544 Pseudo-Structures In Storytelling The Mythcreant podcast

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544 Pseudo-Structures in Storytelling

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Anyone who’s read Mythcreants for a while knows that we’re very critical of pseudo-structures, those things that promise your story will be great if only you arrange it just so. And yet, no matter how much critique we heap on these literary lemons, there are always more. This week, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of why these structures don’t work, why they can’t work. It’s not a question of us preferring a different option; the thing they are trying to do just doesn’t make sense.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is…

Oren: Oren

Bunny: …and…

Oren: Chris.

Bunny: Recently I found out that we’ve been doing podcasts wrong. Or rather, we’ve been thinking about them wrong. Or perhaps we haven’t been a podcast at all because we’ve been doing it the wrong way.

Oren: Oh?

Bunny: There’s, there’s actually an easier way in all podcasts throughout time and indeed all conversations throughout time, analogue or not, have followed the structure. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be conversations.

Chris: Ooh!

Oren: The monopod.

Chris: That sounds so deep and meaningful! Really, it’s a guide to life.

Oren: [laughs]

Bunny: Yes, precisely. And there’s a number of very clear, specific and easy to follow steps. First, we start the podcast.

Chris: Wow. That’s great.

Bunny: Yes. It’s not called an intro though.

Oren: No.

Bunny: it’s called auditory birth.

Oren: [laughs] Oh, God. Oh no.

Chris: [laughs] Oh, man. Okay.

Bunny: And even if it’s not the very first episode of the podcast, or if we’re not babies, don’t worry, it’s still called auditory birth because it’s symbolic.

Oren: Oh, it’s a metaphor. Okay. It’s all making sense now.

Chris: Yeah. It’s arisen from the collective unconscious.

Bunny: Exactly. And now to make your podcast: Best listener, Chris will state our theme at three minutes. At minute 15, we will lapse into a terrible depression. Then Oren and I will argue and reconcile by minute 27 using a polarity realignment.

Oren: This is really optimistic about how long we can restrain ourselves on the opening. Those have just been getting longer and longer as the podcast has gone on.

Bunny: Look, we’ll hit minute three and then Chris can state what the podcast is about if you haven’t looked at the title yet.

Oren & Chris: [laugh]

Bunny: But after minute 27 the podcast is basically over, and it’s a free-for-all and we can talk about what we ate for dinner.

Chris: That’s when we return with the lesson of the podcast to give to all.

Oren: The audio elixir, as it were.

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: The audio elixir.

Bunny: And then we experience podcast death.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: Though hopefully that one will just be metaphorical death.

Bunny: [laughs] It’s a cycle that all podcasts and conversations go through.

Another: fun fact, all podcasts are motivated by desire for sex or fear of death. Because podcasters get laid constantly.

Oren: It’s the most sexually charged profession, if you think about it. Goddammit.

Bunny: They really do make you think.

Oren: Blake Snyder. That one’s a little specific. We should probably reference where that’s from.

Bunny: Yeah, that is Save the Cat, I believe.

Chris: Excuse me, but I believe it is time for me to state the theme.

Bunny: Yes. Chris, what is this podcast about?

Chris: It is about pseudo-structures.

Bunny: Yes.

Chris: Deep ones that are symbolic of regular structures, that are symbolic of pseudo-structures.

Bunny: And now we are rising.

Chris: Oh, sorry. I should probably tell people what that is. Since it is actually a relatively new term that I made up. Cause I can’t stop making up terms.

Oren: It’s just what we do. We make up terms. That’s our thing. Okay. Don’t try to censor us.

Bunny: We are so good at making up terms that we have all the candy.

Chris: So yeah, these are basically things that are advertised as story structures, but they don’t represent what a real plot structure does. And they don’t really teach people plotting.

A lot of times they’re popular because people are looking for fun, easy steps and coming up with ideas is hard. And storytelling is so dependent on all of these factors and it’s complicated. But it’s so easy if somebody just tells you, Step one, do this. Step two, do this.

And they have various tricks that we can talk about to make themselves seem more legitimate. And there is a blurry line right to between what—Because sometimes that really seems like a pseudo structure.

I know that the writer does have a gut level understanding of how stories work, but is just so bad at expressing it, that it basically becomes a pseudo-structure.

So what is and what isn’t can be kind of blurry.

But basically a real structure should actually tell you how to structure your plot in a meaningful way and not just give you fixed points that seem easy and you do them, and then you don’t actually get a good story out of them.

Oren: Right. And so some of these, these are things like Save the Cat, three-act structure, Hero’s Journey, Kishotenketsu, the Virgin’s Promise… There’s so many of them. And some of them are pretty vague and relatively harmless. They won’t really help, but they’re not super likely to sabotage your story either. And then some of them are weirdly specific.

But they all have one thing in common, which is that they are telling you things that could be in a story. They’re not telling you what actually needs to be there. And sometimes the things they tell you could be, there are just bad ideas. You should not do that.

Bunny: Some of they seem to be both universalist and prescriptivist, depending on the scale you look at them and like how they’re being sold to you. Universal claims are things like the monomyth, where it’s like every story falls into this structure.

Oren: Right.

Bunny: This preexisting structure. And the ones that are more prescriptive are things like Save the Cat, which are geared toward writing advice. But all of them have elements of universal and prescriptive, at least if they’re writing advice because they’re usually pulling on things like the monomyth. And yes, it’s circular logic.

Oren: Save the Cat—both Snyder’s version and Brody’s version—both claim that basically all stories do this. Which is hilarious, cause clearly many of them don’t. Snyder doesn’t even seem aware of this contradiction. And just like all movies do this except movies I don’t like, they don’t do it.

Bunny: Every story falls into the hero’s journey and what defines a story? It’s something that falls into the hero’s journey.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: And Story Circle, which I hadn’t heard about until I started researching this episode, says this explicitly, you can apply the story circle to any story. What makes a story? Something that the story circle can be applied to.

Oren: That’s nice. That’s a nice Story Circular definition.

Chris: [laughs]

Bunny: That’s true! It’s meta!

Chris: Yeah. If you can’t identify real story structure, then you’re caught in this impossible contradiction between either:

A) being like, Hey, put that event there. But not every story needs an event there. And so, you’re being way too specific and people can automatically tell that that does not fit. They shouldn’t have to do that because so many stories are not doing that

Or you can get extremely vague and be like, oh, but I meant that metaphorically. It’s metaphorical death. It’s a metaphorical journey.

Oren: Right

Chris: It’s a metaphorical despair or whatever you want. And then it’s so vague. It could literally mean anything. And so people might be inspired by it and might be like, oh, I’ve got an idea for like a metaphorical death I could do here. But now it’s no longer meaningful in any way. Cause you could make anything match that.

Oren: Right. And what’s funny is that sometimes like people will get really vague about even these bizarrely over-specific ones. This is the big difference between Snyder Save the Cat and Brody Save the Cat.

Cause Snyder saved the cat is just hyper specific to a bizarre degree. But people still say like, oh yeah, I wrote this with Save the cat. And you look at it and you’re like, where is any of the weird stuff that Snyder was talking about? And they’re like, well, it’s there, it’s a metaphor of the thing he was talking about.

Whereas like Brody cuts out the middleman and is like, yeah, all of these really weird claims that Snyder made, they’re all real, but also they can be anything. So, don’t worry about it. You can write anything and then say you’re following Brody’s version of the Save the Cat. Because the steps are all so incredibly vague.

Bunny: Well, the thing it has to do is that it has to say that all these stories that you like fall into this structure. And so when it’s being used that way, the definitions of each of these moments has to be broad enough that you can slot in House of Cards episode one and the Emperor’s New Groove.

Oren: Yeah. Cause those are both good things that people like.

Bunny: And two, they have to both follow the structure. But then when you’re trying to give advice to people, then suddenly these structures get like super specific. With Snyder in particular, he’s giving you the pages that you need to to put these things on.

Oren: Yeah. My favorite thing about Snyder’s is, if you just tried to make a movie following Snyder’s advice, it would be incomprehensible. It would be both really boring and weirdly paced.

He’s got this 10% that’s supposed to be the debate of the movie. You’re supposed to spend that long debating to go on the adventure. Of course, none of the examples he cites do that because. Why would they? Why on Earth? Who thinks that’s gonna make the story better?

Bunny: And like you can have a scene with a hero debates something. Sure. But to say that that’s both necessary and obligatory is just wrong. Especially since we have many stories that start after the hero has decided to go on the adventure.

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: Or they’re just fully in. There’s no question.

Oren: Right. They don’t always need to be convinced. And even for the ones who do need to be convinced, you probably aren’t gonna spend that long on it. Because it’s just not that interesting.

Bunny: Can you imagine if 10% of a Brandon Sanderson book was debating whether to go on the adventure?

Oren: Oh, no. Oh God.

Bunny & Chris: [laugh]

Oren: You could fit a normal person’s novel in there.

Chris: Yeah. Okay. About that. This is interesting because some of this idea where you have this introductory segment comes from Freytag’s Pyramid. And then some later books… a bunch of those books, if you actually look at the text of them, they’re like, oh no, this should only be like a scene, or this should be as short as possible.

Or from Kenneth Thorpe Rowe—whose book I’m reading right now—he is like, oh, well actually this can happen alongside other events if you can work the information in later.

So they’re not actually intended to be originally this huge segment, but then you go later and you get to Syd Field’s three-act structure and it’s like, oh yeah, this huge section, one third of the story, should just be a whole bunch of setup.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: You know, with maybe a few important plot points in it. And now we’re just making it really long. It’s not a good idea because you’re supposed to start the plot. You should start the plot as quickly as you can, and then think for your individual situation if it makes sense to delay a little bit so that you can do important setup, that makes it matter.

But those trade-offs are different for every story, and so just telling everyone to delay when it would only benefit a few people is not a good idea.

Bunny: Well, here’s the thing about Freytag’s Pyramid and the three-act structure. The thing that makes three-act structure so bad is that it’s Freytag’s Pyramid bastardized by a long train of dastardly Polish people who have been plotting.

Chris: [laughs] Okay. I think we need to—for listeners who have not read my post on Freytag’s Pyramid.

And again, most people don’t recognize the term Freytag’s Pyramid, but you have probably seen the simple triangle chart where there’s rising action and there’s a climax in the center for some reason, and then falling action at a downward slope. Sometimes they modify it to put the climax in the place we would put it now. But that’s Freytag’s Pyramid.

And Freytag who made this pyramid really hated the Polish. He has at the beginning of his book, cause I’ve read it, he has an introduction where he actually does sound like a proto-Nazi. He’s weird. He never mentions the Polish, but he has a weird emphasis on racist that is kind of creepy.

Oren: He’s old timey, European racist. Nowadays in America, we tend to think of racism as being between black people and white people, or white people and Asian people.

Old timey, European racism is the heck with those Italians. Or if you’re Italian, the heck with those Venetians cause I’m from Naples. That’s the real old timey stuff that he was big on.

Chris: But Freytag, apparently circulated pamphlets talking about how they should conquer Poland, except for Poland had already been conquered by Russia. So these were like, we should conquer Poland if they get free from Russia. That’s a lot of effort into fantasizing about subjugating Polish.

Oren: Don’t worry everybody. The competition between Russia and Germany for control of Eastern Europe will never cause any problems. It’s fine. Don’t look into it.

Bunny: Oh no!

I think he does name drop the Polish people at some point in the book. I remember seeing that. Just to get a little dig it. Can’t let them think that this book about story structure is not racist a little bit.

Oren: So, it’s not like everything Freytag says is wrong, but a lot of it’s wrong. And then a lot of it is in very different contexts to the way that we tell stories now. Storytelling has advanced a little bit from the tragic plays of the 1860s.

Chris: Yeah, it’s just for tragedies. The part of the structure of the end is actually supposed to be the hero dies.

Oren: Yeah. [laughs]

Chris: Right? So, that’s one of his points, is the hero dies. So, it’s not for non-tragedy. It really isn’t.

Again, this gets into the blur in this. I know that what Freytag’s trying to do, and I think it’s like less of a pseudo-structure than something like Save the Cat is. Freytag’s Pyramid is still very general.

I don’t think it’s a good structure, but he’s at least trying to do what a structure is supposed to do, which is talk about the broad outlines of how the story works. Whereas something like Save the Cat is very like at this moment you do this very specific thing. And it’s removed from what even farther, removed from what structure should be.

Oren: Save the Cat is honestly weird. A lot of these books, I can see how they catch on, even if I don’t think that what they’re saying makes sense. A lot of these structures. I don’t get Save the cat, especially Snyder’s version.

Snyder’s version reads like a fever dream conveyed by the most annoying kid you knew in high school. It’s so strange. Everything is written with these really off-putting names that don’t make sense and it’s hard to figure out what he’s talking about half the time. I just don’t get how this became popular.

At least with Brody’s version, I get how it became popular beyond the fact that it’s linked to Save the Cat, because it’s super vague on purpose, right? So anyone who doesn’t like being told what to do can just do what they were gonna do already and then like retroactively fill in the part like that they’re doing Brody’s thing.

That’s hard to do with Snyder’s. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand.

Chris: Remembering when I was young.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: [laughs] relatively.

Bunny: [old voice] When I was young…

Chris: And I liked Save the Cat.

Bunn: …And naïve. I was still saving the cats.

Chris: [laughs] I remember liking it because it just seemed fun and easy. And if you don’t know what real story structure is, you never know what’s missing.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: The funniest thing for me about Save the Cat is that Snyder very briefly references A plots and B plots. Which are actual things in a story, actual structural elements in the story, but never explains what they are. It’s just a passing reference.

Oren: This is so funny.

Chris: And the rest of the time, no reference to plot lines in this book, except for this passing reference that he doesn’t explain. It’s because for him it’s so second nature that he doesn’t even think it’s worth saying, and so it doesn’t go in the book.

Whereas Syd Field with his screenplay, the Foundations of Screenwriting was his book. This is the one where this like “three-act structure” comes from.

Oren: Or at least the version of it that many of us are familiar with.

Chris: Yeah, I think Syd Field really was trying to communicate story structure. He just doesn’t have a good intellectual understanding of it. And so, he keeps saying, oh, you need a beginning and an ending, and a beginning and an ending. But he cannot get down what they are. So he will ask some questions, oh, well, does your character get married or divorced. He will ask questions.

He’s clearly looking for like a hook and resolution. That’s clearly what he means. He doesn’t know how to define it. For him, it’s just gut level. It’s instinctual. So, he can’t say it.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Same with turning points. He has no understanding of fractal structure, right? So, or how child arcs work, right?

So for him, oh you know, there’s a plot point that twists the action around. It’s like, okay, look, every single plot event in a story changes what happens going forward. They’re all do that and they can be anywhere.

Bunny: I mean, the point you’ve made before is that these structures are only useful in as far as you already understand the other storytelling fundamentals.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Oren: And even then, like if you understand the storytelling fundamentals, you can probably make a good story that follows these structures. Although, honestly, Save the Cat’s gonna be kind of a challenge. But you probably can. But at that point, what are they giving to you that is worth restricting yourself like that? Why not just tell the story you want to tell at that point?

Chris: Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised that maybe somebody could pick up Syd Field’s book and by thinking on it really hard and looking at examples, come up with some better idea of hooks and resolutions, even though he never says it.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right? Maybe they could start paying attention to, okay, I need to figure out what the ending is to do the beginning, and the beginning has to match the ending, and that sets them on the wrong direction. I do think it’s a step better than, for instance, the Hero’s Journey. Which is just a bunch of metaphorical things that don’t really try at all.

Oren: I mean, the thing you have to understand about the Hero’s Journey and the Monomyth is that it’s made up, it’s fake. Like Campbell doesn’t demonstrate it ever.

Bunny: It’s a-spiritual-theory-of-storytelling-as-it-exists concept.

Oren: Yeah. Trying to read the original Hero with a Thousand Faces is just an exercise in masochism because Campbell’s not a good writer and what he’s trying to say is extremely hard to figure out, and he’s just goes on and on, and he like writes in this really weird cryptic style.

And then he’ll make bizarre claims out of nowhere. Like all ancient cities are built on the four cardinal directions. That’s just not true. And he just doesn’t feel the need to support these claims at all.

Chris: He won’t say all, he’ll just say ancient cities. And you’re like, what do you mean? What ancient cities? Where in the world during? What time period. And so, you’re just left with just so all ancient cities?

And he’ll make statements like they had a temple in the center too. Apparently ancient cities had a temple in the center and entrances in the four cardinal directions. This is just how ancient cities are.

So, he is just a bad scholar. He is not, he’s not a good scholar and he does not actually prove his thesis in any way.

Oren: He seems to resent the idea that he should. That’s just not what he is here for, okay? He’s already figured out the answer and now he’s here to like make it sound mystical to you. It’s just fake. It’s just made up.

Bunny: What’s very funny to me is that a lot of these structures are like explicitly based on Monomyth, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Hero’s Journey, blah, blah, blah. But the fact that none of them agree with how many stages there should be is something that none of them really reconcile. Can these all be true at once? I don’t know. Does it have 3 acts? 18 beats? 5 acts? 16? Or 14 Or 8?

Oren: It’s very funny watching people try to reconcile these completely unrelated, made up pseudo-structures. Trying to figure out how the three-act structure works with the Hero’s Journey. It it doesn’t, cause they’re both fake. They’re just fake from different directions.

The three-act structure is just made up. You can divide any story into three acts if you want to. There’s no real reason, but you can, and like Syd Fields’ version of it at least has some specific advice. It’s just weird and not very good.

Chris: Syd Field took an attention arc and tried to express it, but didn’t know how to actually describe it. And then built an arbitrary set of events around it. Like dividing the story into three. You could have three big child arcs, that each of them makes the story a little different, because they twirl and each of them spins the story in a different direction. As he was saying.

Oren: Always twirling, twirling towards freedom!

Chris: That’s an option a story could have. But that’s a very arbitrary thing to say that every story should have because if you don’t understand the multi-leveled fractal nature of plot structure, you cannot describe where things go because they could go anywhere.

Bunny: They also don’t specify how long these should be. If you look at the charts and diagrams of, for example, something like the Story Circle—that are like meant to be visualizations—it looks like they should all last the same amount of time.

But then you’ll read them a little bit and it’ll be like, this one can be as short as a single line. I won’t argue that huge moments that are important to the story can happen in a line or two. Like, all right, sure. But then in what sense is this a structure?

Oren: Right. Why did you use a pie graph? If the actual size of these things doesn’t relate to the pie?

Bunny: His claim is that because biology. It’s bullshit about like psychology and it’s a circle because of biology. I think that is what the article says. That’s about what I’d expect from a structure based on Campbell. But you know…

Oren: Yeah. I love Story Circle. It’s like they return to their familiar situations. Do they? Why? Most of the time they don’t. And what is the purpose of dictating that as a requirement?

Chris: I mean, some stories do it and it gives a sense of closure.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right. Or revisiting the past and seeing how you’ve grown. It can be done, but it certainly doesn’t have to be done. Which is again, a lot of how these suiter structures are. They don’t know how to identify what real story structure is. So, they only have two options. One is demanding that you include something you don’t need to include, or being so vague that they’re not really giving you anything at all.

Oren: Right.

Bunny: If I was going to express a progression as a circle, that would imply that you can start at any point on the circle. And that’s also not true of the structure.

Oren: [laughs] That’s a good point.

Bunny: It’s not like other structures. Trademark.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: [laughs] My favorite is when things that are not pseudo-structures get roped into this. Like a while back, I did an episode on this myth that you could avoid the need for tension and conflict in your stories by using this one weird trick, pseudo-structure.

And the main show of that was a Kishotenketsu, which is harmless set of potential plot points.

Chris: If I understand though, this is a structure that we don’t understand very well, right?

Oren: Yeah. In all of my research, I could not find any well-sourced information about Kishotenketsu, other than a set of YouTube videos by some Japanese manga creators who don’t really get into it all that much. They use it as a guide for tension in their story. They don’t get into the specifics that much.

Chris: Right. So, it might similar to the three-act structure a bit.

Oren: Or maybe not.

Chris: One is we don’t have good English sources on this, so that makes it hard for us to know exactly what it is.

Chris: Yeah. I’m not making any claims about the actual Kishotenketsu as it’s used in Japan. I don’t know how they use it there. I just know what English language blogs say about it.

The other one that I was looking at in that article was this thing called Daisy Chain plotting, which is not a structure, it’s a concept. Instead of having a single main character who you stick with for the entire story, you have a group of vignettes that all you relate to the same thing.

Chris: So, I would, I would call Daisy Chain somewhat a structure in that it specifies that there is a chain of vignettes. Because that is a specific structure because you have a story that starts and ends for each vignette.

Bunny: Oh, and each of the mini stories follows the three-act structure.

Chris: [laughs] It’s not a very specific structure. It just means if you say, Hey, this story is an anthology. Or this story is episodic. Or this story is very serial/overarching or whatever you wanna call it, that is structural information.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: About where plot hooks start and where they end. It is very vague and broad, but I would honestly give more credit to the Daisy Chain. Calling it a structure? Okay. Maybe in a kind of vague, broad type of way.

Oren: Yeah, and I don’t have any issues with Daisy Chain. I think that that’s a perfectly legitimate way to tell a story. There are certainly trade-offs, right? There’s a reason why we tend to stick with a single main character. But if that’s the kind of story you wanna do, that’s totally doable. It isn’t gonna do any of these things that the people often claim that it will.

Chris: It doesn’t get rid of conflict and tension.

Oren: Yeah. It has nothing to do with those things. Daisy Chain seems perfectly fine, and it’s being used as this weird prop in this fight that some authors have against the need to put tension in their story. Dave Daisy chain didn’t ask for this. It’s just a neat little story concept.

Bunny: Can we take a moment to appreciate just how bizarre Virgin’s Promise is?

Oren: Uuuuuh…

Bunny: A moment of silence for the fact that we’re talking about virgins. Like that’s not a bizarre, misogynistic concept in 2020, when that article came out.

Oren: Supposedly, it’s one of those things where like the person writing it is like, no, this doesn’t have to be about gender. Anyone can be any of these roles. Okay, but why did you name the dark reflection The Whore? Did you have to do that? I don’t think anyone made you do that.

Bunny: Here’s a line I pulled from it. Just as females can be heroes, males can be virgins whether or not they are gay.

Oren: Yeah. I mean.

Bunny: Thanks.

Oren: That’s technically true. [laughs]

Chris: [laughs] Somebody’s trying.

Bunny: True in the literal sense.

Chris: And failing to be sensitive.

Chris: It’s also nothing I could find in that. And admittedly I just skimmed it because I didn’t feel like I wanted to spend a lot of time on that article. I don’t think that the Virgin ever explicitly has to make a promise, nor do they have to be a virgin.

Oren: It’s sort of like the most obvious example of the thing I talked about earlier. This isn’t telling you what needs to be in a story. It’s telling you some things that could be in a story. If you ignore the weird, like virgin/whore-language, this is sort of about a story with the idea that it’s about a woman who is under pressure to do feminine coated things and wants to do masculine coded things and then has to reconcile those things.

Sure. You can tell a story about that if you want to. There’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of good stories are about that. But calling it a structure is weird because this doesn’t really tell you what needs to be in there. It’s just a list of inspiration ideas.

Bunny: It’s a feminine plot. That’s also what the article calls it.

Oren: Uhm. Oh, no, no, no.

Bunny: I also don’t know if it’s related at all to the Heroine’s Journey. I don’t know if that’s the same thing or something else.

Chris: What Oren was just saying, sounds like Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey.

Oren: It’s similar. It’s very similar.

Chris: I wrote about it back when I was more into the hero’s journey and then I learned better. But at the same time, if you want your character to go through growth and have big change, it can offer inspiration for doing that. It’s basically what I would say about it now.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I suppose you could say there are kind of some emotional structure in that there are periods in which the character appears to be learning and that would take tension down, and then having problems again, which would take tension up. But it’s mostly just for inspiration.

Bunny: I mean, that does seem to be the best case scenario.

Oren: Yeah. And it doesn’t call anyone a whore, which is kind of nice.

Bunny: [laughs] yeah…

Oren: Just in general, I would be very careful about the idea of story types having genders. I’m not gonna say there’s never a situation where that might be useful, but you get carried away with that almost immediately.

Chris: Yeah. I will say with Maureen Murdoch, the thing is that—and I have not actually really clarified while in this post—is that she was a therapist for women and so the inspiration for her was the things that she heard from her patients. And their emotional journeys.

And so the gender in that one, the Maureen Murdoch’s Heroine’s Journey, I think of it not as prescriptive, but as descriptive. She’s describing what a group of women went through emotionally at a particular time in response to patriarchy. And that’s where her idea for this Heroine’s Journey comes from.

Oren: There is one more thing that I think is really important about this is that also, bisexual, non-binary people can be virgins. Just so we’re clear.

Chris & Bunny: [laugh]

Bunny: We’re all represented here. This podcast says you are valid as a virgin. We witness you!

Oren: That’s definitely the message we want to end this on.

Bunny: I think my conclusion after studying all of these pseudo-structures is that A New Hope is to blame for 99% of it.

Chris: But I love A New Hope though, because I can use it to show people what an actual throughline is. It’s like, oh, you thought that a new hope was successful because of the Hero’s Journey? Well, guess what? It’s not! Here’s the actual… yeah.

Oren: Now you’re gonna learn something.

Chris: I had one editing client who told me that after he read this article, where I demonstrated through example that it wasn’t the Hero’s Journey that made it successful, but just having a throughline, that his mind was blown.

Bunny: Heck yeah.

Oren: We love to hear it.

Bunny: Keep blowing those minds.

Down with pseudo-structures. That should be your takeaway.

Oren: I think with that we are gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Bunny: Oh damn. We forgot to have a big row and talk about our dinners. I guess this podcast will not hit the tops of the charts.

Oren: Yeah, that’ll be part two.

Bunny: Perhaps that’s not a podcast at all.

Oren: We metaphorically discussed our dinners.

Bunny: Yes, true. Yeah.

Chris: If you would like us to stop and not discuss our dinners, you can consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons.

First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We will see you next week.

[Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

438 episodes

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