A little over a week ago, I made a TikTok video in which I pointed out that Ted Lasso is a Wizard of Oz retelling. A couple of days later, I made a second video, in which I mentioned that the first season of Star Trek: Discovery plays around with Alice In Wonderland in a similar way. Both of these videos went semi-viral— over 100,000 views for each of them, with hundreds of comments on each.

Something strange happens when I make videos talking about “traditionally male” media (which, first of all, what? Star Trek is for the girls and the gays JUST as much as it is for the dudebro nerds, and Ted Lasso is… a show about soccer. Which, you know, women play. And in the US, are more successful at than the men on an international stage. But whatever). My videos on those topics tend to do REALLY WELL, because they get a ton of engagement. Unfortunately, 30-50% of that engagemet is usually men telling me that I’m wrong.

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This time, the men-telling-me-I’m-wrong-about-things-I’m-absolutely-not-wrong-about took a slightly different turn than usual. It wasn’t “you’re a girl shut up.” Instead, it was “yeah well EVERYTHING is a retelling.” Indeed, without fail, most of these comments mention the theory that there are only 7 stories in the world. They mention it like it’s an idea that’s been part of the literary canon for ages, like it’s a topic that everyone should know. In fact, it’s a vaguely Jungian philosophy-influenced literary theory from a book published in 2004— I’ve been alive longer than this theory has. And it’s not inherently a BAD theory, if you’re the kind of person who likes to break down storytelling into scientific components instead of enjoying a good book. But I do disagree with the way that the folks in my comments section choose to invoke it.

I find that the “there are only 7 stories, everything is a retelling” claim invalidates every piece of writing that’s published fresh and anew. Furthermore, it undercuts the value and hard work that are required to write a GOOD retelling. It’s legitimately difficult to write a story that is both old and new at the same time, paying homage to a canon while expanding upon it. It’s why revival shows are eligible for the Tony Awards. It’s why fairy-tale retellings routinely make for bestsellers while Disney sequels rarely do half as well as their original source material. As I’ve said over and over again both personally and professionally, stuff can be two things! Something can be a retelling while also being its own independent thing. Ted Lasso can be a Wizard of Oz retelling while also being a multi-season long arc about hope and curiosity, about mental health, about the intentional choices required to make the world a better place by being in it. The Warriors, the concept album, can be a brilliant reimagining of the 1979 film AND a retelling of Xenophon’s Anabasis while also being an entertaining (and iconic) story about gang violence and street politics in major cities in the 70s. And it takes SO MUCH work and talent and creativity to produce something that is all of those aspects of itself. Reducing that process to “just one of the seven stories out there” is… gross. I don’t like it. I reject the concept outright.

And let’s talk about purely original works. Because yes, I’m sure if you gave a monkey a typewriter (or in today’s world, if you fed an AI algorithm an endless supply of letters) eventually you’d get a perfect reproduction of a Shakespeare play. But it wouldn’t count, because Shakespeare did it first. Except Shakespeare didn’t do it first, because half of Shakespeare’s works are inspired directly by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or by court politics, or by the irrational choices that people around him in his own life were making. And Ovid probably didn’t do it first either, because he was writing down stories that the people around him had been telling for hundreds of years, too. So where do we draw the line? Why does it matter who came up with something first, when what’s important is how we interpret it and what makes each interpretation remarkable on its own merits?

Saying that there are only seven stories— even if it’s a theory that took over 30 years to write— is so unbelievably limiting. It’s saying that even if there are infinite versions of a story out there, reading them all is pointless because they’re all derivatives of the same seven frameworks. Even if they’re told in totally different ways, in different genres, across different time periods, revealing different aspects of life for different eras and people and styles of storytelling. It’s all just… pointless, not worth it?

Absolutely not.

I’ll take my formulaic love stories and Kurosawa-and-westerns-inspired Star Wars and my own (because yes, I’m an author, too!) Shakespeare-influenced romance novels any day. Life’s just more interesting that way— and isn’t a more varied, less limiting world the one you’d rather live in?

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