The most active fandom around a property is often the one that disliked the adaptation

There is a short answer about adaptation disappointment and a useful one, and they are not the same. What follows is the useful one.

Everyone had already adapted it

Anyone who read a book has already cast it, staged it and imagined its locations, which is what reading involves. An adaptation therefore does not fill an empty space; it replaces something that already existed in a specific form for each reader. The replacement is public and permanent, since afterwards it becomes very difficult to picture the material any other way.

That is a genuine loss even when the adaptation is good, and it explains reactions that otherwise look disproportionate. The complaint is frequently about displacement rather than about quality, and the two get expressed identically.

Why disappointment generates activity

Being satisfied requires nothing further, since the thing you wanted now exists and can simply be enjoyed. Being disappointed requires explaining what went wrong, which means articulating what the material was and what it needed. That articulation is genuine critical work and it produces a great deal of writing, argument and comparison.

It also gives a community a shared project, which is a much stronger organising principle than shared approval. Communities built on disagreement are consequently more active and considerably more durable than ones built on satisfaction.

The corrective impulse

Dissatisfied communities frequently produce their own versions, whether as writing, recuts, illustration or extensive design work. This is not usually a serious attempt to replace the adaptation so much as a way of stating what was wanted. The corrective work often clarifies the disagreement better than the arguments do, since it has to make actual decisions.

It also reveals how much the objectors disagree with each other, which is generally more than they expected. That discovery is one of the more useful things such communities produce.

Fidelity is the wrong axis

Arguments about adaptation almost always organise around faithfulness, which is a poor measure of anything. A precisely faithful version can fail completely, since techniques that work on a page frequently do not work on screen.

On the call sheet, a substantially altered version can capture what the material was doing while changing nearly everything about how it does it. Communities usually know this and still reach for fidelity, because it is the only shared standard available.

Arguments improve considerably when participants specify what they wanted preserved rather than how much.

The second adaptation

Properties adapted more than once produce a different dynamic, since audiences can compare versions rather than compare a version to a memory. That tends to lower the temperature, because it becomes obvious that different choices produce different valid results. It also splits communities by which version they encountered first, which reintroduces the original problem in a new form.

By the middle of the season, the first version anyone sees continues to function as the reference regardless of chronology or general opinion. This is the same effect that governs cover versions, and it operates just as reliably here.

Attribution is difficult on collaborative work, and a credit is not the whole story.

Living with it

The healthiest communities treat the adaptation as one reading rather than as an authoritative version of the material. That is easier when the source remains available, which is why adaptation is much less threatening in print than in other directions.

Here is what the choice buys: it also helps to separate what a version got wrong from what it merely did differently, which requires deliberate effort. Communities that manage the separation stay interesting, and ones that do not tend to become repetitive quickly. The energy is real either way, and where it goes is largely a matter of the norms a community happens to have.

The takeaway

Communities organised around disappointment outlast the ones organised around approval.

Popularity and craft are two different measurements, and both of them are real.