on Higurashi, where he says the Anime's focusing too much on the Horror aspects caused it to totally lose the message about turning to your friends when you need help.  This is the most egregious example, I really don't get how anyone can watch the Higurashi Anime and not get that message from it.

There was also a YouTube video arguing that NONE of the Fate/ Anime successfully communicates that Shirou Emiya has a death wish because of his survivor guilt.  I kind of agree with the agenda of that video as it's kind of about justifying the use of inner monologue/first person narration which I do support.  But this aspect of Shirou's character I did absolutely get from the UFOTable Unlimited Blade Works Anime.

There is also how Dogasu's Backpack talks about the 4Kids Dub turning Mewtwo into a 1 Dimensional Villain, but how he describes the Japanese character is exactly how I always interpreted Mewtwo going off the 4Kids Dub alone.

This is why I prefer whenever possible to watch an adaptation with no prior investment in the source material.  If the original is better then I'm saving the better experience for last, but the originals are never the ones made less enjoyable because you saw the adaption first, even if I like the Adaptation more I can never truly dislike the thing responsible for the existence of the thing I love.

And most of the time returning to said Adaptation after I've learned more about what was changed doesn't hurt the experience.  There is often room to interpret into it whatever subtext actually was lost.  But there is one exception that happened to me fairly recently.

I watched the new Boogiepop and Others Anime with no real knowledge of what it was supposed to be going in and enjoyed it quite thoroughly.  But after watching Digibro's videos on it and the early 2000s Live Action movie I definitely saw what was missing as I tried to re-watch the first couple episodes.

Most disappointing to me now is the removal of most of what was going on with Naoko Kamikishiro.  I've repeatedly said when expressing my praise for the Polygamy of In Another World With My Smartphone that I now also want to see other kinds of plural relationships explicitly depicted positively in Anime not just a dude with multiple Waifus.  In the book and movie Naoko is engaging in Polyandry and she is NOT demonized or slut shammed for it, quite the contrary she is presented as the most morally virtuous character in the story, she is filled with Love.  Both Action Heroines of the story are described as having a "Messiah Complex", but Naoko is the one who is actually "Christ Like".

Nagi Kirima is also described as being Bifauxnen which definitely comes across in the LA Movie but not in this new Anime.  

I think the last 9 or so episodes of the Anime should hold up better since at that point I think it's more like 5 episodes per book rather then only 3.

These are some barely actually related to each other thoughts I wanted to share, hardly an in depth analysis of the subject.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.