With respect, I believe that’s a really harsh and extreme statement to make. I mean, the difference between a character’s pov and an author’s pov isn’t rocket science not even if you try to understand it without dramatica.
As I sit here trying to recall the movie, I don’t remember any of the heroes making an argument based on “what’s best for me” only “what’s best for us.” I think that’s kinda interesting and possibly significant.
I know that the last time Cap and Tony each had this argument (individually in the court scene at the beginning of Iron Man 2 and in The Winter Soldier), they did seem much more to be arguing “what’s best for me” (and they each had the opposite position).
I was trying to use ‘me’ similarly to how I used ‘us’ to show that, in this case, what’s best for the team is a form of Self-Interest because it’s about ‘us’ and not somehow a form of Morality or putting the team over ones self. In this case, the team is the self. I rewatched about 45 minutes of it with a little skipping over the MC or IC parts here and there. I mostly saw team based arguments about what’s best for’us’ but there might possibly have been some best for ‘me’ later with Bucky or Black Panther. Didn’t get that far.
Very nice. I’ve been reading this part of the book tonight, it makes sense. I also liked an older idea on a different thread, trying for nuance on the Elements by wrapping it back to the Class. But you just gave a great handle of understanding where this fits in the creation of, say, genre lit vs, I dunno, who am I reading lately, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, like that. This got me right in the kishkas.
Went back through the ‘theoretical’ discussion of Problems and Justifications tonight, drew a lot of pictures, thought about it, mulled it over. Thinking about how it reflected on our culture, our national problems: our trying solutions that no longer work out of context, how we can’t distinguish justifications from problem solving, how context is always in flux, how a person’s ‘givens’ get them stuck with a solution that no longer fits, or an understanding that is now outmoded or just plain wrong. Made me think about how the work we do is important: we have to try to help people Evaluate/Revaluate 
using a new Methodology. If they do that then their Motivation might change and, who knows, maybe even their Purpose. Anyway.
You know, the tenth time you read this thing, it starts to make sense. Just don’t stop at nine, or you’re screwed.
agree completely with this sentiment, which I had to make longer than 20 characters.
@decastell, I was going to say this on the Wiki Page for Gists threads, but it was too off topic, so I brought it over here instead.
For anyone who didn’t see the conversation over there, I mentioned the possibility of a list of conflict that could be mixed and matched with gists to show how a particular gist is creating conflict within the story. Basically, Gist X is a problem because of Conflict Y.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention that the thinking behind that exercise is the same thinking that leads me to see CA:CW as an Os Physics story. Here’s how it works. The first scene that has the Avengers in it (right after Bucky chases down the car, crashes it, and takes that package out of the trunk) we see the team doing a little stakeout. This leads to the team fighting with the bad guys for a while. We get all the way up the point where what’s his face is about to blow up himself and Cap. There may be some conflict in there that someone like @jhull can use to start assigning a storyform. But so far, I don’t see that fighting is a problem because of Y or that X is a problem because of fighting. So at that point I haven’t assigned anything.
But then what’s his face pulls out the bomb and sets it off. Wanda contains the explosion and tosses it into the air where it blows up a building full of bystanders. You see by their reactions that Wanda and Cap are conflicted by this. Not only that, but all the bystanders who were just standing around a moment before are now running for their lives. The Physics of fighting-specifically of tossing an explosion into a building-have created conflict for everyone in the scene. The next scene has Wanda blaming herself, Cap blaming himself, and people on television blaming super heroes (and Wanda mentions that they’re blaming her pretty hard). So physics is a problem because it leads to conflict within the heroes as well as between the heroes and the general populace.
Eventually we get to the scene where the accords are introduced. This is about thirty minutes in, and we’ve already scene a couple of SP1s, so it’s just about time for act 2 and no one has had to chose a side yet.
So the older guy comes in and reminds the heroes of how destructive they’ve been. They all react with a look of shame. Then the older guy tells them that because of this they will need to sign the accords. So we see that being destructive has become a problem because the regular people now want the heroes to ask permission to be heroes. Some are for this, some are against. This is first time the heroes have to consider making a choice.
I’m not sure what the final form ended up being, but looking at Jim’s initial form, OS SP2 should be Learning. So the Domain in act 2 was shown to be the Physics of destroying various cities as the heroes try to help. Then we see that learning about the accords and where the rest of the team stands on them is a problem because it creates conflict among the Avengers as they take different stances on whether to sign the accords or not.
Now you could say that choosing different sides is a problem because it creates tension in the team, but that doesn’t start until act 2, so that can’t be the OS Domain or it would have been present in the first act. But if we can agree that everyone in the room, even the guy who isn’t on the team, is trying to get what they want over what the others want, then maybe we can fit the choosing of sides into Self-Interest. So the self-interest of choosing sides is a problem because it creates tension within the team.
You don’t have to agree with any of that, and I don’t mean it to just be another ‘what you see as the problem is not really the problem’ moment. I don’t know if I’m doing that even close to right. But the reason I brought it up was just so you could see how I’m using the X is a problem because Y method to analyze a movie and how gives an explanation for why CA:CW has an OS Domain of Physics other than just ‘everybody is punching so it must be in Physics’.
No! Not Civil War! Nooooooo!
Yeah . . . only, it’s kind of nonsense, don’t you think? Crossbones and his fellow terrorists were about to unleash something much worse on the world. Had the Avengers not intervened, things would be much worse. So it’s not actually the physics of what happened that’s causing the conflict but the psychology of how people are dealing with it: desperately looking for someone – anyone – to blame. Wanda blames herself because she was the proximate cause of people’s deaths (though it would’ve been worse if she hadn’t acted), Cap blames himself for not finding a better solution, people blame the avengers because they need to blame somebody…etc.
That’s only true if you start from the premise that the underlying conflict of the story has to be present in the first act. That might be a Dramatica point of view, and it might be a common screenwriting point of view, but it’s not as if the inherent laws of the universe make it so. Sometimes people write bad scripts (or maybe even good-but-unconventional scripts) in which it takes a whole act before the actual story begins.
Watching the film (I’ve watched the damned thing four times), the whole opening along with the attendant kvetching seems like pretext – they needed a big action set piece to open the movie, and they need to establish everybody being mad at the Avengers.
But for me as both a writer and an audience member, the essence that drives the story from the moment the accords are introduced is heroes being forced to choose sides. This comes right up to the end when Steve is forced to choose Bucky over Tony. That’s where the tension and drama happen throughout. While there might be lots of fighting, look at how every fight scene plays out, with people who should be allies forced to fight each other.
I think this is why that first act is so flat. The conflict, the guilt, the dialogue, is all so contrived compared to what happens later. The same is true of the Zemo storyline – which I recall a number of critics saying seemed superfluous to the story.
[quote=“Gregolas, post:47, topic:1601”]
But if we can agree that everyone in the room, even the guy who isn’t on the team, is trying to get what they want over what the others want, then maybe we can fit the choosing of sides into Self-Interest.
That’s just it, though – you end up having to “fit” the essence of the conflict into self-interest regardless of whether that really describes that conflict.
Again, I’m not saying that the official Dramatica storyform is wrong. I’m saying it doesn’t evoke the essence of the underlying conflicts to me. As @jhull would note, however, I’m always looking at it through a novelist’s lens, and for us (well, for me, anyway), there’s no real separation between the skeleton and the skin of the story.
There’s some things here we agree on and that we don’t regarding what’s going on with the story and not going to agree on an analysis today, which is fine. But I’m going to switch gears a bit to how this is helpful in writing a story. You’re the professional here, so maybe you can tell me if how I’m seeing things would be helpful or not.
Assuming the storyform already discussed works, that give us some variation of “punching (gist) plus choosing sides (conflict) = problem”. You’ve made it clear that when it comes to writing you’re more interested in the “choosing sides” aspect than the punching aspect, which is as it should be. As an audience, it’s the conflict part of the equation that makes things interesting. The audience is going to be looking for the conflict, not the source. Dramatica doesn’t build the drama of “choosing sides” for you, so you have to do it. So If you were to accept the notion of CA’s OS being grounded in Physics, is there a way that you, as a writer, would be able to use that information to help build your drama? Would you find it helpful to think that the events that lead to more conflict regarding choosing sides should be physical events? Or would you find that more limiting because you couldn’t switch over to, say, a psychological problem also leading to conflict regarding choosing sides?
The appeal to me of this idea of a problem being the source of inequity plus how it creates conflict is that it forces your story to be 1. infused with conflict that you can use to create the drama you want, and 2. forces all of that drama to be rooted in events of a similar nature. It seems like that would be helpful, but it seems you may be saying that it’s more distracting.
Keep in mind that “professional” in this case doesn’t mean I approach the creative process in the most efficient way. It’s entirely possible that I’m continuously making my life much harder than it needs to be. Certainly feels that way sometimes 
I think what you’re talking about is a kind of equation that looks like:
The physics of people fighting and causing damage = heroes being forced to choose sides
The question is which part belongs on the left and which part belongs on the right, because to me it looks more like:
heroes being forced to choose sides = The physics of people fighting and causing damage
Now, you could rightly point out that the movie opens with a punch-up scene that leads to the building blowing up, but as a writer (and as an audience member) I don’t care about the issue of sequence. Yes, we needed some scene to establish that there’s a consequence to heroes not being controlled, but it almost doesn’t matter what that scene is and its relevance disappears right after the opening (note how Zemo’s issues all come from a previous movie – another reason why I disagree that you can separate this movie from the others any more than you can read The Two Towers without reading The Fellowship of the Ring).
So what I’m saying is that the underlying engine of conflict – regardless of what’s sequenced first or second or last – is heroes being forced to choose sides against each other. That’s what’s being explored in the movie most prevalently, not the idea that heroes can be destructive.
The climax of this movie is Steve Rogers being forced to choose Bucky over Tony even though he hates what Bucky did as the Winter Soldier. If someone came along and managed to get them to just calm down for five minutes they’d figure something out, but they don’t, because this is a movie about what happens when you’re forced to choose sides when neither option is morally perfect.
Ultimately, I think you can quite easily find evidence within the movie for taking the opposite view: it’s about how heroes can be destructive, Tony’s the MC…etc. That’s why to me it appears there are two storyforms: one in which Cap is MC, Bucky is IC, and the OS is about choosing sides, and a second one in which Tony is MC, Cap is IC, and the OS is about stopping the destruction caused by unfettered superheroes.
However I’ve pitched this to @jhull and he disagrees. But that’s only because he’s evil and sides against Cap.
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pretty much nailed it. When I was drafting my last post in my head and using way more words, it even had stuff about Dramatica being concerned with the first part of the equation and the audience being concerned with the second.
I agree that the conflict part of the equation is what is most prevalent for the audience. This is probably true in most or all good narratives. So you’re saying that choosing sides is what creates conflict, while I’m saying that choosing sides is the conflict that is created. This leads me to some interesting questions I may have to ask about later.
So for now, let’s say you were writing Captain America: Civil War with Dramatica and you’ve placed the throughline in…were you putting it in Mind or Psychology? How would you use Dramatica to keep everything in the appropriate area? Would you use punching to bring out the problem of choosing side, or do you use the choosing of sides to lead to punching?
This is what I meant about thinking there are two storyforms at play. In one of them the story goal (thus the OS domain and concern) is about stopping the Avengers from their destructive ways. In the other, the story goal (thus the OS domain and concern) is about deciding which is right: the side of freedom or the side of security.
Now, some people might try to say that the choosing a side is the RS between Tony and Steve, but I disagree: everybody is being forced to choose a side. Black Widow wrestles with this, Hawkeye comes out of retirement, Vision struggles with wanting to protect Wanda but agreeing with Tony, Wanda despite her guilt chooses to side with Cap…etc.
One of the biggest scenes in the film is the airport fight scene. This isn’t a conflict that comes out of superheroes being destructive – Tony’s side is just as destructive as Cap’s if not more. It’s a conflict that emerges from the heroes being forced to choose sides.
Anyhoo, without specifying domains (since I suck at that), the storyforms look like this to me:
Destroying The Avengers
OS: Stopping the Avengers destructive activities
MC: Tony Stark dealing with the guilt over his father’s death and his own culpability in the death of that lady’s son.
IC: Steve Rogers. His seeming nobility pressures Tony to reconsider the accords (What do you do if you know you’re right and yet the person you respect more than anyone else in the world disagrees with you?)
RS: Friends torn apart
Story Outcome: Success (the Avengers are neutralized)
Story Judgment: Good (Tony’s resolved his personal issues)
The Superhero Civil War
OS: Choosing sides: Freedom or Security
MC: Steve Rogers, a man out of time whose values don’t seem to work in this modern world.
IC: Bucky. His messed-up past actions pressure Steve to give him up.
RS: Friends staying together no matter what.
Story Outcome: Failure (Steve’s Avengers are fugitives, no positive determination was made in the question of freedom vs security)
Story Judgment: Bad (Cap gives up the shield. He can’t be the WWII hero anymore.)
As I’ve said every other time: I’m fine with being wrong about this in terms of Dramatica. I’m only putting this here because you asked, so any wrath of Jim must come down on you
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Lol. I’ll take it all! Just trying to figure out where else we might be looking at things backwards compared to one another. There’s a point to wondering about it, but I probably don’t need to go into it here just yet and risk even more potential wrath.
Storyforming is an objective process done by subjective people. Thus, sometimes we get it wrong. But, consensus is the tool by which we use to maintain objectivity. This is no different than peer review in the scientific community. Which is admittedly a flawed process because of power, money, corruption and ideology.
Moonlight is a great example. We went through these phases until we got consensus:
There is no Storyform.
There may be one.
There is a storyform
Well, it is missing something important.
Consensus —it is incomplete
Moonlight has a storyform minus a third signpost from each throughline.
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when I lay out events in another tool, I create a box next to various story points and make sure I am conscious of how the audience feels, but, yeah, that’s not what Dramatica does.
I think of it like building a balsa wood airplane. Dramatica makes sure I have all the parts, and the glue, and at the end of the Dramatica process I by gum have a frame for my airplane, and it’s consistent, holds together, and is ready for paper and paint and display. But it’s not going to put the paper and paint on there for me, nor is it about those elements, and it’s not going to display it for me.
You can sure put paper and paint on a plane with a missing wing, and if you turn it the right way the person you’re showing it to won’t even notice. It will look completely whole to him.
There’s probably some connection to the Lajos Egri idea of the ‘well-made play’ somewhere in there.
A smarter version of me would leave this alone since I’ve tried to make the point as best I could on a number of occasions and it ain’t sticking. But I’m going to try one more time.
First, all people are subjective, so saying it’s “done by subjective people” isn’t saying anything here. Second, it’s not an objective process. There’s no instrument of measurement here – no means of empirically testing a hypothesis. All you’ve got is six people getting together and debating their points of view on the particular movie until they come to a consensus. That’s called a discussion. It’s a perfectly fine way to pass the time, but it’s neither scientific nor objective.
What you’re talking about isn’t peer review. It’s not within a thousand miles of peer review. The peer review process involves taking an article or study and sending it to independent experts to see if they independently can find flaws in either the methodology or conclusions. It’s not a group of people having a discussion.
By the way, the appeal to “power, money, corruption and ideology” is predominantly used as a means to invalidate scientific consensus, which is why it’s so often used by people who want a way to explain why 95% of climate scientists must be wrong.
Look, I don’t know if Moonlight has an objective storyform or not, or whether having a complete storyform has any bearing on whether a movie will be an incredibly widely acclaimed Academy award winner for Best Picture (which in this case it sounds like it doesn’t). But what you described was a discussion from which a consensus was achieved and not in any way an empirical, scientific, or objective process.
It’s kind of like if six of us get together and discuss how old we think the earth is. None of us have instruments to measure the distance of objects in the universe over time. None of us have independent studies to back it up. None of us have experiments that test the hypothesis. But we all come to the conclusion that the earth is six thousand years old. We’re still wrong.
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Is it possible that the apparent dual plots in Civil War could be a result of the movie having to serve both as a single complete story and as part of the larger narrative Avenger arc?
I could see the meta-plot going: Unite the Avengers to stop an alien invasion, Destroy the Avengers to save the humans, and Re-Unite the Avengers to stop Thanos/save the universe.
While the single stand-alone plot would be personal vs collective responsibility, or “Who do you trust to handle this sort of power”.
Have you looked at the skeptic archetype In Dramatica? It seems like you may be performing that function here. Luckily, I’m not phased by it because I’ve seen all these arguments before in undergrad.
I’m not trying to make a statement about climate change. But, I think we can both agree that the medical system uses science as it’s sherpa for drug sales. One need only research a drug like LDN to see that corruption rules our medical system in America.
Ideology can be described as dominance masquerading as nature. We are not proporting an ideology. We are doing story math.
I would think of the Dramatica process as similar to a math proof. Math proofs have peer review. But, the peer review process doesn’t work the same way it does with science.
Here is an article on some of the differnces between math peer review and science peer review.
Certainly with enough resources, we could be more scientific and do more inductive proof. However, we are limited by resources. You will recall that both science and math used to look a lot like today’s psychology. In fact, every discipline including science was at one point philosophy. Even the ivy league schools that perform much of the research we have today were once divinity schools.
Imagine trying to do science without math…it can’t be done, can it? Imagine trying to do math with only inductive reasoning. How far can you get?
In dramatica we have a theory and we have deducted all the rules in the system through proof the same way a mathematician does from the axioms. When we apply it to a storyform, we are doing it inductively. And, it must go through the objective process and meet all the criteria.
Are you really skeptical of math? Because that is all we are doing here — applying a consistent mathematical system as complex as algebra to a given story. Certainly there other systems we could apply just like there are other geometries we could use. But, here we are focused on Dramatica as a means to that end.
If you want to prove that Dramatica is subjective. Try assuming it is objective and proving a contradiction. That would be more scientific than espousing skepticism. I think you will find that we don’t tolerate contradictions in Dramatica the same way they don’t in math.
Science doesn’t prove anything anyway. It only disproves the null hypothesis. So, even science is limited to only certain math systems as it relies on reductio ad absurdem arguments.
I think the best we can do is seek to formalize as we expand the theory and make clearer the objective process of storyforming and analysis. To that degree, I think all of this questioning is quite valuable as we need to find a way to clearly show how we do the proof and not just post the proof and act as if it is obvious how we got it.
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Have you looked at the skeptic archetype In Dramatica? It seems like you may be performing that function here. Luckily, I’m not phased by it because I’ve seen all these arguments before in undergrad.
Oh snap.
I want to be the Contagonist! Let me divert you to Save the Cat…mwah hah hah
Yes.
If this were a story and you were the protagonist, you’d be correct.
Excellent. That should speed things up.
People studying telepathy were convinced they were doing science until they started undertaking actual replicable tests and found out none of it worked. Telling me you’re doing “story math” is like me telling you I’m performing philosophical engineering. It sounds like it means something but I haven’t given you a way to test if that’s true.
I lack the requisite training in the practices of math journals and proofs to address either the accuracy or relevance of the article you’ve linked to.
The main resource you lack is people who have found the theory and the way its applied here convincing enough to develop a sufficient knowledge and experience in Dramatica to be deemed experts. After more than twenty years.
I think you may be confusing the scientific study of psychology, which uses replicable testing methodologies across statistically relevant sample sizes, with pop psychology which comes in the form of self-help books.
Also, I’m not sure that math ever looked like psychology.
Math: “If there are three oranges in your basket and two in mine, then together we have five oranges.”
Not Math: “When six of us look in the basket, we see different numbers of oranges. So we talk about it until we all agree there are three.”
The problem isn’t with the math but the means by which observations and impressions are turned into data points.
That said, for all I know, the math is wrong, too, but that’s a completely different subject.
I’m saying the process by which you record observations is subjective. Which it is. A group of people watch a movie and then talk about what they saw and what they think it meant and how – if it meant those things – that fits in with the Dramatical model of storyforms. How much more subjective can you get?
You know how I know the floor of my office is ten feet by ten feet? Because anyone who uses the same measuring tape as me will come up with the same answer regardless of whether we talk about it beforehand.
Imagine trying to debate whether an office were the right size for doing a certain type of work before you even have a way for everyone to independently verify the actual size of the space.
Interestingly, that was a reductio ad absurdem argument.
What you need to do is dead simple: find a statistically significant group of people adequately trained in the observational method to create measurements for a statistically significant number of cases and then compare the results to determine how closely they match or how much they disagree.
Beware, though, that’s what the E.S.P. people did and that’s why we don’t spend a lot of time talking about telepathy anymore.
I just…i feel like there’s something there, in those three statements. If we are looking for a source of conflict, why wouldn’t sequence matter? Wouldn’t sequence determine what went on the left or right of the equation?