Is the first always the best?

I was never much of a fan of film critic Pauline Kael, but there was a comment she made after the success of Titanic that really made sense. Critics baffled by the film’s box office, she said, should remember that not everyone has their perspective: To someone 12 years old who hasn’t seen a lot of movies, Titanic really may be the greatest film of their lives.
I’ve noticed the same thing writing my movie books. When watching sf/horror/fantasy TV movies for Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan, I realized that some of the movies I was dismissing as generic and formulaic might have gotten a better reception if I’d seen them earlier in the game. They’d still be formulaic, but it wouldn’t annoy me so much (you would not believe the number of Poltergeist knockoffs I watched——but if you buy the book, hint hint, you’ll understand).
The same thought came to me recently while reading a couple of urban fantasies: If I hadn’t read Anita Blake and Harry Dreseden first, would I have liked them better?
Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, for example, starts off very well: Changeling PI October Daye, who moves between the worlds of faerie and humanity (which intermingle more than we know) gets caught by an evil fae and turned into a fish. Fourteen years later, she breaks the spell, but her life——her PI business, her husband and daughter——are gone. Daye has to rebuild her life while investigating the murder of one of her few remaining fae friends.
It’s good, but it just felt too familiar to me. The hardboiled tone, the burned-out protagonist, the supernatural world existing along our own, it was all Harry Dresden redux.
I honestly don’t think that makes the book bad: The number of totally original fantasies (or hardboiled detective stories) is small. If I liked urban fantasy as a genre, I’d appreciate the differences rather than just see the similarities. Or if I’d seen October Daye before Harry Dresden, maybe she’d be the one I kept reading (while wondering why Dresden got all the attention).
Likewise Patricia Briggs Bone Crossed struck me as following more in the Anita Blake mold: The story of were-coyote Mercy Thompson emphasizes the relationships and romances more than it does the mystery she’s solving——prime-time drama style more than hardboiled detective. Which shows urban fantasy isn’t all stamped from the same cloth, but it still didn’t grab me (of the two, Rosemary and Rue was much more to my taste).
That being said, first doesn’t always mean best or best-loved. Glen Cook had a hardboiled mage-detective series out several years before The Dresden Files and I didn’t care for it at all.
Still, it’s safe to say being first doesn’t hurt.