I wonder if there is a strange counter-intuitive thing happening in which more source material creates more gaps.
Actually, I'm not sure that's counter-intuitive at all. The more ground a canon tries to cover, the more gaps there are going to be, for all the reasons you describe (more mythology, more characters, more points of view). And I think this explains why book series and TV series (and, to a lesser extent, film series) are more likely to have large, long-lasting fandoms than one-shot books and movies.
I think, for me, games tend to appeal more because even a strongly arc-driven series (such as B5 and HP) is going to be more episodic in nature than the average RPG, which is almost always telling a single story (even if that story has many points of view and more than one protagonist). I'm not sure why it's easier for me find the gaps in a single story than in a series, but it does seem to work for me better.
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Actually, I'm not sure that's counter-intuitive at all. The more ground a canon tries to cover, the more gaps there are going to be, for all the reasons you describe (more mythology, more characters, more points of view). And I think this explains why book series and TV series (and, to a lesser extent, film series) are more likely to have large, long-lasting fandoms than one-shot books and movies.
I think, for me, games tend to appeal more because even a strongly arc-driven series (such as B5 and HP) is going to be more episodic in nature than the average RPG, which is almost always telling a single story (even if that story has many points of view and more than one protagonist). I'm not sure why it's easier for me find the gaps in a single story than in a series, but it does seem to work for me better.