On Queen's Thief vs Tangled

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

 On the recent post regarding the similarities between the Queen's Thief series and the movie Tangled:
How do these similarities make you feel about the movie? Do you resent them/the movie? Do you find it suspiciously or annoyingly interesting? Or do the coincidences make you like the movie all that much more?
I'm on the fence myself. On the one hand, I sort of sniff at the movie for being blatantly unoriginal and because Gen the Thief is totally superior to Eugene the thief. But on the other hand, ahh, it's coolly uncanny how many similarities there are!

Comments

[ninedaysaqueen.livejournal.com]

Precedents are often lauded because they're "first," but sometimes that correlates to inferiority along other lines, such as character development, or plot cohesion, or thematic depth, or just the sheer ability to make an audience sit back and say "Wow! That was fun!" simply because the ideas that seemed so original in the precedent had yet to be fully formed in either the creator's mind or the collective culture.

This is exactly what I was thinking, but Drash... You've said it far more brilliantly then I could ever hope to. Kudos to you!

Cliche can still be enjoyable if done well, and fantasy culture, especially, thrives on cliche redoes and remakes of familiar stories. Creativity does not always correspond with complete and utter newness. And you're right... I get irritated with the term "original," because most people don't truly want "original". They want a sort of story they are familiar with made into something new. Give a person something completely new and inventive like Hugo Cabret, and we have no idea what to do with it or even what to call it.

And good point on making improvement. Does Jane Austen being one of the first to write "comedy of manners" preclude that no author could ever write anything just as good or better? Certainly not! In fact, I give kudos to Tangled for taking an over-used fairytale and turning it into a very different story with new creative elements. And Flynn? Actually more typical of the usual devilish thief from fairytales than Gen.

Also, I noticed that often times people will complain about not liking a story, because it's been done before. But is this simply because it wasn't done well, or they've seen it done better?

[drashizu.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks :)

I think, for your last point, that it's probably a combination of both. There might also be a secondary originality effect: sometimes, the first book of a particular type that a reader reads becomes the paragon of that type of story in their head, and no other story ever quite compares with it, because it came first, and was the most fresh and new seeming at the time. I know I've had it happen to me with a few stories. I can appreciate other books that do the same thing, but there's just a sort of... "loyalty" factor. I can't ever bring myself to like the later books as much as the first one, because it was, for me, my first exposure to that particular twist/trope/stereotype.