This is a fantastic question!
Everyone asks it eventually, so more than happy to answer it for you so you can gain greater clarity.
To be clear with the example found in the video, when I broke down Signpost 1 of the Past many would have assumed that the children elements of Fate, Prediction, Interdiction, and Destiny would show up. They didn’t - the children Elements of Being showed up. Why is that?
Why do Elements end up “out-of-place”?
In short, the model of the Storymind that you see as those large towers (the PDF and in the Theory book) illustrate the model at rest. Every Element is perfectly in balance (Universe against Mind, Past against Memory, etc.). You can think of it as a visual representation of a Zen state of mind, where there is no inequity and no imbalance.
Once you introduce an imbalance, and the Storymind identifies a Problem, everything in the model gets wound up through a combination of flips and rotates. You can think of the model like a Rubik’s cube, where the model at rest version has all the colors aligned perfectly on either side. Once the Storymind identifies a Problem (i.e., when you create a story), the cube gets wound up over and over again, until–at the beginning of the story–every color is out of place. This inequity expresses itself as narrative tension–the mind wants to see everything back at rest. A story is simply a re-arranging of those tiles back to equity.
During that process of winding up the model, Elements will fall out of place with their at-rest parent Elements. In the example above the children Elements of Being (Knowledge, Ability, Desire, and Thought) end up under Past in the MC Throughline. This is a function of both Dynamics (Resolve, Growth, etc.) and Throughline arrangements–these items tell the platform how to wind up the model to achieve the right kind of narrative tension prior to a story beginning. This distortion is in part, a method of modeling projection in the Storymind (i.e., it’s not my problem, it’s yours).
Practically speaking, you’ll find these out-of-sorts combinations more conducive to narrative to tension and conflict. In other words, how much more fun is it to write about the past in terms of what you know, what you’re capable of doing, what you long for, and what you or others think of your past? Now, compare that to the at-rest version of writing about the Past in terms of Fate, Prediction, Interdiction, and Destiny…definitely, not as compelling.
Differences between earlier Dramatica applications and the Subtxt/Dramatica platform
Narrova is part of the Subtxt/Dramatica platform–which means that it is build on top of the Subtxt Narrative Engine–not the original Dramatica engine. While building Subtxt, I identified two problematic issues with the original algorithms that I updated and engineered into the justification process found within the Subtxt application. The result of this is that many, if not all, of the Storyforms found in Subtxt do not align with the earlier Dramatica application, particularly when you get down to the Progressions and Events beneath the Signposts.
Many familiar with Dramatica and Subtxt find the newer plot progressions to be more accurate and more intuitive when it comes to the order of events within their story.
Now that we have the Storyform Builder within the platform, it becomes necessary to get everyone on the same page with the updated algorithms–which I am, coincidentally enough, preparing today!
Once this is complete, I will be re-visiting my own engineering of the justification process back in 2021. I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to speed up the process so that you won’t have to wait ten minutes for a Storyform that hasn’t been built yet on the platform.
Let me know if you have any follow-ups. Dramatica co-creator Chris Huntley addressed the reason why the model does what it does here back in 2017: How does Dramatica determine Signpost order? - #15 by chuntley
