The Good, the Bad and the Handoff

Dramatica Theory
1

I’m reading your book NEVER TRUST A HERO this morning for the first time in awhile. This section stopped me:

In Amadeus, did Salieri teach those around him? No. He set out to destroy Mozart and those efforts to that end. In that tragedy it was Mozart who changed his approach, working himself to his early grave.

This got me thinking about the Good/Bad judgment at the end of the story, after the Change happens. So, in this case the IC was the Change character.

My question is.

1 So, the Author’s judgment of Salieri is clearly Bad. His approach is wrong. Salieri’s steadfast approach leads him to self-hatred, lunacy, poverty, apparently.

2 As for Mozart, his Change of approach is clearly also Bad. Does the judgment apply to him also? Or is it a separate judgment? I certainly feel, as an Author, that I am showing a bad result from his approach. I guarantee, you both Author and Audience make a judgement about the state of affairs for Mozart at the end of that story.*

*maybe this is the difference between what needs to be specified in the model, vs ‘the extra bits’ that come from the storytelling.

But I could also see a story where the Mozart’s approach could be, hey, he took it easy but knocked off the drinking, loved his wife, got help from the King to get himself out of debt. He wrote less music but had a better life. And as an Author I would judge that as Good.

And then I can also see a story with handoff IC’s with both Good and Bad results from Change approaches. I am writing one right now, in fact.

So, is the Good/Bad judgment JUST about the MC, or does it apply holistically to the entire state of affairs at the end of the story. For example, if Mozart had a happy ending, and the Big Bad had a downfall, is that a story judgment of good?

This seems to work only at a simplistic level. With multiple handoffs, I’m not sure it works at all except in the most abstract sense.

I also note that this kind of story is problematic because in the movie, Mozart is so charismatic you feel like he should be the MC, somehow. You are ultimately more interested in in him than you are in Salieri, who is repulsive physically (sorry, F. Murray) and as a human being. And you are more invested in the outcome of his life than you are of Salieri. At the end of day, you’re going to remember Mozart a lot longer than you remember Salieri, even if you subversively make that reptile the MC. The writer pulls a lot of tricks out of his magic hat to attempt to conjure some kind of empathy for Salieri, “the prince of mediocrity”, but ultimately I don’t think it works. Sympathy for the monster fails, in this case. Othello has the same problem with Iago, imo. You mostly feel like you need a shower after being around Iago for too long.

2

Very true!

Technically, the Story Judgment (which has a value of Good or Bad) applies to the entire story. A Dramatica Storyform represents the communication between Author and Audience. One of the aspects of this communication involves whether or not the overall gestalt of efforts to resolve an inequity were “good” or “bad”—a subjective assessment of the events.

We typically default to focusing on whether the Main Character resolves their personal baggage or not as this is our closest way in to the subjective side of the Author’s argument.

In short, yes, the Story Judgment applies to the entire narrative.

3

I would actually put something like this in the documentation: we call it the main character judgment because the main character resolution, and whether or not the audience feels satisfied by it, is the closest thing we have to a single dial to specify the feeling, a kind of handy shorthand, but the target is the specific feeling the audience has after seeing the entire story, which will likely involve the good and bad resolution of more than one character.. The MC resolution is a handy tool to point at that subjective feeling the audience is having but it’s nothing more than that.

did everyone get their just desserts, and were the demands of fairness and equity served? This is what’s going to give the audience the most satisfaction. If there’s one character who gets what they didn’t deserve, one way or the other, good or bad, that’s going to change the effects, so in reality there are many dials, planes, how some of the best art has an ambiguous feeling at the end. You might have satisfaction mixed with regret, for example.

In short the MC Judgment is usually, but not always, the most important component that goes into the Audience Judgment, but there almost always other components of varying significance in balance of effect on the Audience Judgment. So the best way to look at MC Judgment is as a single slice of pie in the pie chart, where the whole pie is the Audience Judgment.

4

I’m pretty sure it’s in the original Dramatica theory book, it’s been like that since ‘95. :blush: The searches you’re doing are gathering up the totality of discussion on the matter, and most of that discussion revolves around looking at the Main Character Throughline to help assess Story Judgment–because that’s typically the easiest way.

A quick search of the discussions here for story judgment audience bring up this treasure from 2017:

We’ll look into how we can make this more apparent to Narrova going forward.

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5

I’m rereading the original book now. It’s still a slog.