Could you use the storyform alone to cause an audience to see a particular Outcome/Judgment?

#1

Hey all, weird question here. It’s a theoretical question more than a practical one. I probably could have made it shorter, but it kept growing as I was giving the setup. It probably works just as well if you want to skip to the end if this post looks otherwise too long to read.

So, assume you have an OS with an equal number of characters.
A. Half of them are described by the story as “good guys” or “superheroes” or something similar. The other half are described as “bad guys” or “supervillains” or “evil/mad scientists”.
B. Half the characters are trying to stop a bomb from going off. The other half are trying to make sure the bomb goes off.
C. Either no one says anything to the affect of “We have to do X!” OR, for every instance of someone saying, “We have to stop the bomb!” you have an instance of someone on the other side saying “We have to make sure the bomb goes off!”
D. At the end of the story the bomb goes off.
E. The Main Character begins the story remembering an event that others describe as a tragedy. He remembers seeing people hurting and screaming, he remembers standing there watching. But he never uses any language that suggests that this event was good or bad, never wakes up in a sweat hearing the people scream from his nightmares, never says ‘those people sure deserved what they got’. He just remembers it. At most, he says “I can still hear them screaming”. At the end of the story, he finds himself watching the aftermath of the bomb explosion, not helping, not making any judgments on how he feels about it. He simply restates, “I can still hear them screaming”.
F. You write this story with four different storyforms. Each has a different Outcome/Judgment. You use the exact same events in all four stories, and you place them in the appropriate order for each storyform.

Will the storyform for each of these stories be enough for the audience to decide what the story goal was (this means that in the Success storyforms the audience will see the bomb going off as the goal being achieved and thus the goal as being to set the bomb off, and in the Failure storyforms the audience will see the bomb going off as the goal not being achieved and thus the goal as stopping the bomb) and will it be enough for the audience to decide how the Main Character feels about witnessing tragedies (meaning in the Bad storyforms the audience decides that when the Main Character says he still hears them screaming, he means his personal issues are not resolved, and in the Good storyforms the audience decides that when the Main Character says he still hears them screaming, he means his personal issues are resolved)? Or would doing something like this simply look like you were breaking the storyform and leave the audience confused?

#2

Now that I’ve gone to all the trouble of writing and posting, I’m vaquely remembering a similar question that I think was posted on here previously. The answer is probably, no, that it wouldn’t work if the Cost and Consequences and such all look the same as well. It was a fun thought experiment, though.

However, I guess you could change each story to match the points in each form and maybe still have one audience see the bomb going off as success and the other audience see it as failure, or to have one audience see the MC as resolving his issues and the other audience see him as not resolving them even though those specific events look the same in all four stories.

#3

Actually, I’ve been thinking about this question, too, and I think I have an answer, at least one that makes sense to me. Basically, I think of it like this: a story begins in some equity harmony. Either the characters are happy with their lot, or things are negative, but not so negative that people want to rock the boat. Then, the Story Driver hits, and things are thrown into inequity discord. The Protagonistic character(s) want(s) the discord to resolve towards the Goal, right? Towards a new harmony. The Antagonistic character(s), meanwhile, want to resolve towards the Consequence. In many cases, this is the old harmony. So part of it depends on how you frame the first harmony:

If in the first harmony, it feels like the bomb-makers have the upper hand, and it feels like the bomb disrupters are trying to reach for a new, more peaceful equilibrium, then the bomb-makers are the Antagonists, and the disrupters are the Protagonists.

If in the first harmony, it feels like everything is basically peaceful, but the bomb-makers are trying to spur some new, more terrified equilibrium, then I could see them being the Protagonists, and the disruptors the Antagonists trying to maintain the status quo.

…I don’t know if that makes any sense,or if it’s theoretically sound, but that’s how I’ve interpreted it.

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#4

So the question I began with–and I should have just asked this–was can you use only a storyform to make your audience comfortable or uncomfortable with something they wouldn’t normally be? It’s easy to do this with subject matter. Take Romeo and Juliet. Replace Juliet with a guy. Same storyform, same story, but now there’s going to be a certain portion of the population that’s no longer comfortable with this story. Can you do that, but by switching the storyform and keeping the subject matter?

I still don’t know what that would look like, but I was thinking about Silence of the Lambs. Could you take that movie and reorder events so that, without Clarice ever saying it, the audience saw it as a good thing that Clarice could still hear the screaming of the lambs? And if so, could you somehow be so precise as to have the audience differentiate between it being a good thing because she used it as motivation to stop the bad guys and it being a good thing because she was, say, secretly a serial killer as well and enjoyed the screaming? Again, without her saying it? Seems like it’d be a stretch because the implied story points wouldn’t match up. But then…maybe?

And now I’m looking at The Watchmen (graphic novel, not movie). I remember when I read it the first time and got to the end and realized along with the good guys that they weren’t going to be able to do anything with Ozymandias to bring justice because it would essentially mean undoing the world peace he had brought about. I felt pretty uncomfortable with it, as I’m sure I was supposed to. I don’t know what the storyform was, but I’m thinking it was at least a Judgment of Bad. So now I’m wondering if it could have been written in such a way that I would not have been uncomfortable with that ending, so that I would have thought the heroes ridiculous for having a problem with not being able to take Ozymandias in, so that I would have seen it as a Judgment of Good. It would be easy to get me to accept it, even if not feel comfortable with it, by writing it from O’s perspective, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. I want to know if I could have read the same story from the heroes’ perspective, same subject matter, but see it as a good thing.

I’m sure it’s a much easier thing to do than I’ve made it. If I really knew how to look at it, this is probably all Dramatica 101.

#5

I think what you’re getting at is tension between content and process. Dramatica is all process; it is content-agnostic. Nothing in the storyform demands that Juliet be a man or a woman or a fish – that’s all up to you, and it’s all up to the audience how they feel about that.

I re-watched Prince of Egypt recently and there’s a scene where Moses (and the musical score) recoils from Pharoah as he justifies the infanticide with, “They were only slaves.” This is obvious to a modern Western audience, but I wonder how that scene would play out if you showed it to ancient Mesopotamians, for whom slavery and castes were a fact of life. “Dude, what’s Moses’ problem?”

My point is that it’s impossible (and IMO not even desirable) to preemptively sever people from their cultural / socio / religious / spiritual backgrounds, which they are going to bring to any story in full force. So the short answer is no, I don’t think there’s any one storyform that will make everyone, universally, comfortable with its Outcome / Judgment combination.

#6

I think you’re at least mostly right. But…

I’d agree you wouldn’t want to preemptively do this. I was thinking more along the lines of letting an audience bring all this with them, but to somehow convince them to give that up along the journey. Imagine how amazing it would be (amazing in achievement, but not good) if you could show Prince of Egypt to a modern Western audience and have them be on the Pharoahs side when that scene takes place.

If you preemptively try to separate the audience from their expectations, they won’t accept the givens of your argument. You’d need to match the stories givens to what the audience will accept and then lead them away from that. But then, I guess that just is what telling a story is about. Convincing people of your argument.

Anyway, I don’t think i was even very focused on one idea there. mostly just pondering about the strength of a storyform and how much impact a single storyform change can have on one story. There was some discussion in the Call Me By Your Name thread that sparked it.

#7

I guess this is the reason I posted the question I did instead of the one I said I should’ve posted. By the time I got to to posting,I was also wondering if ones storytelling could be such that it would it be possible to write a paragraph or a page or whatever for each item on the chart and then those same couple hundred paragraphs be arranged into 31000+ stories that all accurately represented a unique storyform.

#8

Well, it sounds like what you’re talking about is less using the storyform alone to cause an audience to see a particular outcome or judgement-- I think it’s pretty clear that you can-- and more suppressing certain story points and then asking whether the audience will still be able to conclude the judgement/outcome you intended based on the points that remain.

In the example you’ve laid out, you are deliberately trying to obscure the story goal. Either the story goal is to make the bomb go off, or it’s to keep it from going off. Either way, you as the author know your own intent. If you choose not to transmit this intent to the audience, you’re just leaving out the encoding of a key storypoint. Whether the remaining storypoints will be enough to allow your audience to correctly intuit your original intent probably depends on how many of those story points are encoded and how clearly they are presented to the audience.

I think you could definitely write a story in which you refused to clearly encode the story goal and still have a story that makes a successful argument, but it seems sort of like shooting your foot before running a marathon. Like, okay, you could do that, but I’m not really sure why you would.

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#9

I have two reactions to this.

First, why does it matter? Yes, it is interesting in theory, but in practice it feels like hamstringing yourself.

Two, storyforms have a way of not really snapping into place until the very end, and that allows some re-interpretation of things we’d seen earlier. (Any strong twist will do this, too.) So… no. You need to have the ending in there, to make it work. Otherwise, all points will have no context. Look at the ending of Birdman or Split (is it good or bad?).

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#10

So I have a couple of reactions to this.
First, I could say that it doesn’t matter. But at this point I’ve been studying Dramatica for as long as-if not longer than-I went to college. Sometimes it’s just fun to explore the parts that don’t matter.

Second, I could suggest that the reason it’s interesting in theory is because the answers might provide a lot of valuable information for using the theory in practice. If I know that placing things in the right order alone is enough to explore a problem properly, it could mean a big difference in the way a story is written. It means I could, for instance, write a superhero movie where the audience comes to see the superheroes, and still feels a sense of triumph at the end when they fail to stop the bomb from going off…because the story’s goal all along was for the bad guys to set off the bomb. It could be an interesting bit of misdirection, a way to toy with audience reception. But if you’re constantly having to suggest that “the goal of the story is x” then you can’t really use a storyform that way.

Third, my specific musings may not make much sense, but they’re not outside the box at all as far as Dramatica theory goes. The difference between a GAS and a Tale is that a Tale could leave out two or three throughlines worth of information and still expect an audience to get something from it. And Dramatica’s definition of Propaganda specifically mentions leaving out important bits so that the audience can fill them in with personal experience.

Or maybe there’s some use for it in IF if I were so inclined to write it. Can I write one Chapter that comes at the end of four different journeys that would still make sense to the audience? It may be hamstringing myself before running a marathon with a hole shot in my foot, but knowing if I can run a marathon that way means I know whether I should even try if ever I find myself at the starting line bloody and sore.

#11

So I’ll leave it alone after this, but…

…I took this as a personal challenge rather than the rhetorical question it was more likely meant to be.

Suppose I’m not talking about writing a narrative, but real life. Maybe I try to do something and it doesn’t turn out well. I failed and now, because of that, I can’t get a job, or I lost the one I had, or my health ended up getting worse, or whatever. BUT THEN I realize that I can take the same storyform, flip the Failure/Bad to Success/Good and tell everyone, no, look at it this way! The Goal wasn’t X, it was Y, the Consequences weren’t Q, they were Z, and the Dividends weren’t A, they were B and now everyone thinks I totally succeeded. Then I’ve just used Dramatica Spin to rewrite the way everyone sees the story. Now I can get a job, or…be okay with getting fired and dying. Hmm.

That may not work at all in practice, but that’s why contemplating it would matter. :grin:

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#12

Yeah, I hear you there. In some ways, this is like my own recent digression about what a “Steadfast OS” would look like.

I think a crucial take-away, though, is that you can only remove so much before the storyform falls apart. Most importantly, the storyform is not topics but themes, so you will have a very hard time placing things in the right order, because their thematic significance can only be understood as a piece of the whole. Propaganda works because the holes are small enough for us to fill in. (See: Gestalt Theory)

As for knowing you can run a bloody marathon, I do think this is a valuable piece of knowledge. Because sometimes you just need to crank out a bunch of pages.

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#13

Wondered the same thing. I’ll refrain from posting about it, though.

Yes, exactly