User blog comment:Eikakou/L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables: The Good Stars review/@comment-4934571-20170222142729/@comment-4934571-20170224010214

Well, I've been thinking about the Mr. Phillips issue about quite a long time, but I never knew how to brought the subject up. I'm glad that the opportunity is finally here.

There is this weird thing about how my mind and imagination work. When I read the book and then see the adaptation, I cannot imagine the characters differently after watching the film. When I re-read the book, I see the actors in my head. For example, I can see only Emma Watson's portrayal as Hermione, not my own version of her – and this happens to me all the time. I usually don't mind, but sometimes the adaptations is really bad (Divergent being the best example). My mind passively accepts the film version, links it with the book version and then I am not able to read the book because I see pictures from the adaptation in my head, I cannot separate them.

I usually do know the differences between the plots of books and films. But as I said, I passively accept many things from the adaptation and associate them with the book version, often when the adaptation adds some new information to the story (something which was not in the book). It doesn't contradict the original version and my mind just accepts it as a new fact.

This is exactly what happened to poor Mr. Phillips in my head. And Prissy as well. When I read the book as a child, their relationship did not disturb me in any way. I watched the film in its entirety when I was 14-15 years old. That time I found it completely inappropriate. Mr. Phillips is portrayed by Paul Brown. I don't know how old he was when they were shooting, but he seems much older than Prissy. Their relationship in the film just seems unhealthy and weird, not to mention creepy. Honestly, I think I became biased because since then I've never been able to see Mr. Phillips differently. He became the Creepy Mr. Phillips in my head and even though I try, I cannot alter the image. Around that time I also became an admin here on Wiki and I discovered that there are many more adaptations. I've added most of them here and Mr. Phillips appears in some them. But whenever his name was mentioned, I found myself disliking him. Similar thing happened with Prissy. In the movie she seems to be... dumb. I think she is mentioned to be successful in one of the exams (along with Anne and Gilbert), but she appears to have troubles with spelling and generally with many other things. I often wondered how is it possible that a girl like her really wanted to go to Queen's. I almost accepted it as a fact in my head - "Prissy is dumb". But then I watched the anime and I realized that Prissy is not dumb and she never truly was in the book! It made me wake up and reconsider many things that became my head-canons just because Sullivan said so. He made Prissy dumb in my head and turned all the portrayals of Mr. Phillips into creepy pedophiles. It is very easy to forget that this is not what happened in the book. I am aware of it more than ever and even though I like many adaptations of Anne, I have to remind myself that I have to think about everything before passively accepting it as canon.