Narrating fantasy settings

A friend doesn’t enjoy reading fantasy novels but will happily snatch up fantasy movies and fantasy comics. Why?
I think it has to do with establishing setting rules. With a non-familiar setting, pictures are worth a whole lot for establishing the basics. The sky is blue. The roads are paved. People carry guns. So many things can be established without ever drawing attention to them. But in most prose fiction, the convention is that setting details should be established through narration, and incorporated into the story itself. Show, don’t tell. This requires a lot more words than conventional modern fiction.

I admit it, I’ve bought into the vague idea that fiction set in pre-existing settings (Star Trek, Werewolf, Forgotten Realms, fanfiction) is somehow not as cool as stuff set in an original world. It isn’t as prestigous. I suppose I’ve picked up some of that idea because the quality control on some licensed stuff doesn’t seem that great; like the publishers are relying on the license to sell books rather than the stories and writing. And I suppose that’s probably true.

But now I’m wondering if there’s a confusion of motivations; if the readers aren’t embracing it just because it’s a license they’re attached to, but because with all of the setting basics pre-established, the stories are a much more enjoyable light read than ‘original fantasy’. This connects to the pleasure I’ve always felt reading stories set in comfortable well-established settings and my own interest in incorporating original mythological resonance in fiction.

Okay, so, let’s take this as true: speculative fiction’s barrier to entry is the amount of setting internalization required of the reader (which usually neccesitates lots of dense prose that is difficult to make interesting without incorporating ‘tours’).

Now, the challenge is to think of ways to present that setting information without incorporating it into the narrative. Comics and movies do it with images. Games do it with a dry presentation of the setting material that is then incorporated into RPG experiences. The trick there is getting people to read the setting material, which, in my experience, a lot of people don’t really want to do. It’s dry, it’s boring, they read the parts that relate to them (maybe) and make the GM help them figure the rest out later.

I have some ideas, though.