Story Goal of Return of the Jedi

analysis
#1

Just listened to @jhull 's awesome, awesome podcast on The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I know the storyforms and some discussion came out a while ago but the podcast is just a really great way of conveying everything.

Empire has long been my favourite film so it almost brings tears to my eyes to understand why I loved the story so much. The way the two storyforms are interconnected is just so cool!

However, with Jedi I was a bit unsure about the scope of the Story Goal as mentioned. I feel like that story is bigger than just “teaching Vader he can be turned”, though that’s certainly a huge part of it. But the big battle for Endor that involved Lando, Chewie and all the rebels in space, the Ewoks and Leia and Han etc. on the ground, all struggling against the Empire – I feel like that’s all still part of the narrative and achieving the goal.

Couldn’t the Goal be something like:

  • teaching everyone that the Empire and the Emperor can be resisted
    OR
  • preventing the Empire from teaching everyone that they are all powerful / impossible to resist

Something like that would neatly fit Luke’s part of the OS – teaching Vader and the Emperor that the dark side can be resisted – into a larger-scope goal that includes what everyone is striving for.

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#2

Jim gave a couple of examples of illustrations for the OS Problem and Solution which indicate a wider scope than “teaching Vader he can be turned,” such as the inhabitants of Jabba’s palace accepting the state of things (OS Problem of Acceptance) or the Ewoks rejecting the Empire’s authority and fighting against it (OS Solution of Rejection/Non-acceptance). Since the Problem and Concern (which is different from the Goal, but of the same type) are different resolutions of the same thing, I would assume that the Ewoks and the inhabitants play some part in the OS Goal, especially since the Ewoks are part of the OS Solution.

I’m not sure if I’m coming to the right conclusions or not, especially if I’m mixing up the OS Concern and Goal, but I think you’re right about the scope of the OS, @mlucas.

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#3

I love this idea of it—much bigger and more all-encompassing than just the little part about Vader. Need to be able to crowdsource storyencoding!

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#4

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Doing the Contextual Subgenre thing has left me with lots of mostly-illustrated storyforms (at least 73) and I’ve thought about sharing them a couple of times, as other people could really help fill in the gaps and fix any inaccuracies (I’m pretty bad at illustrating the RS). But I don’t know if there’s rules about that.

Anyway, that’s all off-topic. Back to the Star Trek talk.

(The Star Trek thing was a joke don’t hate me)

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