I admit to being v confused by how tumblr is reacting to Nolan's The Odyssey vs GDT's Frankenstein. I'm not sure why del Toro changing so much in his adaptation was received so well as opposed to what Nolan was doing... esp since, imo, one adaptation used the source material to convey interesting and challenging ideas whereas the other removed a lot of complexity and wallpapered over the disturbing, meatier aspects
(Note at the top: GDT and Chris Nolan are friends and colleagues, and often speak very admiringly of one another. If you care about movies as a popular art form, it's a good thing to have these two guys putting out work with so much love for the craft and its history, regardless of what you think of the films themselves.)
As to your question - there's two answers here, so let's do the easy one first. GDT is received well on tumblr because he plays with aesthetics and themes that people on tumblr already like. When he departs from a text or adjusts elements to be more in line with his thematic interests, he has an audience ready to celebrate the changes if he's successful or carry water for him if he isn't. For example: he sanded off the wickedness and cruelty of the Creature, but it came with incredible set dressing, and allowed for an emotional landscape in which he and Victor could tenderly reconcile, which helps if you want them to fuck hard in your fanfiction, but without elements of brutality and parental rape. IT'S FINE to make adaptational changes, or to use an existing story as a scaffold for the one you want to tell, but as an artist, GDT is trapped in a love for the gothic aesthetic without much beneath it; I don't think he challenges himself or his viewers, and I think that's part of what makes him so popular here. As Aretha Franklin once said, "beautiful gowns".
The Nolan of it all is a little more complicated. For my part, I wouldn't consider myself a fan of much of his past work. I loved The Prestige, but for years that was the only one of his movies that really sang for me, and I assumed it was because it was an adaptation. The spectacle of Inception and Interstellar was exciting, and that was sort of it? I didn't find myself compelled by any of his thematic interests, and I found his writing to be by turns either too remote or too sloppily emotional. I started to perk up a bit with Dunkirk, but it really all came home for me when I saw Oppenheimer, which is a genuine masterpiece and the first place his filmmaking instincts and fascinations align with the kind of story he's telling.
It's a Sophia Coppolla + Marie Antoinette match: That Thing The Director Is Intrigued By (with Nolan, it's time and the way it bends and warps and ripples with our choices; with Sophia, it's the tension between the internal worlds of young women and how they are perceived) finally finally clicks into a narrative where it fits perfectly, and enriches every other theme. In short, I started responding to Nolan's work when he started making movies about the human fingerprints all over apocalypse. Because that interests me, and gave his work a harrowing emotional jolt that it had long been missing.
But tumblr, I think, doesn't see Nolan as having a body of work that's evolved. They don't know or care that his thematic interests have shifted. They're annoyed that Film Bros caped for him in the Dark Knight - Inception - Interstellar - Dunkirk era, and think that the fans of something are commensurate to the thing itself. (tumblr: a likely and ironic place to find that sentiment.) To many people on this site, Nolan is a symbol of a certain kind of filmmaking, a certain kind of movie watcher, a certain kind of story: masculine, grey, too impressed with itself by half.
Nolan also has a reputation as being particularly poor at writing women, something that tumblr users really like to harp on, despite how many adored fandoms On Here are fighting for their lives to put a woman onscreen at all. It's a fair critique in some respects, but not one that belongs especially on his shoulders. I think he is, with one or two exceptions*, as good at writing women as many critically acclaimed male screenwriters in Hollywood, which is to say....he's okay at it. He's fine. He's not winning any prizes. But you cannot look me in the eye and tell me that Mia Goth's character in Frankenstein was written any better than Marion Cotillard's in Inception.
There are just a lot of things that many tumblrites have decided are unique to Nolan, and it gets their back up. So when he makes a movie about a Greek myth, something the pedants on the pedantry website are locked and loaded to nitpick, it turns into a real "bitch eating crackers" moment.
Which is a shame, because The Odyssey is a continuation of what he explored in Oppenheimer, and both those movies are the least like The Nolan Tumblr Hates that he's ever been.
(*Kitty Oppenheimer is an incredibly well-written character, a real "right twice a day" type thing. Loved her, loved Emily Blunt's performance, and I guess maybe the real magic is having a historical human woman to base her off of.)
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