There's always something about movie adaptations that all fans of the book have to fear. One of those fears is that maybe the director has a poor kinda vision for his movie, and the film ends up a complete letdown and terrible reflection of the story.

Another is that the story in the film will be so different from the book that they won't even be able to tell that it's the story that they've read and reread and loved all these years, and worse yet, when others who haven't read the book before take watching the movie as a cue to go read it and find it entirely different (and even worse, "boring"), you can't help but feel a little disappointed (or in the latter case, insulted).

Recently, I've found yet thing to fear. It's not a reason that's commonly known or thought of, because I believe that that the larger proportion of any fan base out there probably doesn't even know of fanfiction, let alone read it.

So here's what the new fear is: unwanted, disturbing romantic pairings.

Take Lord of the Rings for example. I never read the Lord of the Rings books before the first movie, but I'm willing to bet that LOTR slash either never existed or was never this prolific BEFORE the movies.

And after the movies? Well, it's pretty common to see Legolas paired with Aragorn. Or some other male elf. And Samwise with Frodo, and maybe Merry with Pippin.

I read slash myself, but steer away from the LOTR FPS (Fictional Person Slash); I've talked to a lot of people who feel that the amount of touching and hugging and outward emotional expression in the movie is "just gay", and sometimes that irks me. A lot. What is it with our modern society's obsession with marking guys as "gay" just because of certain things that they do? In fact, when I myself see guys behaving in a "non-masculine" sort of way, I jokingly call them "gay" too, but on hindsight, it does make me wonder why on earth it should disturb me.

Suffice it to say for now that I just don't see why people can't accept that Tolkien was writing about brotherly love and deep love between friends, and for all the touching and hugging in the movie, well, sometimes there just isn't any other better way to tell someone how much they mean to you, is there? And the slash pairings in LOTR just sorta... degrade that, to me.

May seem odd to you that I say that, but I think the cliche phrase "more than friends" has inadvertently led to most people thinking of romantic love as a deeper relationship than friendship, as the "hierarchy" of relationships go.

With the LOTR slash pairings, I guess I see many of them as saying that when a relationship between two people reaches its deepest and most meaningful point, then it has to be one of romantic love. And I say, can't it just be one of really deep friendship? And here's where I feel it degrades friendship: Why can't they just accept that friendship can reach the same depths that romantic love does without becoming the slightly different kind of relationship that is romantic love?

I'm digressing.

Y'know what made me come to this realisation of yet another thing that book fans should fear about movie adaptations? Yeah, that's right, Narnia. (Yes, my life revolves around it at the moment, get used to it. And it doesn't help that William Moseley is most endearingly distracting.)

And with it, the disturbing discovery of Peter/Susan and Peter/Edmund pairings on FanFiction.net's Narnia pages.

My skin crawled. I swear it did.

And I realised that it's easy to think of these pairings when we see the characters on screen, because hey, some part of us knows that these people are not related, they're certainly not siblings, and so they certainly can get together. And in the course of putting the actors and actresses together in their mind's eye, the characters are put together by association. It doesn't help that the Pevensies hug each other a lot in the film. And it helps even less when you consider that William Moseley (Peter) and Anna Popplewell (Susan) are VERY beautiful people indeed.

And maybe that's all it comes down to. Beautiful people. Orlando Bloom was an ethereally beautiful Legolas, and Viggo Mortensen was a rugged sort of beautiful as Aragorn. And Elijah Wood and those stunning blue eyes of his made Frodo beautiful in a heart-breaking sort of "innocence-lost" way. And Sean Astin's portrayal of his character made him a beautiful Samwise Gamgee, in all his stalwart loyalty and stumbling-- but honest-- bravery.

And while watching the screen, we're all kind of reduced to the media's habit of taking everything at face value.