“You take twenty-five things that are in any successful genre, and you reverse one of them,” he said. “Reverse too many, and you get genre confusion. It’s a muddle, and nobody knows how to place it. Invert all the elements, and it’s a parody.” But one strategic tweak? Now you’ve made something that is perfectly new, like a classic western adventure story, but set in space.”
―
Derek Thompson,
Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular
