Quotes • Headscratchers • Playing With • Useful Notes • Analysis • Image Links • Haiku • Laconic |
---|
Whenever source material is adapted, changes will be made for whatever reason (budget, time constraints changing values, target audience). Inevitably, this can be a character. Sometimes even an important one.
Usually part of a Pragmatic Adaptation, Adapted Out can often overlap with Composite Character or even Demoted to Extra.
Of course it doesn't have to be a character. Sometime it can be part of the backstory, a plot line, or a location. Again, usually the result of a Pragmatic Adaptation.
Examples of Adapted Out include:
Anime
- When the British novel series Five Children and It had an anime Setting Update as Onegai Samia-don, the eldest daughter Althea did not appear. Instead, a girl named Anne who resembles her becomes the kids' next-door neighbor and a Love Interest for the eldest son Cyril/Sil.
Comic Books
- The Dalek Chronicles excluded the Doctor!
- Thanks to Executive Meddling, Skoodge and Tak can't be included in the Invader Zim comics.
- Since Command Sheperd is quite literally an OC Stand In, don't expect to see them in any media in the Mass Effect Expanded Universe.
- ROM (IDW) did away with Wraithworld, the planet having been destroyed by the Space Knights long before the series started. Subverted and mixed with Composite Character in Transformers: Unicron. The original Dire Wraith homeworld does technically still exist, it just has a new name: Unicron.
- Despite tons of DC cameos and characters from all over the mythos, Supergirl doesn't appear in Superman Red Son.
Fanfics
- Per Word of God, Steven *AU*niverse: Ask WhitePearl and Steven (almost!) anything disregards anything post Season 5, specifically Spinel.
- Much of Kara's supporting cast; James Olsen, J'onn J'onzz, Cat Grant; is excluded from The Girl Who Could Knock Out The Hulk. Brutally justified in Chapter 32 where Doctor Doom reveals that he abducted Kara from the Phantom Zone and dropped her on the MCU!Earth to take advantage of her heroic charisma.
Film
This trope lives here.
Animated
- Technically all adaptations do this, but Aladdin drops the Genie in the Ring.
Live-Action
- Mistress Death, Adam Warlock, Quasar, She-Hulk, Namor, Starfox, Mephisto (who is a light Composite Character with Ebony Maw), and every Elder of the Universe, bar the Collector, are absent from Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. That's not even half the characters who got hit with this.
- Uncle Ben does not even get a mention in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Per Word of God, this was done because this is the third Spider-Man reboot in a decade. Everyone knows the story now.
- In the Harry Potter films, several characters are dropped entirely (Ludo Bagman, Winky, Peeves), some were absent but later appeared (Charlie Weasley), and some had their early appearances but didn't get their later ones (Nearly-Headless Nick).
- Dobby did appear in the Chamber of Secrets film but was cut from Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, and Half-Blood Prince.
- Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets does away with humanity's mastery of Time Travel. It's really for the best given how convoluted the plot already was.
Live-Action TV
- Ten is missing from Arrow's Royal Flush Gang.
- Played with in Riverdale:
- Miss Grundy has seemingly become Younger and Hipper, and Hotter and Sexier, but it's soon revealed that the real Miss Grundy (the elderly music teacher) has been dead for years. The 30 year old on the show stole her identity to hide from her abusive ex-boyfriend.
- Chic, Betty's brother. He appears in the second season but he's soon revealed to be an imposter who knew the real Chic but the show is deliberately ambiguous on whether or not the real Chic is still alive. Season 3 reveals that he is.
- Wonder Woman and Green Lantern never put in appearance in Smallville.
Western Animation
- Avengers Assemble! drops the Soul Stone from the Infinity Stones' lineup... only for it to show up later on in the Shared Universe.
- Amusingly, its predecessor, The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, inverted this, having only the Soul Stone (albeit as just a tool used by Adam Warlock) and none of the others.
- Hal Jordan is notably absent as a founding member of the Justice League, an d the series has John Stewart instead. He does exist in this 'verse (or did, or will, we can't be sure of the specifics due to time travel) however.
- As a result of the concept being done to hell and back over the previous six years, Transformers Animated did away with Primus, the Thirteen Primes, and Unicron.
- When Hasbro made a finalized list of the Thirteen Primes, Logos Prime was cut from the roster. Of course most of the fandom had never heard of this character so there's no harm done.
- The Netflix adaptation of Trollhunters reimagines Jim's dad as a simple deadbeat who left his family. As a result, Uncle Jack is unlikely to appear.
- When GoLion was adapted for English audiences, Voltron cut out Sincline's mother likely due to the whole Oedipus Complex and the fact that Sincline being a Child by Rape isn't something one could really show on an American cartoon-like adaptation of Japanese anime back then. To be fair, she does appear in footage but the dialogue is completely altered to remove her connection to Daibazaal and Sincline, making her look like a random, if very beautiful, victim that begged for her and her fellow prisoners' lives, then was all but said to have been murdered for defying Zarkon..
- Several characters from GoLion and Voltron did not make it to Voltron: Legendary Defender. The biggest examples include Ryou Shirogane (Takashi/Shiro's younger brother), Romelle and Bandor's older brother Samson/Avok and their father the King of Heracles/Pollux, etc., Raible/Coran's wife Raiza/Leda and son Saint/Garret (and the cyborg/spy who took the son's place). Subverted with Hys/Nanny and Sincline's mother, since both of them sort-of made it, but with different identities: the first became Prince Lotor's Sadist Teacher of a governess, Dayak, and the second was the basis for his mother Haggar's younger and uncorrupted self, Queen Honerva.