I mean, to be fair, you just listen sorta everything. It's like saying "all the fruit I've had before has been fruit and that's cliche". I expected you to be a little narrower on your setting like schools or medieval middle earth fantasy. You've listing huge categories. Also you're not listing settings. Cyberpunk and fantasy are genres.
I think as far as huge umbrella archetypes most settings can fall into one of those listed. But if you're looking to further explore options and try and find some that are somewhat less common I think it would be useful to look deeper into different subcategories of settings. For example, off the top of my head some unique-"ish" fantasy settings that have definitely been done several times but maybe not as much as a generic fantasy setting, would be something like heaven, hell, or perhaps inside a character (either physically- think like stories where characters shrink down and go inside, or maybe spiritually like diving into their psyche).
When looking at "Earth", there are not only thousands of different locales to choose from, but also time periods and added "flavors", such as steam punk or urban fantasy. I feel like big key cities are probably cliched at this point (tokyo is the setting for tens of thousands of japanese media, new york city is a similarly common United States setting, etc) but there are lots of underutilized sorts of settings as well.
& etc. for the other categories.
Well, there are alien planets and space stations, unless you amalgamate it into space. There is some stuff that takes place in microscopic world or within human body but i guess you can amalgamate it as Earth.
All and all, maybe I am thinking inside the box too much, but I am not seeing an alternative. Some sort of an energy field? Still cosmos, I suppose. Time as a setting? A crystal? Matrix or other simulated/electronic world?
Like, just hint what you are driving at?
Do not think about Edwardian & Victorian summer houses, the London Ton, the costal farms, the light houses, and fishing villages.
Do not think about the metropolis throngs, musical songs, urban lawns.
Do not think about space freight bars, orbital stars, stellar rifts, and guns that go biff.
Do not think of magical schools, celestial daughters, green energy tools.
Do not think of class rooms of the mind, heartbreaks pined, angst defined.
Do not think of myriad planes for Doctors Strange flow astral again.
Do not think of adventures gathered, bards scolded, treasures sorted.
Do not think of dystopia scenes, rarely green, confounding schemes.
Do not think of household and apartment angst, tired pranks, giving without thanks.
Do not think of demi-god rage, a fresh page, confusion made.
Do not think of cherry blossom paths, prose token verse, love word in supply and in dearth.
Write down everything you hear, that you find dear. Keep a note file on hand. Make Plan.
Listen for the whispers at The Muses Door.
"The Flintstones were the pioneers of stonepunk, but aside from that it was not very explored"
serious reply: i think it may be because cavemen are strongly associated with primitive grunts and stupidity (despite demythifications, they started building tools after all)
But a combination of stoneage with mythology could be interesting. "how do cavemen handle dragons", "do they develop magic?", how these tribes work?
If anyone is interested on a solid narrative on a primitive setting, i totally recommend "Primal" from the creator of Samurai Jack.
Like people already pointed out nothing is 100% new, whatever this even means, everything has been done before, all song have been written, all stories have already been told. Now it is up YOU to expand on all that has been done before. You are the lord of your tales, master scribe and acolyte at the same time. A setting is a shorthand for many things, but how do you tell the story? Do you barely show background and give detail or do you create microcosms upon themself? It's up to you to breathe live into the story. To gift the readers with something unexpected. A twist, a turn, an ancient urn, containing scrolls of tales of old.
So to the unused settings, we cannot know of untold tales. YOU have to tell them. Blend and merge all that you love, detail, uniqueness, a law unseen. I cannot give you examples for that would render my rant pointless. It is really up to each creator to do something unseen, yet like I stated it will ALWAYS be somehow inspired by your suroundings, we can only work with what we know...
So it's less about the setting that is 'original', but the execution and amount of work you put into it. And for this you can only turn to other media to gather a vision of what you want, continueing this cicle of retelling all the same yet different tales.
Unfortunately, despite our desire for originality, almost everything has been done already. Granted each thing has probably had varying amount of use, but my teacher used to tell me. "Everything has been done before, the only difference is that it hasn't been done by you." So sure, there may be settings, ideas, and everything else that's similar to others' but what you bring to the table, that's unique. It's your idea and so whatever you end up doing, it'll be great.
I have to agree with everyone who says nothing is 100% original, someone somewhere has done it before. Cliches aren't the evil some people make them out to be. The problem lies in what the person does with the cliche. If they truly are following everything to the exact T, then yeah it's going to be boring as heck. But if the author can put their own spin on it then even the cliche foundation can be something special. I have no problem admitting I have a lot of cliches in my books (especially when I follow the chosen one trope. Oh man do I love a good Chosen one story) because they're what I enjoy.
A few years ago I wrote a superhero book where there are pills that give a "normie" (my noon-supers since there's those born with power and those born without) superpowers. I had never heard of anything with that kind of premise for superpowers before and I was talking to a friend about the basic idea right before I was going to start writing it and all of a sudden she's like "Oh you mean like such and such" and lists off a comic series. Now I can't for the life of me remember the name of the comic now, but when I googled it sure enough, it had some of the basic ideas I had come up with. I also believe there is now a Netflix movie that also uses super power giving drugs as the premise (though from my understanding is the pill doesn't give a specific power like my pills do.) So here I was, thinking I had a totally original idea and now there are at least two things that have the same basic idea of superpower giving drugs. Now obviously there aren't enough of them the idea has become cliche, but it still shows you nothing is truly original. Someone, somewhere has done it before. Some will have done it better, some won't.
So if you like a certain cliche either as a reader, writer, artist, then go with it. Just put your own spin on it whenever you can. Don't force yourself out of the box just for the sake of being out of the box. Create what you want and enjoy.
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