Anyone ever notice how common backstories for Space Operas are a bit Crapsack World style?
I mean Star Wars is filled with Space Nazis, Seperatists, droid armies, and according to the EU, a race beyond the galaxy that can turn planets into ships.
And Star Trek was in a nuclear war and on a ravaged planet before they hit space Travel.
And Mass Effect has the Reapers.
DAN in NY
I'd like to start the following discussion. Feel free to agree or to politely disagree:
Tone matters.
"Space Opera" is not the same thing as "Science Fiction." It is as distinct as Magic Realism is from Modern-Day Fantasy. It is as different as a 'spaghetti western' is from 'Dances with Wolves.'
Asimov, for example, wrote hard science fiction in his Foundation stories. A good example of space opera is Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. If it has an idealistic tone and can be re-written as a 1950's western, it is space opera. Stargate Universe failed because the first two series were out-and-out space operas, and the new one was trying too hard to take itself seriously and be like the new 'Battlestar Galactica.' The old 1970's Battlestar Galactica was a space opera. The new one was... wait for it... science fiction. If it's dramatic instead of melodramatic, then it's science fiction.
I'm new here.
Should Decoder Ring Theatre's "Deck Gibson: Far Reach Commander" be included?
It certainly fits.
Edited by R.G.
In the entry for Space Battleship Yamato, under "Anime," should the text read: the first space opera anime and among the first space operas to use large scale battles between fleets of spacecraft or the first space opera anime and among the first space operas to use large scale battles between fleets of spacecraft in visual media ?
Gigantic fleets of opposing spacecraft are common in space opera all the way back to (at least) the Lensman series which was in many ways the trope codifier for the foundation of the genre in the 1930s and early 1940s. Since Space Battleship Yamato was released in the 1970s, it cannot reasonably claim to be a 'first' for space opera as a whole. But I'm not really qualified to comment on whether there were many such large-fleet space battles in visual media before that time. Certainly, the limitations of practical special effects would make it difficult for any live action visual media to show large space fleet battles, and Space Battleship Yamato was one of the pioneering works in the genre for drawn visual media. So I don't know. What do people think?