: Re: The concept of "Exotic Culture" and the necessity of a new world A personal point of view on the necessity of a new culture in fiction "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away",

@BetL639

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Frame Shift Challenge: Logically, why wouldn't a culture from an alien world come off as "exotic" to the reader?
People have noticed that other groups of sapient beings (including this as a qualifier since we are talking about aliens and non-human sophonts like centaurs) around the world have different cultures. It's an observation that goes back to Herotodus' Histories. People in general come up with different ideas on how to live, how to survive in varied environments, how the world works, and their own cultural traditions all over the place. Why would the inhabitants of a fantasy world or an alien planet be any different?
You're saying that all of these cultures are "exotic". But why would you expect the cultures to be familiar in the first place? When Europeans first landed on the shores of the New World in the 15th-16th century, did they find perfect clones of medevial Europe awaiting them? And if someone from Ming China visited Spain during that same time, wouldn't they consider it strange how disorganized Europe was compared to their homeland?
When humans travel to the stars, would we expect alien species to have a society that resembles whatever cultural background the author hails from? No, that kind of thing has been done, and when audiences see it now we cringe because we know that alien culture wouldn't look identical to Earth culture (unless it's done for comedy, like in Planet 51). We would expect aliens to have an "exotic" culture, if for no other reason than their biology, psychology, and ecosystem would lead them to having their own solutions as to how to survive and the big questions of life. This isn't just Euro-centric, either, look at how much Avatar got backlash for copy-pasting Native American stereotypes onto an alien planet.
Is it a bit lazy to use IRL exotic or foreign cultures for this kind of thing (i.e., Romans IN SPACE, Native Americans IN SPACE, Knights and feudalism IN SPACE, etc.) Yes. The thing is we know of only one sapient species with culture with which we can reliably interact (cetaceans, elephants and the other apes, if they have culture, can't share it with us), and it's hard to write a complex character that doesn't at least act human enough to communicate with other characters. So we tend to extrapolate from the most extreme examples of what we know (i.e., other human cultures), like how scientists use extreme environments on Earth to predict environments on other worlds or what life was like on Earth in the past.
It's not that we need to go to a new world to see an exotic culture, it's that readers want to go to an exciting new world (whether that's Barsoom, Middle-Earth, Westeros, or Pandora) and an exotic alien culture is a logical consequence of that.

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