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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3303 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The disparagement of derivative literature and incremental improvements on classic stories seems to me to be a quite modern development linked with the strengthening of copyright protections in the west. Early epics like the Odyssey were probably composed iteratively over many centuries and you can trace characters in Shakespeare's plays all the way back to Ovid. Our modern equivalents would be comic book and movie characters like Batman and the Joker, whose stories continue to be retold in (sometimes) new and exciting ways. Of course, it's still the case that the things that make one iteration of these stories better than another are less objective and more culture-dependent than something like mechanical engineering.

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