Originality In Entertainment Revisited

Originality can take more forms than novelty both when it comes to philosophical ideas at large and entertainment.  Autonomous conceptual reflection or autonomous creativity, like coming even to ideas introduced by others on one's own or using popular story elements without doing so because of popularity (or outside prompting), are expressions of the capacity to rely on reason and oneself instead of others.  Artistic autonomy is just sometimes denied a little more overtly thanks to all but a few people talking as if they have just assumed that a given work of entertainment must be inspired by or a reaction to some other work rather than merely being the product of a person's own thoughts.

Another reason why artistic autonomy--coming up with ideas without directly looking to specific examples of other works even if one might be drawing from emotions or thoughts previously stirred by exposure to entertainment--is trivialized or denied is that there are plenty of examples of works of art that by all appearances by made to imitate something else in a cheap way (as opposed to intentional parody or self-aware storytelling).  Intentions are impossible to know from actions because it is always possible for an artist to have motives that are not what they seem to be based on their work, but some art looks like a greed-driven attempt to profit off of success without any thought behind it beyond fitting into a current trend.

For example, if a story made solely to ride on the popularity of a similar work for the sake of money will usually make minimal changes to the story such as switching up names that otherwise make it almost an exact mirror for something else, but there is nothing clever or artistically sincere about this.  In contrast, even if someone thought of a story where every element had already been used somewhere else but was merely focusing on the quality of the execution and did not mistake it for something conceptually distinct from all other works of entertainment, then his or her story can still be one of excellence and originality in the sense that it is not meant to be inspired by any specific work that has already been released; it was truly their vision.  Thinking of a story oneself or without trying to model almost everything about it on some other work is still originality.

Even though the latter creator's ideas and work are not new or unthought of, they are sincere, can be understood for what they are, and were not derived from any sort of admiration for other entertainment, not to mention the idiotic idea that it is literally impossible to come up with ideas for art without exposure to or inspiration from other art.  It is true that artistic ideas, unlike philosophical ideas purely rooted in awareness of the logical axioms at the epistemological and metaphysical foundation of all things, almost always require some form of experience to be prompted (whereas purely logical truths must be at least indirectly grasped for even slight awareness of anything at all to be had and can be thought of without any sensory, social, or psychological prompting).

Regardless of the exact way a storytelling or gameplay idea is thought of, novelty in entertainment can be less of a strength than sheer quality of execution if handled correctly, not that novelty is impossible even after so much art of different mediums has been made and not that everything that is not new is just an intentional imitation of something established in the artistic world.  Originality in entertainment is too often just mistaken for something completely new (which is almost impossible beyond remixing well-used ideas) when there is more to it than that.  The intentions and methods of thinking behind an artistic idea also pertain to how original a song, film, television or streaming show, book, or video game is and can in fact far surpass sheer novelty in many cases.