How does or can Dramatica handle stories like Game of Thrones where there are no clear protagonists or antagonists (as Dramatica would define them), rather each character can, at any particular time, be a protagonist or an antagonist and there may be several of either at the same time?
I would focus less on Protagonist and Antagonist, and instead focus on the relationships between individuals. Who are the Main Characters and Influence Characters, what kind of Relationship Story Throughlines do they possess, and how do those play out over time?
Then, I would go back in and start defining Overall Story Throughlines.
For instance - in Season One, Ned and Robert have a Relationship (friends) where Ned is the Main Character and Robert is the Influence Character. Ned eventually Changes because of Robert’s Steadfastness. The Outcome and Judgment of that Changed Resolve would help point you in the right direction of the Overall Story Throughline—for that first season storyform.
And then you would do the same for all the other relationships, which may or may not carry over from one season into the next.
It’s all about the meaning of the relationship and that Changed/Steadfast dynamic.
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Bear in mind, I’ve only read the first book, and even that was a while ago. But from what I understand of the series:
Let’s look at this series from two different angles. From the first, the series titles: “A Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Crowns,” “A Storm of Swords,” etc. These all refer to the Overall Throughline of attempting to seize the Iron Throne. We have multiple Protags/Antags, but let’s set Pursuit/Avoid and Consider/Reconsider aside for the moment. Why do each of these characters want the Throne? Dany wants it because it’s her birthright; Tyrion wants it to prove to the world that he’s greater than his disfigurement; the Lannisters want it because… they’ve got it, and they’re going to hold on for as long as possible? (The rest can be filled in by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. 
)
So saying all the different families are Pursuing the Throne is… true, but probably not very helpful. I think what makes the Overall Story interesting is the different motivations (…Purposes? You know what I mean) driving the characters to do it.
But then we can look at the overarching title: “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The current interpretation of that is as the Relationship Throughline between John Snow representing Ice (his last name, the Wall, etc.) and Dany representing Fire (because, you know, dragons). So I think you can create an interesting contrast between the life and arcs of John Snow, the bastard without a name, and Danaerys*, the woman bearing the most powerful name in all of Westeros. Even if these two almost never interact, the story gains its strength through the reader comparing and contrasting their lives.
I… don’t know if that makes sense. 
- This is why I’ve been calling her Dany the whole time. I have no idea if that’s spelled right or not. XD
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Because my day isn’t complete until I’ve annoyed Jim . . .
Thinking in terms of both the books and the TV series, I’d argue that there are multiple (but not infinite!) storyforms in each of the main books and each season of the TV series. These get progressively more complicated as the books and series progress.
In Book 1 (which coincides with season 1 of the TV show), you’ve got 3 distinct storyforms:
- Fight for control of the throne. As Jim rightly points out, Ned is the MC (he’s also the protagonist) and Robert is the IC. The antagonist in that first season and book is Cersei.
- The Dragon Queen. Danni is the MC (and protagonist). The IC is, I think, Kal Droggo. While he gets vegetative early on, his existence and plight is what pushes Dannie to change – to become a queen. When she finally burns him in a funeral pyre and emerges unscathed, she’s let go of the past entirely.
- The North. Jon is the MC (and protagonist) trying to find out what’s really happening north of the wall even as he struggles for his own place and sense of identity among the watchers. Sam is the IC.
There are lots of other mini-arcs, but I’d argue they aren’t complete storyforms in the first book and season. Rob plays a big role, but his actions in the first book and season are largely about what Ned’s doing (i.e. trying to support him). Tyrion gets involved in lots of stuff, but not in the way he does in the second and subsequent books/seasons.
Before anyone says they’re all part of one storyform, though, keep in mind that 1) these crucial characters (Ned, Jon, Danni) – with whom we spend vast amounts of the book and tv show – barely register in each other’s throughlines (in the case of the first book and season) Nobody in King’s Landing knows or gives a crap about what’s happening north of the wall. But what’s going on north of the wall is important and its own story. We only get the barest hint of Danni’s story in King’s Landing (when they agree to have her killed) and that whole plot point amounts to nothing in the end. 2) You could extract each of these stories and have them be their own books or series. They’d have all four throughlines and full progressions.
One of the traps of something like Game of Thrones is that Martin completely changes who the main characters are across seasons. Someone like Jaime Lannister is a side character in the first book, but eventually we hit a point where he’s got his own story.
This is one of the challenges of something like Game of Thrones. While its got series arcs that could be defined globally (ultimately as “Saving Westeros From The White King”), it’s simply much, much bigger than what we’d think of as a normal unit of story (like a novel or a movie). Unlike a show like Law & Order where each episode would have a separate storyform, it seems to me that GoT uses the unit of a season within which to tell several different stories.
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For the record, I’m not annoyed and I totally agree with all of it! I was just pointing out what I considered to be the “main” storyform of the first season (having yet to read the books).
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Holy cow . . . never thought I’d read those words 
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[SPOILERS if you’re not up to date on the series…]
It seems pretty clear to me that for the overall series story, John Snow is the MC and Dany is the IC, with whatever romantic thing happens between them as the RS. (My holistic-minded wife has been waiting for John and Dany to “get together” since season one.) That said, she was a little disappointed when they did finally get together, because it felt both a bit rushed and predictable (to her).
I think this is because while the “big arc” story has always been playing in the background, the series has been so busy with its other stories that some of the big “Song of Fire and Ice” story points have been pushed off. This is particularly true for the RS, which couldn’t really even develop until the two characters meet. (I think it’s not as true for the IC - Dany’s “influence” has been felt by all the characters for a long time, if not as directly on John). I guess it’s possible that there have been IC handoffs throughout, but I can’t remember now.
Curious to know what the more expert Dramatica users think about this.
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Given they meet for the first time in season 7 (of 8 total) and haven’t ever referred to or even really known of each other’s existence for the entire rest of the series, it’s hard to make the case that he’s the MC and she’s the IC. You can make a case that the main storyform of season 7 is about them, but to go farther than that isn’t supported by anything in the actual story outside that one season.
There’s a risk in trying to force a massive series – one that has many, many different storyforms over its many seasons – into a single storyform. In just the first five books, A Song of Ice & Fire is 4228 pages long. By the end of the series you’ll almost certainly be able to identify a generalized OS – something along the lines of “A fractured kingdom must come together to face a cataclysmic threat”. But the only MC you’ll be able to choose will be whoever’s last standing. If Jon Snow dies in episode 1 of season 8, it clearly won’t be him. If Danni leads everyone to victory, we’ll think it’s her. If she dies and Tyrion is the one that leads the charge, we’ll think it’s him.
I don’t think this is universal to all series, by the way. M.A.S.H. clearly had Hawkeye as the main character. Harry Potter had . . . well, Harry (though it really should have been someone else! #TeamHermione ;)).
A Song of Ice and Fire, though, is a series of many stories told within the context of a massive civil war and the looming threat of a magical enemy. To look at it in its entirety is to reduce it to a tale: one with no clear main character, no clear influence character, and no relationship story.
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Was thinking the exact same thing @decastell. For me, one of the tests I propose the community should do is to deeply analyze one of these compelling epic fantasy series. The one I suggest is LOTR. Reason being that it’s been completed.
Personally I feel that some of the choices for analysis - while very structurally sound- are just too safe. Let’s have a professional LOTR breakdown and see how the different storyforms were woven and so on.
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Interesting idea, though a huge time commitment for people participating. My brain is full of the LotR movies now, and certainly in those you can argue for Frodo as the MC. If the entire story was reduced to “An inexperienced hobbit travels through a dangerous land to destroy a magic ring” you can get the essence of the story. There’s of course a whole world of characters and subplots in the trilogy, but I think it’s still pretty focused overall.
Something more modern – maybe along the lines of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series (though I haven’t been able to get through them myself) might be more ideal in that people can approach it without preconception.
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Brandon’s stories are amazing. Each book has its clear and complete storyform(s). Very modern and focused just as you said. For those with very limited time, I suggest listening to the audio version. Narrated my Michael Krammer(the best imo). If you’re up to it we could create a new Mistborn thread and do a thorough breakdown with other interested people.
Point taken.
I have had the subjective feeling that John Snow is the series MC from the very beginning (even though I like other characters more). Not a concrete thing, just a sense I have that the whole series is somehow “about” him, which is reinforced with these late revelations about his backstory. I agree though – if they kill him off, I will be wrong for sure!
So this leads to a practical question, which is: what’s would be the best way to develop a big work like this using Dramatica? Is it necessary to have all four throughlines for the overarching series, or would it be more practical to create just the OS and then different storyforms for the individual parts (books, seasons). Or is it better to forget Dramatica for this part? I realize there are probably many answers to this question, but I’d love to know about your and others experience and if there are any best practices/obvious pitfalls.
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I hear you. The problem, I think, is that you’d end up having a “story” (in this case by declaring the entire series one storyform) in which for the vast majority of the pages or screen time we weren’t looking through the eyes of the MC.
Maybe another way to look at it is that there’s this “title” story (i.e. the thing that we call “A Song of Ice and Fire” in the case of the books or “Game of Thrones” in the case of the TV show) which is made up of snippets from all the books or seasons. That story just follows those very specific parts of Jon Snow dealing with the white walkers and those very specific parts of Danni mastering her dragons. In that narrow slice, one person’s discovering the problem in the north, the other is coming up with the solution in the east, they come together, have sex, and then kill some ice zombies (I’m being facetious about the RS here, but it just seemed so feebly done in season 7 I couldn’t resist.)
So you could have a “title” storyform (for want of a better term). It just wouldn’t in any way encapsulate the actual series which is about these fractured kingdoms coming together. From the standpoint of the Jon/Danni thing, all those other stories are just part of the background context (i.e. they make it harder for them to solve the overall problem of the ice zombies).
My resistance to looking at it through this lens is that it kind of renders the series itself shallow – turning the thing Martin was aiming for (a rich, complex, highly nuanced examination of a long war through multiple intersecting characters and arcs) into the exact thing he was trying to avoid (boy hero gets magic sword + hot, frequently half-dressed girl with dragons and slays evil dark lord).
It’s an excellent question – and one I’m unlikely to be able to answer. Having written a completed series of about 650,000 words (for context, Lord of the Rings is about 450K and Harry Potter is just over 1 Million), I can tell you that the least important thing for me at any time was the overall series arc. At any given moment, a novelist, screenwriter, director, or pretty much everyone else in the entertainment business is concerned with whether this next book/film/game is going to be a success. For me that means leaving everything out on the field every single time. I just couldn’t afford to be counting on book 3 being the exciting bit while book 2 would be the slower bit.
A second consideration is that, regardless of where you intended to go, its where each instalment takes you that defines what happens next. Sometimes small things, like a subtle change in the relationship between two characters, completely negates the virtue of what you intended to write next.
With that in mind, Dramatica’s been very helpful to me in writing a series in two ways:
- By forcing me to see thematic holes in my draft.
This is kind of the most obvious use of the model because when you’re trying to make the book the best it can be, identifying what’s missing is crucial. Frequently I’ll find I’ve got an IC and an RS but that they’re so overlapping as to be indistinguishable from one another. That forces me to give the IC a true throughline, and to give the RS a reason to exist (rather than just the “We’d like to see a romance in there somewhere” notion).
- By helping me to avoid repeating the same storyform
Often when I’m working on a sequel, I’ll go back and re-map the book that’s published as a Dramatica storyform. Seeing what I’ve just done abstracted into Dramatica variations and elements makes it easier for me to push the new book into a different storyform – and thus keep things fresh.
So for me, it’s less about Dramatica giving me a structure for a series and more about Dramatica giving me tools to think about each book as I’m going and how to make each one compelling in its own right. In this sense, I’m going for completeness (i.e. exploring all four possible concerns in each domain over the series) rather than progression (i.e. having it tell me what each book should do.)
Not sure if that’s helpful, but that’s kind of where I’m at.
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This is super helpful @decastell. Thanks for the detailed response.
Both of these points are very interesting to me. I discovered Dramatica last year while I was trying to outline a series and finding out that the conventional 3-act/4-part approaches weren’t working. I had another unfinished book that wasn’t working structurally either.
I find the idea of having a tool for outlining from the series arc down to the scene/beat level (having it help me with both completeness and progression) very seductive, but the progression part is harder than it looks. I’m beginning to come around to the idea (as @mlucas and others have repeatedly suggested) that it might be better to use Dramatica to understand the story, write the first draft, and then use it to fix holes.
So anyway it’s very instructive to understand better how you use it.
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I understand what you’re saying. The series would be pretty stupid if that were all it was boiled down to. I guess I was trying to understand how having some big story arc/argument might give the work an overall coherence that it might otherwise lack, and how one might use Dramatica to apply that to one’s own series in the conceptual stage. I think most tv series (even the good ones) don’t have that overall arc – even the good ones take things season-by-season (e.g. The Walking Dead). But I always had the feeling that GoT was building to some bigger climax that would sort of tie everything together a that was a good thing (but maybe it’s not!)