One thing I’ve been thinking about of late is the importance of certain archetypal and trope content to a particular genre (genre being defined as it usually is - science fiction, western, comedy, etc.). An example of such content would include laboratories (pronounced laBORatories), confined spaces, old sins, monsters, taboos, lightening, peasants, insanity, horrific secrets, dark strangers, karma, virginity, etc, in horror stories.
It seems to me that such archetypal / tropic content should serve as gists. Has there been any more work on this type of content and its relationship to Dramatica? It’d be awesome to be able to go through a master list of such tropes and figure out how they represent different appreciations.
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I don’t think the tropes could serve as gists on their own, but you can relate them to Dramatica elements by using them as the “nouns” in the gists. @jhull used to include collections of thousands of such gists (fantasy, sci-fi, western, thriller, etc.) as part of a Narrative First membership; I’m not sure if he maintains those any more but you could contact him. It’s possible he plans on adding genre functions to the Subtext gist lists at some point?
An example would be take “confined spaces” and use it to make a gist for Subconscious: fear of confined spaces, or being claustrophobic.
Or take “monster” and use it to make a gist for Desire: lusting after the monster
The existing gists that end with “someone” or “a particular group” or “something” are particularly good for applying these things. You can end up with neat combinations you might not normally think of, like fearing virginity or lusting after insanity.
This was actually why I started to build Subtext in the first place - load times for Dramatica with the Gist Collections were sometimes over 10 minutes.
Unfortunately (fortunately), I got a bit side-tracked…but it’s part of the initial design and will be a part of it.
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