Franchise writing is sort of a fascinating space. Most franchise writing is mediocre or worse, but some franchise *writers* are excellent.
When you have some space that is maintained by multitudes of writers, it is interesting to track these individuals.
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i.e. when sci-fi/fantasy writers need to do all the worldbuilding, storylines etc. themselves, there are hard caps to what can be done.
When they can situate themselves at their preferred spot in a much larger ecosystem, they can write outstanding stories no longer than a novel.
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And, they can repeat this exercise over and over, as often as they are willing, without being personally responsible for maintaining their readership's interest in the universe.
This is kind of magical, and does much to elevate what would otherwise be incredibly stale fiction.
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There is some mutually elevating virtue as well. The role players - the writer who does four sort-of-maybe-OK novels and eight novellas a year, the outsider commissioned for one story, the many dud one-offs - are all making this work possible.
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Many arts are built on principles like this.
There would be no excellent competitors in games and sports if not for the mediocre ones. Everything is relative to some baseline. One context's mediocre is another's incredible.
All the work contributes, even the unimpressive work.
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And unfortunately, in the broader world there are many poisonous structures built on similar principles.
Factory farming, monocultures and Congo slavery are all built on our individually quite modest consumption.
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I think about this stuff a lot. Which decisions do you make to perpetuate evil, and which could you make to improve things?
When is a choice really meaningful, and when are you simply shifting externalities around in a larger system that remains essentially unaltered?
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Depending on the level of analysis, this looks like a moral problem, an ethical problem, a political problem, a spiritual problem, a sociological problem, a design problem, an engineering problem...
... in truth I think all of these lenses are correct, and thus partly incorrect.
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So in a sense, it matters less which lever you end up pulling, more what kind of effect pulling that lever will have on the wider system.
Which, you know, who knows?