“Why does every film and TV series seem to have the same plot?”
https://aeon.co/essays/why-does-every-film-and-tv-series-seem-to-have-the-same-plot
Eliane Glaser for Aeon
Discovered 2:55pm 5/13/2025
Begins as a blithe essay on the hero’s journey and the need to find a new narrative structure, detailing the capital-patriarchal structure of the hero’s journey. It gets interesting 2/3rds of the way through when it lays out some alternatives while maintaining a smart acknowledgement of the traditional structure’s importance and influence.
Being told a story is to be infantilised, somewhat: to suspend one’s critical faculties. In contrast to polemic, stories are covertly persuasive. Even if their message is good for us, the sugaring of the pill represents a lowering of intellectual expectations.
There is also the question of whether the kind of change the monomyth advocates is always in our best interests. The politics of most mass-market screen fictions – from the fake anticolonialism of Avatar (2009) to the fake feminism of Barbie (2023) – are covertly conservative. … The lesson is very often to be happy with your lot and to celebrate the comforts of the nuclear family, small-town existence and, often, capitalism.
I’m fond of the approach discussed for The Camera where the central character is only adjacent to the driving events of the plot. Similarly, the carrier bag theory offers a great basis for world-building.
Serious fiction, Le Guin wrote, is ‘a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were’.
3rd Voice 3rd Year
Evan Dahm for his damn self
Discovered 3:05PM 5/13/2025
To a certain extent it feels like the world-building in riceboy’s Vaatu and 3rd Voice achieve the synthesis of carrier-bag and hero’s journey theories of narrative. They’re not decentralized narratives per se; they follow the growth and development of a hero, but this hero is surrounded and shaped by a changing world. The world of the 3rd Voice is the “womb of things to be and tomb of things that were”
The narrative structure of the comic reflects the lifestyle of the author. In the video he discusses the minutia of the creative process, from Patreon funding format, problems with marketing on social media, narrative design, the vibrant community surrounding the comic, and his plans to basically continue it into perpetuity. Nonetheless given the political economic uncertainties it’s clear that the comic’s future is at stake - the future of all independent artists are at stake.
Navichet is basically everything I want Basil to be. A small, curious, and deeply committed scholar and scrapper in a broken and mysterious world. I’ll have to do a deeper analysis of the comic in the future.