You can love a genre and still notice what it’s missing. That gap is your opening.

Fandom and criticism are not opposites, and the most useful critics are usually the people who have listened hardest. Loving something closely means you know its habits, including the things it keeps refusing to do. That refusal is information. Nobody inside the genre is going to fill the hole they cannot see.

Write down three things your favourite kind of music or film never does. Then make something small that does one of them, keeping everything else familiar. The combination of fluency and one deliberate absence is where most new corners of a genre start.