Hemiola, my feeling is there are certain kinds of stories that get told over and over and over. Actually, they're not really stories, they're frameworks for stories. They're setups. The "one person falls in love with another but thier parents/friends/society disapproves." It gets told with racial angles, gender angles, religious angles, nationality angles, but it's the same story framework.
Or the "Rag tag group of misfits come together and somehow manage to accomplish a feat that a more technically accomplished or officially sanctioned but "soulless" or "passionless" group cannot. And that gets military mission angles, show business angles, sports team angles, etc.
When you look at the realm of fantasy/sci-fi stories, you see the same thing, any long time sci-fi geek has seen or read the: "Warning from your older self from the future about some dire matter" story, or the "It's all in your head, you've been imagining this the whole time" story or the "child with a special birthmark has a secret destiny" story, or the body switch/gender swap story, the evil twin story, the "evil monster is just a parent protecting it's children" story, the "your gods are actually advanced aliens/computers" story, the "stuck in a time loop story" the "adventures of your heroes as little kids/old folks" story, etc.
We could map just about all of those to one or another episode of Star Trek, Farscape, Buffy, Twilight Zone, Dr. Who, Stargate SG-1, Xena/Hercules, Charmed, X-Files, you name it.
I actually look forward to these kinds of stories, my friends and I literally rub our hands and go "Oh man, how is this show/episode writer/group of actors going to handle the "body switch" episode or what have you.
How these story framworks are used is the important thing to me, I don't think anyone tries to pretend the setups themselves are original.
-len
