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Changes to the Characters
- Abled in the Adaptation: Removing a character's disability.
- Adaptation Name Change: Changing a character's name.
- Dub Name Change: A foreign work changes the character's name.
- Adaptation Origin Connection: Changing a character's origin to tie in another character.
- Adaptation Personality Change
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Making a character more angst-ridden.
- Adaptational Badass: Making a character more impressive.
- Adaptational Comic Relief: Making a character funnier.
- Adaptational Heroism: Making a character more heroic.
- Adaptational Intelligence: Making a character significantly smarter.
- Adaptational Jerkass: Making a character more of a jerk.
- Adaptational Nationality: Changing a character's country of origin without necessarily pulling a Race Lift.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Making a character nicer.
- Adaptational Villainy: Making a character more evil.
- Adaptational Wimp: Making a character less impressive.
- Not as You Know Them: Completely changing a character's personality beyond recognition.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Making a character more attractive.
- Adaptational Curves: Changing a character's design to be more muscular or busty, which may or may not make them more fanservicey.
- Adaptational Ugliness: Making a character less attractive.
- Adaptation Dye-Job: Changing the colors of a character's hair or clothes.
- Movie Superheroes Wear Black: Superheroes wearing darker versions of their iconic outfits in movie adaptations.
- Adaptational Karma: Making a character suffer consequences for actions they ended up pulling a Karma Houdini for in a previous adaptation.
- Adaptational Modesty: Making a character's dress sense more modest, or toning down or cutting incidents involving nudity.
- Adaptational Sexuality: Changing a character's sexual orientation.
- Adaptational Species Change: Changing the species or breed of a character's pet.
- Adaptational Superpower Change: Changing a character's powers.
- Adapted Out: Removing an important character.
- Age Lift: Changing a character's age.
- Canon Foreigner: Inventing a new character out of whole cloth.
- God Created Canon Foreigner: One specifically created by the original creator of a franchise.
- Character Exaggeration: Turning a character into a caricature.
- Composite Character: Splicing multiple characters into one.
- Death by Adaptation: Killing off a character who survived in the original.
- Decomposite Character: Dividing one character's role among others.
- Early-Bird Cameo: A character makes a brief appearance before their supposed introduction.
- Everybody Hates Hades: Gods of Death and the Underworld portrayed as evil, regardless of the original myth.
- Everybody Loves Zeus: Gods of light and the heavens portrayed as good and pure, regardless of the original myth.
- Gender Flip: Changing a character's sex.
- Named by the Adaptation: Either a No Name Given character or a character addressed only by their profession or nickname gets one or a full name. Same goes for characters with Only One Name (given name or surname is optional).
- Promoted to Love Interest: Creating a romance between two characters who weren't romantically linked in the original.
- Race Lift: Changing a character's race.
- Related in the Adaptation: Self-explanatory.
- Sadly Mythcharacterized: Changing aspects of a mythological character.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Sparing a character who died in the original.
- Xenafication: Changing a docile character to be more action-oriented.
- You Don't Look Like You: Changing a character's appearance beyond recognition.
Changes to the Plot
- Adaptation Distillation: Paring down elements of the original in order to streamline the plot.
- Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Removing a key plot point without removing its effects.
- Adaptational Alternate Ending: Changing the ending of a story from the original.
- Adaptational Consent: A situation originally portrayed as consensual or nonconsensual in a particular work is altered when the work is adapted to a different medium.
- Adaptational Context Change: Changing the context of a line of dialogue.
- Adaptational Early Appearance: Things in adaptations appear earlier than they did in the original.
- Adaptation Inspiration: Creating a mostly new work with roots in the original.
- Compressed Adaptation: Combining two or more Story Arcs from the source material.
- Disneyfication: The adaptation is Lighter and Softer than its source work, with darker plot elements removed and some light-hearted comedy and/or musical elements added, to make it more suitable for younger audiences.
- Grimmification: A child-friendly story gets Darker and Edgier in the adaptation.
- In-Name-Only: An adaptation that's completely disconnected from the original.
- Not His Sled: Changing the plot twist.
- Sadly Mythtaken: Changing aspects of a culture's mythology.
Changes to the Setting
- Recycled In Space: Changing the setting to someplace more exotic.
- Ret Canon: Incorporating elements from a later adaptation into the original canon that it came from.
- Canon Immigrant: A character specifically created for an adaptation that was later incorporated within the source material.
- Setting Update: Changing the setting to someplace more familiar.
Miscellaneous SubTropes
- Cultural Translation: Replacing a reference in the original with a local equivalent.
- Dub-Induced Plot Hole: An error in translating a work into a foreign language that affects either or both the story consistency or/and the characters.
- Woolseyism: Replacing a reference in the original with something else.
Examples Not Belonging to a Sub-Trope:
Anime and Manga- The anime version of Maken-ki! only adapts parts of the manga in its first season and makes many changes to the main cast. Season 2 deviates from the manga altogether in favor of ramping up the fanservice.
- Winry is taller in the Fullmetal Alchemist anime (which ended before the manga did and has its own plot) than in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. Edward, in contrast, never hits a growth spurt like in the manga, so he's always short. In Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, Winry is taller than the eighteen-year old Edward while in the manga he grows several inches taller than her.
- In the Bokurano manga, Waku was a Chick Magnet. The anime changes it so that the only girls who came to his soccer games were the cheerleaders.
- The ending to the Wandering Son anime implies Takatsuki and Nitori will "grow out" of their gender dysphoria. The manga version of the ending scene is considerably less optimistic and Nitori still identifies as a girl even when she finishes high school. Takatsuki did stop being male identified though.
- At the end of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Ginji's Rescue Team, Ginji wakes up in his house as a human after his adventure ends. In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team, the protagonist stays a Pokemon.
- Michelangelo's painting of Haman's death on the Sistine Chapel ceiling doesn't show him being hanged on his own gallows like in the Book of Esther, but instead shows the genocidal villain being crucified. This may have come about because the Latin Bible which Michelangelo would be familiar with describes the gallows as a "crux," although other parts of the text make it clear he was hanged. The scene is described similarly by Dante in The Divine Comedy.
- Superman: The Movie gave Krypton a crystal motif, and also invented the idea of Superman's S being a family coat of arms. Before that, it really was an S.
- The 1980s Supergirl movie changed Argo from surviving on a chunk of Krypton to surviving in another dimension.
- One of the X-Men movies infamously depicted Deadpool as not having a mouth. This is not a minor change, either, as one of Deadpool's nicknames in comics is "the merc with the mouth"note .
- In The Secret Garden, Colin's father discovers him just as he's winning a footrace with Mary. The 1993 film adaptation changes this to a game of blind man's bluff, resulting in a somewhat more emotional moment.
- While not a strict adaptation, Looking for Group got its start as a parody of World of Warcraft. The name comes from the MMO chat term for a player forming a party to tackle a difficult quest, and each of the original four main characters corresponded to one of the Horde races in the game. But as the series went on, it drew less and less inspiration from Warcraft and eventually just became a comedic fantasy series. We can pinpoint the exact moment the series stopped being a WoW parody: when the team encountered a group of trolls (including recurring character Tim) who looked nothing like Benny, whose appearance is based on the trolls from the game but her background turned out to be completely different.
