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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1590733" data-attributes="member: 5171">Well, I could quote this:Your issue seems to be with the theme itself and not with whether or not the theme is done well.  I don't see a use of tropes as being a sign of a complete lack of imagination -- although I will note that your position, if I am understanding you correctly, is a very popular one in the Old School Science Fiction field.  Powerful editors decry "character stories" and "the same old thing, only with different characters" and call out for stories with new ideas -- and will, if directly asked, say that they would prefer a story with many original ideas and cardboard characters to a story with well-realized characters telling a popular (and thus, "done before") form of story.I understand that you didn't SPECIFICALLY say that you wanted it to be completely black and white.  I didn't say that you said that. Please tell me what line made you believe that I said that you wanted that.  I said that your idea didn't really interest me any more than any other, because I've seen it done badly, like any other idea.  And I said I'd rather see an old-fashioned idea done well than a newfangled idea done badly.  You brought up Firefly in a negative context, saying that you thought Whedon "wasn't really trying" when he came up with the idea for the Firefly universe.  And yet, the Firefly universe is, in my opinion, a very original one, and an original one done well at that -- our heroes aren't paragons of virtue, space combat wasn't glamorized with sound effects or unrealistic dogfighting, and the protagonists served for the side that lost the civil war, with the exact ethics of which side was right and which side was wrong left deliberately unclear.  Add to that the lack of aliens, the mixture of high-tech and low-tech, and the cultural diversity, and it seems like a fairly original concept.  Perhaps you and I have different definitions of originality.Or perhaps it's just that Whedon was trying to be original in a lot of different ways and said, "Wow, if I try to be original in ALL ways, I'm going to completely lose my viewers, because viewers at some level need something familiar to latch onto," and opted to keep the theme of the outcast hero as something familiar for the reader -- and that just happened to be the one thing you wanted.  In which case, sucks etre vous.  To demand that a creative work be original in all ways would indicate less than complete experience with creating things for users.If you're making a website, you can put the navbar in a weird place (in the middle or at the bottom, instead of on the top or left side), or you can make the navbar function in a weird way (different from normal dropdowns or simple clicks), or you can make it appear strange (odd alien sigils instead of words) -- but you can't do all three.  If you do all three, nobody can use your site. Or, if you don't dig on Web stuff: adding one new spice to your dinner gives it a dash of newness.  Adding twenty new spices to your dinner makes it taste horrible.  This doesn't refer to your idea in a vacuum state, of course -- it's a fine idea, and my point of disagreement wasn't that it would be bad to do it, only that it would be bad to throw out all fiction that uses that element, regardless of whether it was done well or poorly.  My originality comments apply only to your supporting example, in which you state that Firefly was less than great because the creative team chose not to be original in one specific area, even while bringing in original elements in many other areas.No, I wasn't.  Thank you for asking, instead of phrasing it in a manner that might have been construed as rude.  Glad we could keep this civil.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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