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  • oniononion@night.studio-2am.net
    Oct 8, 2026, 8:00 AM
    Do you ever get the feeling that recent stories (across all media) trend more towards sci-fi or fantasy or at least fantastical / supernatural elements than older stories, from 50 years or so ago?

    Or in other words, if you go back a certain number of years, do think there's relatively more stories about "mundane" things, I mean like crime stories or just human drama without any time loop or ghosts or so?

    Sometimes I get the feeling it might be that way, but I'm not going to make huge lists and categorize every piece of media by whether it has supernatural elements or not. So I'm just asking how other people see it.
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Replies

  • Ruth / Anarchaeanarchaeopteryx
    Oct 8, 2026, 5:08 PM

    @onion I'm not an expert but have read enough American pulp from the 1910-1960 era to say no, genre fiction/the supernatural has always been incredibly popular, if anything it was more popular back then when there were dozens of magazines cranking out issues every month full of genre tropes with subscription numbers that would make modern writers weep. I think it's just that the genre stuff from the past has been considered not worth preserving/teaching, so we remember the Literature more.

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  • oniononion@night.studio-2am.net
    Oct 8, 2026, 11:27 PM
    Interesting, thanks for the input! I haven’t read much fiction from that era, but often when I’ve been looking up the roots of certain tropes, it leads back to the 1920s and magazines like “weird tales”. But like you said it’s not held in high regard like the great gatsby or so.

    Then again, maybe for every weird tales that’s at least being remembered, maybe there were 4 other magazines that had just crime, romance.. maybe cowboys? XD and that have been completely forgotten by now

    @anarchaeopteryx@gamepad.club
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  • Ruth / Anarchaeanarchaeopteryx
    Oct 8, 2026, 11:34 PM

    @onion Oh definitely, before Science Fiction really picked up it was all Westerns and "adventure" stories and ghost stories. And just like how people complain today about book trends, back then it would be soooo many stories with basically the exact same framework copy pasted, e.g. the Nancy Drew series. And if you think about it religious stories, folk tales, and mythology go back forever and ultimately informs the human desire to talk about "what if something really weird happened".

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  • oniononion@night.studio-2am.net
    Oct 9, 2026, 6:36 AM
    That makes sense yeah. The oldest stories are all about supernatural things (though debatable whether the people of the time saw it as that?)

    Anyways if I had been around during last century’s 20s I probably would have consumed a ton of these cheap magazines :D
    @anarchaeopteryx@gamepad.club
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