21–30 of 105 posts
A poor man finds a magic lamp. He summons the genie, and wishes for great fortune. (Rags to riches.) He makes another wish, and it horribly backfires. (Icarus.) No longer trusting genies, he wishes he'd never found the lamp. The genie rewinds time. A poor man finds a magic lamp.... (Infinite loop plot not included in the classification.)
EDIT: Downvoter, how would you classify this story?
A great book on this subject is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His theory of the archetypal hero and the theory of the monomyth is a great influence on anlyses like this one (and also on some artistic works - including a small film series known as Star Wars). It's fantastic to see these natural language processing techniques applied to this topic.
There are so many more interesting, surprising stories to be told that leave the viewer with unresolved things to think about and captivating cul-de-sacs along the way. The 1970s films were full of odd, interesting plots and films where it was unclear who the protagonist was (let alone a hero). Then Lucas discovered Campbell and made two pretty-good, unbelievably successful kids' films and modern cinema was born.
Now every film (especially kids' films) are a take on a James Bond plot whether they are about loveable zoo Creatures and cheeky penguins, toys in a nursery-school or talking cars: a super-villain, a secret base, a mysterious super-weapon… yawn
Grown-up films are no better: reduced to a sorry stream of infantilised garbage about super-heros who each in turn is given super-powers only to see them quickly taken away to provide some tension before a giant battle in which cities (and budgets) are destroyed for no good reason (accept perhaps to deliver a few half-decent one-liners) before a last-minute triumphant victory in a working steel-mill (if budget allows) or some disused warehouse if not.
sigh
tldr:
Every story has change.
* Positive
* Negative
* Positive, then negative!
* Negative, then positive!
* Positive, then negative...then positive!
* Really negative...then positive!
if that's what you learn after studying 1700 novels, i'd give up on fiction entirely
A lone melody works on one dimension also: Absolute rises and falls.. This can be pleasing but is limited in it expressiveness. Add another note however, and you get another kind of rise and fall: Relative. One note is falling, but the other note is falling faster. One note rises while the other note falls, but then later falls when the other rises.. Now add a third note, and you start to get to hint and deceive where each note will go, fulfilling and violating expectations.
Now that sounds like a real story.
Counterexample: A poor man finds a magic lamp. He summons the genie, and wishes for great fortune. (Rags to riches.) He makes another wish, and it horribly backfires. (Icarus.) No longer trusting genies, he wishes he'd never found the lamp. The genie rewinds time. A poor man finds a magic lamp.... (Infinite loop plot not included in the classification.) EDIT: Downvoter, how would you classify this story?
Early in the run it'll come across as kinda corny, but mid-way through the run it'll be a strong episode and one fans will cite as a favorite forever.
This feels pretty reductive. They chose one variable to measure stories on, fortune, and then of course all of these stories follow a short list of possible patterns. This counts as research?
What they should research next: "every story falls into one of these basic length categories!"
Researchers could not find other lengths although they hypothesized that if someone wanted they could create a “mega” category. “It’s possible,” they concluded.
A great book on this subject is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His theory of the archetypal hero and the theory of the monomyth is a great influence on anlyses like this one (and also on some artistic works - including a small film series known as Star Wars). It's fantastic to see these natural language processing techniques applied to this topic.
I blame Joseph Campbell for ruining modern cinema with it's simplistic boring plots (like Star Wars's) where yet another hero battles some evil tyrant to save the world, universe or forest. There are so many more interesting, surprising stories to be told that leave the viewer with unresolved things to think about and captivating cul-de-sacs along the way. The 1970s films were full of odd, interesting plots and films…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What they should research next: "every story falls into one of these basic length categories!"
Short, medium and long. Researchers could not find other lengths although they hypothesized that if someone wanted they could create a “mega” category. “It’s possible,” they concluded.