[4Tran]

Originally Posted by Kanon

How does that not make sense? If a bad work is somehow turned into a good work by the anime staff, then the anime staff should be credited first. If the opposite happens -an originally good work getting a bad adapation- then the anime staff should be blamed. If the anime adaptation is faithful to the original work, then the original author should be credited first and foremost.

Even for a faithful adaptation, the only elements retained from the original work are the plot and characters. Everything else (including the dialogue) is the responsibility of the anime staff. It should be really obvious that there are lots of parts of writing in addition to this.

There are some rare cases where all of the dialogue is taken from the original work, but even there, an anime has to make trade-offs to retain it. And of course, the writer had to decide what portion to retain and what portion to eliminate.

Originally Posted by Kanon

And once again, I'm not saying we should credit only the original creators. That would be unfair. However, crediting the anime writer over the original writer is even more unfair imo, unless the writer made so much changes it can be considered a different work from the original.

Why would it be unfair unless everything was retained full-cloth? We praise musicians for good performances all the time, and we usually don't care who wrote their music. Most original creators have no creative input on their adapted anime save for a few very rare exceptions.

Originally Posted by Kanon

I think I have a decent grasp of what they do, but it's hard to know which of the director or writer has more influence on the adaptation.

This functions the same way for adapted works as it does for original ones. A show is a collaboration between many individuals, and all of them deserve credit for their work. In particular, the creative portions have to be well done for a show to be good.

Originally Posted by Kanon

Totoum brought up some very good examples. Plus, it's not rare for several writers to work together. That doesn't make it easy to know who to credit exactly, since I assume each team works differently. Only interviews can help us (it helped a lot for Fractale and Hanasaku Iroha, to keep this Okada related), but we don't always have access to that kind of information.

If you're really interested in apportioning individual accomplishment, you can look at what elements of a particular work contribute the most to its success and so on. It usually isn't that hard to have an idea of what the different positions were responsible for. Just look for clues like what episodes the series composer/story editor wrote, and how loose the plot is.

Take Black Rock Shooter TV as an example. What clips I've seen of this show feature some truly atrocious writing. Most of this is the fault of Okada Mari, but Yoshioka Shinobu was the director and he had the authority to veto the crazy things she came up with. And so, the result can only be so bad because both of them did a poor job.

Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo

Don't get me wrong - I adore the manga and it's Hourou Musuko at its finest, but Okada was faced with a manga that was already almost 100 chapters and told to try and make something decipherable out of it in 11 episodes. She made some very difficult decisions (like cutting out the entire elementary-school section, 33 chapters) except in flashback, and in doing so incurred the wrath of manga readers. But the end result was a really superb anime that captured the essence of the manga very well.

A high-level decision like this isn't solely made at the discretion of the writer - the director probably made the final call. However, how this story was executed was probably left to Okada Mari.

Originally Posted by Triple_R

Then why do we never hear about them?

It depends on what other show the writer was responsible for. To be fair, most directors don't get talked about as much as they deserve as well, and we almost never hear about most other creative staff like the sound director and so on. It would seem that this is more a problem of this forum than anything else.