Originality

Your work is contrived, and your insights are derivative, you are devoid of original thought, rehashing existing ideas.  This is a criticism that is often directed at writers when starting out, either as a hobby or as a desire to break into the industry.  The thing you have to remember about this criticism is that it is an opinion, and it is often held by people who, to put it politely, have "been around the block a few times" - by that I mean their view point is a consequence of the fact they really have seen it all before.

If you're a critic and you have uttered these words, then I have some advice - retire.  That may sound arrogant, and yes, it is, but, there is a retort to be considered here.  In all of history, mankind has lived in a world that is comprised of 118 elements on the periodic table [only 94 of which naturally occur].  Every single thing that ever was, is, and ever shall be, is comprised of those elements.  They are small in number, infinitesimal in comparison to the enormity of the Universe and all of space and time.  What you can create from those elements is limited, it is how you use them, reuse them, and extend upon existing ideas that we are able to progress as a society.  The moment you stop trying to do that, and begin searching for an unknown element, is the moment when you stop creating.  When you are a critic, your job is to take what you see in the moment and judge it.  You are not expected to judge it against all of space and time.  If you reach a point where all you see is what you have already seen before, then it's time to retire, you're job is done.

Every single day people are born.  They grow up.  It is 2018 and this year is the first that there are adults, 18 years old, who were not alive in the last Millennium, they hadn't been born.  The longer you live, the more you see, and inevitably you realise that history repeats itself.  Fashions return, sometimes with alterations, sometimes they return intact.  So too do the ideas that gripped the Zeitgeist.  The reason certain TV shows and Music, and artistic styles find resurgence despite being "done before" is simply because there's an entire generation that never witnessed it before.  There is the temptation to say that they should look back, and learn about the past, and history, and know what has come before, but if you force ingenuity and creativity to contrast itself against what has come before, you prevent reimagination.  You prevent reinterpretation.  You prevent the exploration of ideas with mindsets that diverge significantly from those that came before.

In the Movies, Games, and Entertainment industries as a whole, there is often an opposition to "remakes" and the new yet not so new concept of "reboots" where the history and cannon of franchises from the past are completely ignored and works are created from scratch with new visions.  These creations are opposed in their inception, and compared at length to "the originals" and judged based on their divergence from, or their adherence to what came before.

The problem with this mentality is that it projects the present onto the past, and expects the two to match up.  The reality is they will never align because the world that existed is gone, and the world we live in now is a whole new world.  More over, what succeeded before and what failed before, does not dictate what will succeed or what will fail today.  There was a time people were perfectly content with dial-up internet, with MSN Search, and with a handful of TV channels.  Those would never satisfy modern audiences and would be doomed to failure if they were to try.  At the same time, if you were to give Google to someone long before it came to prominence it likely would have failed.  To say that what came before are templates for success is to say to become the next Google one need only do everything they did - that clearly doesn't work.

The World Wide Web was created in the early 90s, but the Internet itself has been around for decades more, and the capability to build computers has existed longer still.  The fact is we never used the technology in the capacity we do today as there was no desire, no drive, and no vision to do so.  They succeeded when they did, because the conditions were right at the time.  This is the reason more than any other that we must be able to try out existing ideas whether they succeeded or failed in the past, once again, but in a modern setting.  We must be able to see if the changing environment and the new conditions that have arisen, would influence these ideas and see the impact that has.

There is a reluctance to accept this argument, the adamance in the belief "that which failed before will fail again and will always fail" - those who hold this belief and stand in the way of progress should stand aside.  You have lost the vision, the optimism, the drive, and the courage to try.