Dominic wrote:Scifi uses lasers and other energy projection. Sword and sorcery use magic spells and black powder weapons. In both cases, characters have ranged attacks. Islands and planets are pretty much interchangable as places where mysterious ab/non-humans live.
You're only making a surface level comparison and trying to pass that off as interchangable. It makes a difference how those things work within a story and whether or not they could potentially exist or couldn't ever exist in the real world. That's part of what defines each of these genre's and makes them unique from each other, and you're completely ignoring that.
The hows and whys of the technology and magic make about as much sense in either case.
To quote Rod Serling for one of many, many, many definitions of the two genre's: "Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible." The elements in Science Fiction are designed to make sense to a real world environment in order to make it seem possible. Fantasy on the other hand invents its own rules and thus doesn't need to make any logical sense.
That has to be the most absurd thing a fandom has come up with since the "more serious" term "Trekkers" for hard-core Trekkies.
It's not something a fandom came up with. It's a genre classification in literature.
Shockwave wrote:It's totally possible to tell the same story in different settings. If I write a fantasy story where the hero uses winged boots and a flaming sword to kill the bad guy then how is that any different if the hero uses a lightsaber and rocket boots. It's the same story, just different settings.
Again, this is a surface level comparison of what those objects can do. That doesn't mean you can just switch them and it's the same thing. Changing these elements impacts more in the story than you're giving credit.
To use Sparky's Frodo example it would essentially be the same story but instead of being Lord of the Rings it's now an episode of Deep Space Nine.
If you change it to an episode of Deep Space Nine, it's not the same thing anymore at all. How would they defeat the Dominion if DS9 was LotR? Throwing a cloaking device into a volcano isn't going to stop them like the One Ring does to Sauron's army. Things cannot work like that in a universe based on real world laws of nature.
We're not saying that one element can be swapped, we're saying the genres themselves are interchangeable.
If they were so interchangeable, why would they be distinguished as two separate genre's in the first place? As I keep saying, there is a fundamental difference between the two. They aren't so easily interchangeable for a reason unless it's a completely different genre like science fantasy (which Star Wars arguably is a part of btw, given the Force is more a fantasy element).
