Why are fantasy and sci fi settings so unoriginal...

Why are fantasy and sci fi settings so unoriginal? Basically everything is a remix of established ideas made decades ago.

You're asking the wrong questions.

Your post is a paraphrase of a bible quote. Novelty has no inherent value and anything designed solely with novelty as the goal ends up as some of the most soulless forms of media.

Once you've read a dictionary, every book is just a remix.

Mass production and consumption of media means that there is a greater demand for new content than new ideas can sustain, and commercial enterprises are more willing to finance content that is proven anyway.

If I pitch a fantasy movie about a low-tech civilization that takes place in the rotting body of a colossal ancient god, thats not going to get made into a film. Its weird and they don't know if they have an audience for that. What they want is swords and sorcery. LOTR stuff. That they know they can sell.

>If I pitch a fantasy movie about a low-tech civilization that takes place in the rotting body of a colossal ancient god, thats not going to get made into a film.
Funny you should say that, because there's a scene thats almost exactly that on Guardians of the Galaxy.

Or you know...Bionicle

No Man's Sky has original planets and wildlife.

Did not help it from being a massive fuck up.

>Basically everything is a remix of established ideas made decades ago.
This describes literally all of fiction.

You're not funny.

No.

Not sure what your point is.

Have you taken a look at what the anons in Fading Embers General are doing? That feels pretty fresh and original to me.

Not really.

Tell me an original work from the last 20 years.

Well, something had to be the original at one point. But it's so long ago that nobody even knows anymore.

Well, you are not worth talking to.

Exactly how dense are you?

Defiance

Using such vague terms can you give me an example of a setting that is original?

>firefly meets farscape

Do you think this post contributed anything?

Emergence

Man, I loved the Bionicle universe. It had such a mysterious atmosphere.

Divergent, Blade

>has original planets and wildlife.
In the same way that wildly flailing away at pieces of paper with a pencil produces "original works of art", sure.

Thought the disappointment would be apparent.

...

True random will always be "original".
And sufficiently advanced pseudo-random is indistinguishable from true random...

Because we're only human. It's far easier to crib off of a few already existing ideas and try to develop new things from there, than to start completely from scratch.

You see it everywhere, not only in literature, but in things like videogames, movies, and beyond media into architectural design or even arguably scientific theories. Nothing is or ever really can be created in a vacuum.

You wanna talk unoriginal, how's this for fucked up:

The Godfather and Die Hard have the exact same setting!

Because nothing's original and everybody's a hack.

Frog helmet best helmet.

Creativity is dead; long live creativity.

Stop being a dense cunt is the point.

Who cares if something is not wholly original? News flash: Tolkien and CS Lewis were both influenced by events, mythologies, and prior works before their own. The Hunger Games could be traced back to Battle Royale, yet now it stands on its own. So on and so on. If you really want to get into it, nothing has been original since the formation of the fucking Monomyth, and if you don't know what that is you have little right to complain about unoriginality.

What matters is, really, if people enjoy it. Forest elves, dwarves, marauding orcs, a upright human kingdom with an evil to defeat and a princess to fall in love with can still *work* and give people a good time. That's all which matters.

Also, self-conscious attempts at doing novel things often end up emphasising why people never did those things in the first place. The fact that something's novel doesn't mean it'll automatically be good.

Originality is overrated. Execution is what truly is important.

If originality doesn't exist, then the Lascaux cave paintings are the same as my Japanese animes, which sounds ridiculous. It is true that works of art have antecedents, but it is also true that works of art are not identical to their antecedents; ergo, there is some point at which novelty enters the process by which art is created. Perhaps no individual work of art appears to be original in and of itself-- wholly disjoint from its predecessors-- but a long succession of works of art can attain originality as a group.

>Execution is what truly is important.
Can you phrase this in a way that isn't tautological, or very nearly so? We say that a work of art is well-executed if we think it is good, right? If that's so, then it is unsurprising that we would regard execution as being important, because we are simply using the word "execution" as a proxy for quality. To accurately evaluate the importance of execution, we need to find works of art that are well-executed but terrible. Can you think of some?

Any movie with a lot of good, polished scenes from a skilled director, that's still a flop in terms of story and leaves the audience unable to enjoy the skilled cinematography.

I have to disagree to some degree, as there are films whith practically no story and still are considered masterpieces, but I get what you mean.

It is not tautological. Essentially, what he said was that *how* you do something is more important than *what* you do.