Here's the thing.
Apr. 14th, 2011 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinWhen people say that all stories have conflict, all stories have drama, or all stories have a protagonist and an antagonist...
I'm not saying those things aren't true.
I'm saying they aren't true in a way that matters.
Say you believe that all celebrity deaths come in threes. How do you prove this? Well, when a celebrity dies you wait for the next two to die. Bam! Celebrity deaths in threes. Until the last celebrity dies who will ever die, you cannot fail to be proven right (and even then you have a 1 in 3 chance of hitting it.)
Say you believe that everything happens in fives. Same thing. You count off fives and wouldn't you know it, you're right.
Say you believe the whole world of real and fictional people can be divided into nine alignments along two axes of Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic and Good, Neutral, Evil. You'll sort the whole world into those nine buckets and then declare victory because now everyone fits in a label.
And these things... that last thing in particular... can be fun and interesting and even insightful exercises. It can be an entertaining intellectual challenge to figure out where characters fit in the D&D two axis alignment system. But then you get to the point where you declare that, say, Batman is [Some Alignment] (I'm not going to put any alignment there because I've played this game before; Batman is the electrified third rail.) and therefore this depiction of Batman is wrong because no one who is [Some Alignment] would ever do that.
At that point, the lens you're viewing the character through has become an eyepatch. What is a fashionable accessory for pirates may prove to be a very poor tool for analysis. You're no longer viewing Batman as Batman. You're no longer taking the text at is own value.
All these dramatic structures, they can be useful tools for viewing fiction. They can be useful tools for creating fiction. But they're neither as ubiquitous nor as necessary as we are often taught that they are, and viewing all fiction through a lens like "the dramatic arc" or the "protagonist/antagonist conflict" is like viewing the world in terms of threes, or fives. It's like sorting everybody's behavior into nine buckets and expecting them to act like the label on the bucket instead of themselves.
Now, I don't expect the people who rely on these lenses to learn this lesson... certainly not from me. Anybody who comes into my story's site to tell me about these things has a viewpoint that is based on the idea that they possess special knowledge that I clearly lack. So the point of this post isn't to teach anyone else anything. It's to teach myself a lesson.
And the lesson for me here is to never pose rhetorical questions like "Where's the antagonist in this story?", because there will always be answer. If you walk into the Emerald City wearing green-tinted glasses, you will find emeralds. If someone believes that all story is conflict and all conflict involves an antagonist, they'll find the antagonist, even if it involves the same kind of mental gymnastics needed to view the cast of Firefly in D&D terms.
I'm not saying those things aren't true.
I'm saying they aren't true in a way that matters.
Say you believe that all celebrity deaths come in threes. How do you prove this? Well, when a celebrity dies you wait for the next two to die. Bam! Celebrity deaths in threes. Until the last celebrity dies who will ever die, you cannot fail to be proven right (and even then you have a 1 in 3 chance of hitting it.)
Say you believe that everything happens in fives. Same thing. You count off fives and wouldn't you know it, you're right.
Say you believe the whole world of real and fictional people can be divided into nine alignments along two axes of Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic and Good, Neutral, Evil. You'll sort the whole world into those nine buckets and then declare victory because now everyone fits in a label.
And these things... that last thing in particular... can be fun and interesting and even insightful exercises. It can be an entertaining intellectual challenge to figure out where characters fit in the D&D two axis alignment system. But then you get to the point where you declare that, say, Batman is [Some Alignment] (I'm not going to put any alignment there because I've played this game before; Batman is the electrified third rail.) and therefore this depiction of Batman is wrong because no one who is [Some Alignment] would ever do that.
At that point, the lens you're viewing the character through has become an eyepatch. What is a fashionable accessory for pirates may prove to be a very poor tool for analysis. You're no longer viewing Batman as Batman. You're no longer taking the text at is own value.
All these dramatic structures, they can be useful tools for viewing fiction. They can be useful tools for creating fiction. But they're neither as ubiquitous nor as necessary as we are often taught that they are, and viewing all fiction through a lens like "the dramatic arc" or the "protagonist/antagonist conflict" is like viewing the world in terms of threes, or fives. It's like sorting everybody's behavior into nine buckets and expecting them to act like the label on the bucket instead of themselves.
Now, I don't expect the people who rely on these lenses to learn this lesson... certainly not from me. Anybody who comes into my story's site to tell me about these things has a viewpoint that is based on the idea that they possess special knowledge that I clearly lack. So the point of this post isn't to teach anyone else anything. It's to teach myself a lesson.
And the lesson for me here is to never pose rhetorical questions like "Where's the antagonist in this story?", because there will always be answer. If you walk into the Emerald City wearing green-tinted glasses, you will find emeralds. If someone believes that all story is conflict and all conflict involves an antagonist, they'll find the antagonist, even if it involves the same kind of mental gymnastics needed to view the cast of Firefly in D&D terms.