In the end, almost everything has a soap opera in it somewhere. People have a hard time processing stories that don't have a soap opera in them somewhere. For some people it's just impossible. There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all.

That's not to say that the parts that aren't soap opera aren't meaningfully different. I disagree with the reductionistic claim that "everything is just a soap opera in the end", and leave it to the reader to determine whether or not the original link is making that mistake.

I would say it's more like salt in cooking for the vast majority of people; they expect a certain proper amount and trying to engage a normal human's taste without it is an uphill battle at best. As a result, across a wide variety of genres and styles, you'll find soap operas.

(I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot. Soap operas tend to focus on the romantic end more than average, so the embedding is not quite perfect. But I use "soap opera" as the shorthand here because they are one of the more pure embodiments of the idea, because they are basically nothing but human relationships churning and spinning, with generally not much more going on. Yeah, a couple of them have a more exotic framing device, but all that does is move them slightly off the center of the genre, not really change them much.)

Here's what's funny. You know what they used to call a book that foregrounded the soap opera elements you're talking about? A novel. That's why Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel. Now, if you go to Wikipedia, War and Peace is also categorized as a novel. What else could you call it? But it's funny to imagine a time when novel was a genre.

I think a lot of character-centered conflicts boil down to the same set of problems, regardless of the setting. For instance, you often see "keep the status quo and die a slow death" vs "expensive, risky gamble". Sometimes the setting is a small midwest town, sometimes it's a spaceship on the way to Beta Virginis. Sometimes the solution is actually unique to the setting but often it's just "find a compromise, prevent the extremists from blowing up the deal". Replace the mayor with a captain and TNT with nuclear bombs and you basically have the same story.

> There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all.

All that to say I wish there were more stories that are more focused on the plot / implications of the setting. What-ifs that aren't derailed by character drama. "What if telekinesis was real? How can we exploit it for energy / propulsion / everyday gadgets?" Like basically thought-experiments in narrative form, or a textbook with characters.

Or at least I wish I knew how to search for these types of stories. Searching for "hard sci-fi" comes close but it requires the science is plausible (no FTL, minimal new physics, etc). I don't think it's reasonable to expect authors to simulate an entire universe / provide plausibility proofs for every bit of engineering / physics. As long as the mechanics of whatever fantasy physics are consistent and developments are plausible, that's good enough for me. I don't even need a satisfying conclusion, if the protagonist rebels fail because the ultra-wealthy corpos are just better equipped, so be it, at least the ride was fun.

> I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot.

I don't know if that's really fair. I don't think that's really what most people think the term soap opera denotes, and if you broaden it to mean any work that has any sort of relational elements, its almost a tautology that all fiction will meet the standard.

More to the point, i think its an unfair response to the article, as the author is not claiming that the similarity between these two works is merely that they have relationships in them.

Thats always my justification for not caring about football at all. I don't know any of the characters and I missed the first 20 episodes.