How is the Present any different from the Situation overall? I mean, the other types have a very distinct flavors when it comes to a situation, but the Present seems like a reiteration of the Situation. I mean, whatever you define as the Situation, it must by definition be happening here and now. So how to wrap one’s mind around the fact that the Situation domain is qualitatively different from the type of situation in the Present?
We may tend to default our thinking to the present tense, but that bias is not intrinsic to the Dramatica meaning of the Situation class. Situation is defined as an external state. There is no timestamp on that external state.
In Dramatica, the Types within the Class are there to discover/explore inequity, and by inference, conflict. Here are the four flavors of Situation:
- What conflicts exist because of the Present Situation?
- What conflicts exist because of the Past Situation?
- What conflicts exist because of the Future Situation?
- What conflicts exist because of How Things Are Going in the Situation?
ALL of them describe an aspect of the Dramatica Situation structural class.
Putting it that way (“what conflicts exist…”) certainly makes it clearer: the situation is not THE conflict itself, but part of the framework that defines the conflict – the Crucial Element, right?
Would I be correct in stating that, as we go down to Types, Variations and Elements, time gets more specific until we touch the Crucial Element pairing and say “this here is THE conflict”? In other words, was the mistake of my initial thinking here to conflate the Situation Class with the story inequality, when in fact, the Situation Class just as the three other Classes are there to frame and define the conflict?
Now that I think of it, it makes a lot of sense that the Situation Class isn’t in the present in any shape or form, because by its very nature, it’s outside of time; it’s meant to be define a FIXED external state, in other words, a state that can’t be defined in terms of time – not until it’s refined, that is – because even the Present imposes a definition of time that isn’t fixed, even though it may seem fixedto our brains. Mind blown…
Yes, though I would suggest thinking of an inequity at the ‘bottom’ of the ‘stack’ rather than the crucial element. In fact, it is better to see the inequity as represent by the quad of Problem, Solution, Symptom, and Response, which works for every domain equally.