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Narrative
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A space opera is a work set in space, often on a spaceship or a station. It has an epic character to it: The universe is big, there are lots of sprawling civilizations and empires, there are political conflicts and intrigues galore. Frequently it takes place in the Standard Sci Fi Setting.
Space opera has a lot of romantic elements: big love stories, epic space battles, oversized heroes and villains. What it rarely has is serious consideration of how technology and science would change society, with the space opera setting working just like present day (or past) society. (Which may be an excuse to deploy Medieval European Fantasy tropes.)
Note that is is quite different from the first definition of space opera, which was a derogatory term. It was a variant in a long line of terms for substandard genre fiction: 'horse opera' was bad Western fiction, whereas a 'soap opera' (so named because they began as hour-long ads for soap) was a hackneyed drama. The phrase was coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to describe what he called "the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn". Weirdly, this means that today many works which were originally touted as examples of 'serious' science fiction, such as the Lensman series, are today held up as prime examples of Space Opera. As more authors and writers came to embrace the space opera style, the term has largely lost its negative connotations. Assisted by writers who regarded all tales of action and adventure in space as bad, and so tried to label it all "space opera" in pergorative sense; they succeeded with the label, but not with keeping it pergorative.
Star Wars is probably the most famous modern example of space opera. In Star Wars, technology is either magic (the Force) or slightly faster versions of today's gadgets (blaster rifles, hovercars, space ships) and the characters would be right at home in a fantasy novel (evil emperor, farmboy, princess).
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith had a subtle Lampshade Hanging on this. In one scene, the characters go to an opera performed by the aquatic Mon Calamari - a literal space opera. (Despite it looking very pretty, it was nicknamed "squid lake".)
The genre is useful for long story- and character-arcs but also expensive to film. Unless you do it in animated form, like dozens of anime series.
The opposite of Space Opera would probably be Hard Science Fiction, where the characters are generally more "normal" (i.e., more working class slobs, pragmatic engineers, and imperfect AntiHeroes than Aces and Capes) and with technology that is either conceptually similar to plausible real-world near-term technology, or at least internally consistent. In recent years, however, the trend has been towards incorporating hard sci-fi elements into space opera, as in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica.
Note that while many more famous space operas go to the "ideal" side of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, more recent ones are harder and more "realist" (i.e., cynical): Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and Firefly being most prominent in Live Action TV. In Science Fiction literature, where there are less restraint due to budget, a growing subgenre of this sort of thing has been dubbed New Space Opera, starring authors such as Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton.
Space Opera is actually a component of the religion of Scientology, under that exact name.
ExamplesAnime
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