A little bit of background for this topic: from my teenage years into my early 20s I was a prolific writer and artist. I wrote dozens of short stories, fanfics, and even a full length novel which I never posted publicly. I drew a lot, too. I would never consider myself ‘good’ at either discipline, but I’d say I reached the lofty heights of ‘passable’.
Unfortunately, you need to make a living in this world, so I put all that aside for about 10 years to become a software developer. I was still consuming a lot of media, though, and still do to this day. Like you guys, I lamented the wokeification of games, films, and books, and frequently discussed it with people in my personal life. I kept coming around to the same conclusion: ‘If we’re not happy with the stories the mainstream are providing, we need to create our own’.
Fast forward to today, I’m at a position in my career where I’ve automated a lot of things so that I have more free time. A few months ago my wandering mind was struck by a bolt of inspiration from the blue, and for the first time in ages I felt the desire to create again. As I sat down and organised my ideas, though, I realised that I was (consciously and sub-consciously) pulling elements from media which I have enjoyed and combining them into my own story. It’s very difficult to put a number on these things, but if I had to estimate I’d say about 60% of my ideas come from media, 40% from my own personal experiences. Of course, I did the same thing as a teenager, but I’m a bit more self-aware now than I was back then.
My question to you guys is, do you care about originality for its own sake, or does it have more to do with how a story is told? When I think about my favourite stories, some of them are extremely trite and tropey, but they are told masterfully well. Is it even possible to be truly original in such a media-saturated world as ours?
For what it’s worth, I don’t intend to shake the foundations of the world with my story, I just want to tell a good one that isn’t full of woke BS.
I want to say it means a lot to me, but it doesn't. To me, it's all about form and technique. If the material of the story itself fails to subvert my expectations that's actually alright and comfy. Sometimes it's a great idea to jostle the viewer and shake them out of their comfort/expectations, when that is appropriate (which isnt always the case), but even the most unexpected and creative pitch won't save the film from unchecked nepotism, globohomo, indian cgi, shoddy production ethic, etc.
If the film is being done well, it can be Hamlet again for all I care- for all audiences at large care, I think. It could be the 13th spider-man origin story, but if it does it better than Raimi it will basically take over all the others. Hollywood sniffs money and doesn't seem to have a problem with juicing up glaringly unoriginal ideas with hundreds of millions of dollars, which leads me to believe that my viewpoint is not only shared among people, but is an observation of an innate truth about storytelling as a whole: that there are about 12 ancient core human stories that have been retold since truly ancient times, that we love and are doomed forever to play at the form and technique of these stories, and that our inability to expand on this core repertoire of stories reveals something about our attempts at "true" never-before-existant products of creativity; it's vanity, it's us grasping, reaching, etc at something just outside of our reach. (grasping at being The Creator, I think).