I was listening to @jhull’s awesome podcast with the Dramatica (+Lord of the Rings) inspired story he came up with on the spot. I got a chill up my spine at the Signpost of Learning: the halflings teaching the dwarves a lesson, teaching the dwarves to fear them. Not just because it’s a really cool illustration of conflict from Learning, but because that is exactly is what my RS Signpost 2 feels like to me.
Of course, there’s no dwarves harmed in this relationship – what I mean is that feeling of scorching the earth to teach someone a lesson is what I ended up with.
I’m still not totally sure how to phrase the illustration, because the Relationship Story is so weird. If the verb is “scorching the earth to teach a lesson”, who is the subject and who is the object in the RS? Does the relationship have to be the object?
The best I can come up with is: “Becca and Devin try to teach each other that they’re not to be trifled with, and end up scorching the earth of their budding relationship to do it”. That’s pretty accurate, though in the actual story it’s not quite so even – Becca does a lot more earth-scorching than Devin does. But I don’t think the evenness matters, as long as the Learning-based conflict is felt in the relationship.