Related comment - Mike Duncan who made a name for himself doing long form multi episode history podcasts recently produced a fiction project of the false history of a class revolution on mars ~200 years in the future that is told through the lens of long form multi episode history podcast from a narrator in the distant future.
It's pretty good considering it is his first not-non-fiction project and the narrative is a refreshing departure from typical sci-fi stories since it's written to sound like a true history with too many important figures to remember and historically disputed causes and effects of pivotal events.
The story doesn't not follow the conflict-rising-climax-resolution structure but it often refutes a listener's anticipation of satisfying narrative elements like true history many loose ends remain loose and plenty of important characters "disappear from the records" which leaves one wondering.
It's certainly unlike any fiction I had consumed prior and it's pretty good imo so I'm shining a light on it here.
In the audio-track commentary for Angel, which is a TV series that has some very long story arcs, one of the writers mentions that they would insert superfluous details into the script (i.e names of people and places) so that they could tie future story developments back to earlier episodes and seasons, making it seem to the viewer like the entirety of the show had been worked out from the start, and that the writers had been dropping hints along the way.
>one of the writers mentions that they would insert superfluous details into the script (i.e names of people and places) so that they could tie future story developments back to earlier episodes and seasons, making it seem to the viewer like the entirety of the show had been worked out from the start, and that the writers had been dropping hints along the way.
I always wondered if writers do that stuff. Even with novels, I wonder if they go back and add details in or plan from them way back at the start.
I've listened to all of his Revolutions and Rome podcasts. I look forward to getting to his Mars Revolution podcast, but I just can't stomach the thought of it right now. Maybe in four years.
I did manage to get through the first few episodes, and I was very pleased with how effectively he recreated the level of detail he used for his real Revolutions episodes. It's not like a novel, but it captures just how many different players there are in any real-world event -- very different from conventional storytelling.
At that, I think it might be most interesting to people who see it in terms of his other Revolutions work. As a pure work of fiction, it could be quite dull -- too many players with too little characterization, too many events with both too much and too little detail.
>but I just can't stomach the thought of it right now. Maybe in four years
Downfalls of civilization don't seem so appealing when you're living through them. I'm that way with media that overly focuses on mental health too, I have too many relatives dealing with that stuff to enjoy it in my media as well.
Likewise, I thought it would be very cool to create a show written in a hypothetical future, that is set in our time period. The nature of the future society would only be revealed by how they choose to portray our time period, and which stories are told, just like we always put our own ideological framing on shows about the past.
It'd be interesting to see if something like that could be adapted to the screen formats the author is complaining about here. House of the Dragon faced a similar problem. The source material is a lot like what you describe, a fictional history written as if it was real historical research, with multiple conflicting sources, disputed accounts, and no way to resolve the truth of what really happened. The HBO television adaptation kind of just threw that out the window and presented what is supposed to be seen as the "real" history through a normal God's eye third-person narrator. It also showed what happens in situations that the fictional history had no account of, resolving mysteries of what happened to people who disappeared without anyone involved witnessing how and writing it down.
I think there is a pretty significant chance that someone _does_ make a TV series out of it, and it's almost ideally suited for it because it's all background material, so there's a lot of space for a showrunner to actually put their mark on it, and you could probably mine seasons of drama out of it.
Although if they haven't made the Kim Stanley Robinson books into a tv series, it would seem weird to start with this one..
I enjoyed the The Revolutions podcast from him, but was very confused when I returned to it and new episodes were clearly fiction. I would have preferred a separate podcast instead of using the same feed for history/non-fiction and then changing to fiction midway.
For sure I mean he certainly wanted to access the subscriber base he built up. And he has made some commitments to do a few series on 20th century revolutions once he's done with this project so check back in a few months there should be more non-fiction series.
I had similar thoughts about it, and the thing it's actually closest to is world building chapters in RPG books. It's almost pure world building without any actual story. Super interesting experiment.
The lore in the game Morrowind has a similar feel, though in a mythology-history instead of modern history sense, with a lot of Rashomon-style ambiguity.
Sounds alot like Alastair Reynolds Yellowstone series, although he has a more classic, alive characters bumping into and becoming part of the future history. I agree though, its a fantastic medium.
It does feel like that, but apparently after this he's going to take the podcast right back into more historical revolutions, like maybe the Cuban Revolution, as if nothing happened. Which will be hilarious if he does it.
One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one of the best movies of all time, and one that I rate very highly, but it's very different from Western movies. That difference was essential to my appreciation of it, because it's also slow paced and lacking in action; the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I could engage with the story.
I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
In children’s movies the antagonist/monster is often meant as a metaphor for the child’s lack of autonomy in an ambivalent world that they do not fully understand.
And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.
While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
It’s a standard trope in a mahou shoujo anime such as Sailor Moon or Futari wa Precure that the enemy tries to infiltrate the hero group and ultimately gets domesticated by Japanese society. I think of how the antagonist joins the party in Tales of Symphonia as a playable character.
My kids (8 and 6) snuck out of bed and ended up watching Grave of the Fireflies with me. I originally didn't watch it with them because of the subtitles, but they were hooked.
To me Ghibli often seems closer to the medieval / early modern narrative of the knight's adventure, which is a variant of the classical Western arc (initial stable situation, incident, helping figure, self-doscovery, resolution), even without considering the "Princess in the Castle" aspect (which can also be considered the female narrative counterpart).
I'll be the guy to mention Grave of the Fireflies, which is also Ghibli, and which is the Totoro flipside as another, "There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle," situation. In fact, IIRC, they were released as a double feature (imagine being in THAT theater). As with Totoro's joy, GotF's devastation lies in its lack of concern for fitting events to any overarching metaphor. People make choices and there are consequences. That's all. The story ends when the viewpoint characters have nothing else to say.
Some years back I started wading into the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die". I'm still consuming — perhaps another 3 years and I'll be done? (Can die.)
Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it.
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
Classic Thing, Japan. There are plenty of western movies that don't follow the three-act structure (off the top of my head, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive (and probably most Lynch), Boyhood (and other Linklaters), basically any Robert Altman) and plenty of foreign films that do.
"One of my favourite films, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), conforms pretty closely to formulaic structure, even if it is complicated by dream sequences: the inciting incident of the car crash; Betty’s quest to help Rita rediscover her true identity. I believe that one reason we don’t object, don’t groan with boredom, is that the scaffolding is – crucially – hidden."
I liked the movie, and I approve of this kind of creativity, but a disguised 3-act structure is still a 3-act structure.
Kubrick frequently uses a two act - Barry Lyndon where he rises from nothing to peak at the exact midpoint and then falls to nothing at the end, or Clockwork Orange where he does a bunch of horrible things in the first half and the consequences are mirrored around the midpoint of the movie.
Agree on foreign films having tropes/plot beats which were locally grown, instead of borrowed from Hollywood.
Time is another dimension you can use to get to different tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
Examples:
Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister. And then they do it, and the second act of the movie takes place and they all die. What a ride!
Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable, for such an old film.
> I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie theater screens-- sure.
For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
There is another film structure that is super common but is often overlooked. It is perhaps not coincidental that the protagonist is more often a woman. I found a blog post describing it once, but can't find it now.
In the typical three-act structure, the protagonist must make an internal change to themselves before they are able to resolve the conflict.
In this alternate plot structure, it is the community itself that must change. The protagonist is "right all along" and serves to the be the catalyst for that change. Almost as if society is the protagonist. It looks something like:
1. Inciting incident where problem appears.
2. Protagonist attempts to tackle problem using their "true self".
3. Family/village/community smacks them down and says they can't do that.
4. Protagonist tries to conform and solve the problem the way they are told to but fails.
5. Climax: Running out of options, the protagonist unleashes their true inner self and solves the problem.
6. The community witnesses this and realizes that they should accept the protagonist for who they are.
This is very common in Disney movies (Mulan and Frozen being stellar examples) and in family movies where the protagonist is a young person that "no one understands".
It is sometimes mixed with the typical three-act structure where the protagonist also makes an internal "change", but the change is most often simply accepting who they already were at the beginning of the film before trying to deny that throughout the second act.
Moana might actually be a better example than Mulan or Frozen, because there's not even any inner turmoil outside of the very beginning.
Moana herself is just about the only person who doesn't have a character arc, she just gets better at doing the things she was already set on doing. Both Maui and the entire village of Motunui including her family need to learn that Moana is actually right about everything.
She's effectively an avatar of the ocean's will, and the more she leans into it, the better it goes for her.
Having watched Moana more times than I can remember (we have two young kids), I think Moana is a classic example of the monomyth. It is basically a re-skinned version of Star Wars:
1. She starts in the ordinary world but longs to go to sea. [Just like Luke Skywalker who wants to leave Tatooine.]
2. She initially rejects the call of the sea, and tries to fit in. [Just like Luke Skywalker initially rejects Ben.]
3. But the death of her grandmother convinces her that she must leave. [Luke Skywalker decides to follow Ben after his uncle/aunt are killed.]
4. She meets Maui, a lovable rogue, and convinces him to help, despite his reservations. [Luke convinces Han Solo to rescue the Princess]
5. They defeat a few lesser enemies. [Luke and Han defeat waves of stormtroopers.]
6. Finally, she must face the final test, but the lovable rogue decides to leave. [Luke attacks the Death Star, but Han decides to leave.]
7. In the final test, she realizes that she needs to give the infinity stone (I mean, the Heart of Te Fiti) to Te Ka, but not before the lovable rogue returns to help her. [Luke realizes that he needs to use the Force, but not before the lovable rogue returns.]
8. Moana returns as a Wayfinder. [Luke returns as a hero and a leader of the Rebellion.]
9. [Oh, and I forgot about the comic relief of Heh-Heh, who only speaks in chirps and sometimes gets her out of trouble.]
It might sound like I'm making fun of it, but I really like Moana. And I do actually believe she has a character arc. The unifying theme in Moana is "knowing who you are". There is literally a song about it! Moana doesn't know who she is at the beginning. Is she supposed to stay on the island or explore? Maui doesn't know who he is--he thinks he's powerful because of his magical fishhook ("Without my hook, I am nothing!") but Moana convinces her that he is a hero even without his fishhook. Moana helps Te Ka to discover that she is really Te Fiti. And when she returns to her island, she convinces her father that they are all voyagers.
Like I said, I've really watched Moana too many times!
I haven't seen Moana but this seems like the narrative arc of a lot of mythology, where the protagonist has to learn to submit to the will of God/the gods, or can only succeed with divine intervention.
You’re describing something real; I’m a screenwriter and have worked on studio films where this kind of character arc was encouraged. (I wouldn’t call it a distinct structure because it can be mapped onto a very similar, traditional three-part framework.) It is, however, very much not an artistic decision. The reason for the prevalence of this arc in expensive, family-oriented movies is because studio executives (or worse, the CEs at production companies) are uncomfortable with characters who make bad choices, and think audiences will reject them. Maybe they’re not wrong— but this is a relatively recent development and one of the thousand reasons why movies have become so boring.
More satisfying (in my opinion) arcs tend to follow a psychoanalytic path: a character with some unaddressed pathological issue ends up in a serious crisis. The crisis forces them to acknowledge the issue and change slightly. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in a tragedy, the change happens too late. (An interesting variant in tragedy is that the change happens in time, but unexpectedly turns out for the worse—think of the end of The Godfather.)
Weirdly, Unicorn Store was the first thing that came to mind. Which is funny when you consider that it was essentially a sort of weird meta-prequel to Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson's turns in Captain Marvel.
The Hero’s Journey is useful as a writing tool, but imo it is also a lens through which we analyze stories (once we learn about it). My feeling is that _any_ story can be cajoled into matching the hero’s journey with enough imagination. For this reason, I’m not as concerned about the limited palate — i think it says more about our perspective than about the story itself. It’s like complaining that we’re missing out on math because we learn numbers in base 10. Consider this example:
“I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
Is that really constrained by the hero’s journey? Or is it just that communication discusses dilemmas and resolutions, and these can be fit into our stereotypical hero’s journey?
> “I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
Reminds me of another frequently poasted/discussed story arc classification attempt where the author basically draws some graphs that look like "down-up", "up-down", "down-up-down", "up-down-up" and so on. Well after a down you must have an up and after an up a down, if you aren't planning to quantify things...
Though I agree with you to an extent, the hero's journey includes an element of inner change in values or moral disposition. That, and not the subject's situation (or GPS coordinates), is what makes it the hero's journey.
Be as it may, I'm not a fan of this element, because it assumes that every hero worth following is morally lacking to begin with and that that's the only thing worth writing about. First, the inner world of a well-crafted character can be so fundamentally alien to any reader that its discovery can fill any number of pages. Second, and more importantly, focusing on the accidental faults of an individual person while neglecting commentary on the vices of the world at large is asinine. It also gets very tiring as you age, because you keep reading the same story for decades.
The good news is that, in many novels (and certainly in mine, check for example "When Ra Rows through the Gates of Duat"), that inner change is elided. The character's situation changes; they may completely step out of GPS range, but they remain fundamentally the same person. The conflict can be about creatively making do in an imperfect world.
One thing I've noticed in music composition (where I have more training/experience, but I suspect the same is true for narratives) is the rules get codified / standardized a generation after a style of music is popular. Bach, for example, "breaks the rules" of counterpoint at least once in every piece in Well-Tempered Clavier, which was supposed to be an educational piece so if he actually felt like there were rules to follow he'd be more likely to be "by the book" for educational purposes.
But the rules of counterpoint were codified after his death (IIRC there were two people who worked together to do it), and act like an averaging across all baroque composers. Making the rules is kind of like putting it in a glass box, sealing it off and preserving it - IE removing all life from it. A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-punk and elsewhere but also this bizzaro copy of all the superficial aspects of punk moved elsewhere.
While I love Joseph Campbell and the heros journey, I do feel like sticking too strongly to it does the same thing for narratives. I especially hate insistence that everything needs a three act structure, not because it's inherently bad, but because stories that don't need it are shoehorned into it and given an unneeded third act with more set pieces than genuine character motivation and development. It's like people see a good movie with a three act structure, and think it's due to that specific structure.
Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements.
Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.
Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.
There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
You're missing the constraints: what kinds of stories actually work for humans and can be told clearly, with mass appeal, in a 90-120 minute audio/visual format.
We already have spaces for broader or more experimental narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the kind of stories that can work.
And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel. They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be... not movies.
Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was identified and expanded upon. Then it become not new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by technical limitations slowly being removed by new tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which theoretically should make it more interesting, music has gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel new experiences.
Yes, that's a really good point. I had this nagging feeling of there was a commercialization aspect driving when I was writing that, since that's obviously what happened to punk, and you hit the nail on the head. I do think students are taught the 3-act structure / heros journey as if it was the ideal structure, but the true reason for it's ubiquity is an attempt to commoditize art.
> A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-pun
It’s not only that the films have the same basic narrative structure, but the way films these days need to check a series of boxes. You can’t have just an action movie anymore, it also must contain a romantic subplot, charismatic antagonist, light humor, diverse cast, visual effects, international marketability (topic not narrow to one countries audience) etc.
Before we had the same basic recycled narratives, but a film didn’t need to check every single box and some films were more directed at romance or certain audiences and only checked a few of these boxes.
Modern tent poles need to check every single box and it just feels so formulaic and boring.
Children's animated films also require a fart joke or two.
My parents don't enjoy seeing films in theaters. So when they took us out as children, it was under exceptional circumstances. We went to see E.T. when it premiered. I remarked about Drew Barrymore's young character shouting "penis-breath" and my mother explained that if they didn't throw in a few profanities, the film would have been rated "G" and dismissed as a children's film. A "PG"-rated film was likely to gain more screenings in more theaters and capture a broader audience.
Is that still as much of a thing? Maybe I'm over-indexed on comparisons with 1930-1960, but it seems to me that romantic subplots have been in decline--there are quite a lot of recent films that entirely lack such a thing--especially compared to back in the day. The academy's award structure of lead actor/lead actress seems like it was a better fit for days where you had to shoehorn that into everything. To the point that they stuck romance subplots into Marx Brothers movies regardless of if it made any sense. (Which is conclusive proof why Duck Soup is their best film, since the Groucho/Margaret Dumont romance subplot is better integrated into the film.)
I'd be interested in seeing someone do a breakdown of the frequency of romantic subplots in films; I have some guesses as to the possible pattern but this seems like a moment for hard data.
It is easy to lay out criticism, hard to tell what a real answer could be. A writer friend of mine said it in a Hegelian way, that plots are thesis - antithesis - synthesis. You have some conflict and it is resolved.
You might make experiences that are about spending some time in a loved imaginary world with loved characters (The Star Wars Holiday Special or Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser [1]) but inevitably people who aren't superfans are going to feel it doesn't appeal to them. You can make a profitable game (Azur Lane) which is all about fanservice, collecting, and little narratives -- and people are going to say it is degenerate and compare it unfavorably to normal single player games like, say, Hi-Fi Rush or even mobile games which have a clear story like Love Nikki. All the complaints that people have around big media franchises will still stand.
While I do have a lot of love for TVTropes, I think what they're talking about here is a little broader than most of the tropes we see there (although they do have an excellent article on the Hero's Journey itself [1]). IMO, tropes in the sense that we see them listed there are building blocks for a narrative structure, of which the Hero's Journey is one example. As mentioned upthread, kishōtenketsu is an alternative (and for that matter, TVTropes has an article on it as well, see [2]).
Readit News
It's pretty good considering it is his first not-non-fiction project and the narrative is a refreshing departure from typical sci-fi stories since it's written to sound like a true history with too many important figures to remember and historically disputed causes and effects of pivotal events.
The story doesn't not follow the conflict-rising-climax-resolution structure but it often refutes a listener's anticipation of satisfying narrative elements like true history many loose ends remain loose and plenty of important characters "disappear from the records" which leaves one wondering.
It's certainly unlike any fiction I had consumed prior and it's pretty good imo so I'm shining a light on it here.
I always wondered if writers do that stuff. Even with novels, I wonder if they go back and add details in or plan from them way back at the start.
I did manage to get through the first few episodes, and I was very pleased with how effectively he recreated the level of detail he used for his real Revolutions episodes. It's not like a novel, but it captures just how many different players there are in any real-world event -- very different from conventional storytelling.
At that, I think it might be most interesting to people who see it in terms of his other Revolutions work. As a pure work of fiction, it could be quite dull -- too many players with too little characterization, too many events with both too much and too little detail.
Downfalls of civilization don't seem so appealing when you're living through them. I'm that way with media that overly focuses on mental health too, I have too many relatives dealing with that stuff to enjoy it in my media as well.
Meta-irony(?)
Likewise, I thought it would be very cool to create a show written in a hypothetical future, that is set in our time period. The nature of the future society would only be revealed by how they choose to portray our time period, and which stories are told, just like we always put our own ideological framing on shows about the past.
Although if they haven't made the Kim Stanley Robinson books into a tv series, it would seem weird to start with this one..
I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu
And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.
While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
From the article:
"One of my favourite films, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), conforms pretty closely to formulaic structure, even if it is complicated by dream sequences: the inciting incident of the car crash; Betty’s quest to help Rita rediscover her true identity. I believe that one reason we don’t object, don’t groan with boredom, is that the scaffolding is – crucially – hidden."
I liked the movie, and I approve of this kind of creativity, but a disguised 3-act structure is still a 3-act structure.
Time is another dimension you can use to get to different tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
Examples:
Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister. And then they do it, and the second act of the movie takes place and they all die. What a ride!
Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable, for such an old film.
Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie theater screens-- sure.
For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
That's a great point. My recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(2019_film)
In the typical three-act structure, the protagonist must make an internal change to themselves before they are able to resolve the conflict.
In this alternate plot structure, it is the community itself that must change. The protagonist is "right all along" and serves to the be the catalyst for that change. Almost as if society is the protagonist. It looks something like:
1. Inciting incident where problem appears.
2. Protagonist attempts to tackle problem using their "true self".
3. Family/village/community smacks them down and says they can't do that.
4. Protagonist tries to conform and solve the problem the way they are told to but fails.
5. Climax: Running out of options, the protagonist unleashes their true inner self and solves the problem.
6. The community witnesses this and realizes that they should accept the protagonist for who they are.
This is very common in Disney movies (Mulan and Frozen being stellar examples) and in family movies where the protagonist is a young person that "no one understands".
It is sometimes mixed with the typical three-act structure where the protagonist also makes an internal "change", but the change is most often simply accepting who they already were at the beginning of the film before trying to deny that throughout the second act.
Moana herself is just about the only person who doesn't have a character arc, she just gets better at doing the things she was already set on doing. Both Maui and the entire village of Motunui including her family need to learn that Moana is actually right about everything.
She's effectively an avatar of the ocean's will, and the more she leans into it, the better it goes for her.
1. She starts in the ordinary world but longs to go to sea. [Just like Luke Skywalker who wants to leave Tatooine.]
2. She initially rejects the call of the sea, and tries to fit in. [Just like Luke Skywalker initially rejects Ben.]
3. But the death of her grandmother convinces her that she must leave. [Luke Skywalker decides to follow Ben after his uncle/aunt are killed.]
4. She meets Maui, a lovable rogue, and convinces him to help, despite his reservations. [Luke convinces Han Solo to rescue the Princess]
5. They defeat a few lesser enemies. [Luke and Han defeat waves of stormtroopers.]
6. Finally, she must face the final test, but the lovable rogue decides to leave. [Luke attacks the Death Star, but Han decides to leave.]
7. In the final test, she realizes that she needs to give the infinity stone (I mean, the Heart of Te Fiti) to Te Ka, but not before the lovable rogue returns to help her. [Luke realizes that he needs to use the Force, but not before the lovable rogue returns.]
8. Moana returns as a Wayfinder. [Luke returns as a hero and a leader of the Rebellion.]
9. [Oh, and I forgot about the comic relief of Heh-Heh, who only speaks in chirps and sometimes gets her out of trouble.]
It might sound like I'm making fun of it, but I really like Moana. And I do actually believe she has a character arc. The unifying theme in Moana is "knowing who you are". There is literally a song about it! Moana doesn't know who she is at the beginning. Is she supposed to stay on the island or explore? Maui doesn't know who he is--he thinks he's powerful because of his magical fishhook ("Without my hook, I am nothing!") but Moana convinces her that he is a hero even without his fishhook. Moana helps Te Ka to discover that she is really Te Fiti. And when she returns to her island, she convinces her father that they are all voyagers.
Like I said, I've really watched Moana too many times!
More satisfying (in my opinion) arcs tend to follow a psychoanalytic path: a character with some unaddressed pathological issue ends up in a serious crisis. The crisis forces them to acknowledge the issue and change slightly. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in a tragedy, the change happens too late. (An interesting variant in tragedy is that the change happens in time, but unexpectedly turns out for the worse—think of the end of The Godfather.)
Dead Comment
“I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
Is that really constrained by the hero’s journey? Or is it just that communication discusses dilemmas and resolutions, and these can be fit into our stereotypical hero’s journey?
That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
Be as it may, I'm not a fan of this element, because it assumes that every hero worth following is morally lacking to begin with and that that's the only thing worth writing about. First, the inner world of a well-crafted character can be so fundamentally alien to any reader that its discovery can fill any number of pages. Second, and more importantly, focusing on the accidental faults of an individual person while neglecting commentary on the vices of the world at large is asinine. It also gets very tiring as you age, because you keep reading the same story for decades.
The good news is that, in many novels (and certainly in mine, check for example "When Ra Rows through the Gates of Duat"), that inner change is elided. The character's situation changes; they may completely step out of GPS range, but they remain fundamentally the same person. The conflict can be about creatively making do in an imperfect world.
But the rules of counterpoint were codified after his death (IIRC there were two people who worked together to do it), and act like an averaging across all baroque composers. Making the rules is kind of like putting it in a glass box, sealing it off and preserving it - IE removing all life from it. A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-punk and elsewhere but also this bizzaro copy of all the superficial aspects of punk moved elsewhere.
While I love Joseph Campbell and the heros journey, I do feel like sticking too strongly to it does the same thing for narratives. I especially hate insistence that everything needs a three act structure, not because it's inherently bad, but because stories that don't need it are shoehorned into it and given an unneeded third act with more set pieces than genuine character motivation and development. It's like people see a good movie with a three act structure, and think it's due to that specific structure.
Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.
Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.
There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
We already have spaces for broader or more experimental narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the kind of stories that can work.
And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel. They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be... not movies.
Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was identified and expanded upon. Then it become not new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by technical limitations slowly being removed by new tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which theoretically should make it more interesting, music has gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel new experiences.
also pop and indie pop, rock and indie rock.
Before we had the same basic recycled narratives, but a film didn’t need to check every single box and some films were more directed at romance or certain audiences and only checked a few of these boxes.
Modern tent poles need to check every single box and it just feels so formulaic and boring.
My parents don't enjoy seeing films in theaters. So when they took us out as children, it was under exceptional circumstances. We went to see E.T. when it premiered. I remarked about Drew Barrymore's young character shouting "penis-breath" and my mother explained that if they didn't throw in a few profanities, the film would have been rated "G" and dismissed as a children's film. A "PG"-rated film was likely to gain more screenings in more theaters and capture a broader audience.
I'd be interested in seeing someone do a breakdown of the frequency of romantic subplots in films; I have some guesses as to the possible pattern but this seems like a moment for hard data.
I generally have had to go back to movies pre-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark to find film less formulaic.
You might make experiences that are about spending some time in a loved imaginary world with loved characters (The Star Wars Holiday Special or Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser [1]) but inevitably people who aren't superfans are going to feel it doesn't appeal to them. You can make a profitable game (Azur Lane) which is all about fanservice, collecting, and little narratives -- and people are going to say it is degenerate and compare it unfavorably to normal single player games like, say, Hi-Fi Rush or even mobile games which have a clear story like Love Nikki. All the complaints that people have around big media franchises will still stand.
[1] https://screenrant.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-hotel-...
A long analysis of Stargate SG-1 as starting point: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1
1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu