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Notes -
Exploring the Set of all Possible Story Ideas
There are a set of tropes which one may call woke tropes that seem ubiquitous in television and movies. Genius women vs. stupid men, black heroes vs. white villains, mixed race families with a black father and a white mother. They seem ubiquitous, though perhaps they only seem that way because they stick out more than the polar opposite tropes. Has there ever been an attempt to quantify the prevalence of particular tropes in television and movies? Somebody posted a compilation of "anti-white propaganda" in the SSQS, which was rebutted with a random sampling of Superbowl commercials that were not noticeably anti-white. Many people here agree that woke tropes are overrepresented in Wheel of Time and Rings of Power. It seems to me that woke tropes are a real phenomenon, but the question is why... and relative to what?
To truly quantify the overrepresentation of tropes would require taking the set of all existing television shows and movies and seeing where they fit within the Set of all Possible Story Ideas. For every television show with a black hero and a white villain, there is a polar opposite show with the races reversed that never got made. Some spaces within the Set of all Possible Story ideas have been explored thoroughly, while others are unexplored. Books with protagonists that are professional writers seem pretty well done-to-death. Plays set in New York City, plays-within-plays, movies set in Los Angeles, movies about making movies. These ideas have all been thoroughly explored because authors and screenwriters write what they know. One explanation why movies and television have woke tropes is because professional writers live in New York and Los Angeles and know a lot of genius women and genius black people in real life.
By contrast, a novel which captures the inner life of a mentally retarded person is elusive and largely unexplored. Writing a book is beyond the means of most mentally retarded people, and professional writers have trouble portraying characters who are so vastly different from themselves. Even the lives of ordinary people are largely unexplored, because ordinary people do not write novels, and professional writers have trouble writing ordinary characters. It is easier to create a clown or a buffoon than it is to write an accurate depiction of a person with slightly below average intelligence. Another reason why stories about ordinary people are unexplored is because audiences demand stories that are extraordinary. There is a realm of possible story ideas that do not get explored because they are boring to audiences. Every person's life is a possible story, but most people's lives are not extraordinary. Audiences will not see a movie about a store clerk who does not have a wicked sense of humor and does not get up to crazy hijinks.
A writer can take an ordinary story and make it extraordinary by tweaking a number of variables. A natural or man-made disaster can be added to an ordinary situation to make it extraordinary. In a sporting event between a strong team and an underdog team, it is ordinary for the strong team to win and extraordinary for the underdog to win. By definition, underdogs should lose more than fifty percent of the time, but a survey of television and movies would reveal an underdog win rate approaching 100%. The underdog trope is an inherent feature of story-telling since it is the most basic way make an ordinary story extraordinary. Many of the tropes I called woke tropes can be seen as variations of the underdog trope. Maybe the reason writers have genius women vs. stupid men and black heroes vs. white villains is because they think of these as extraordinary role reversals of the ordinary state of affairs in real life. Or at least, they think they are subverting the expectations of the audience.
But it seems like audiences are getting tired of having their expectations subverted over-and-over again. Have audiences become so fatigued by underdog stories that they will pay to see the Bad News Bears lose to the Yankees? Or pay to see an intelligent white male hero triumph over a stupid black villain? Probably not. I think the underdog trope is an inherent feature of story-telling that television and movies will never escape from, and woke tropes will continue to be featured as variations of the underdog trope. I think the solution for people who are fatigued by woke tropes will come from AI story generators. AI story generators work for free and do not have to worry about writing stories that will draw in audiences. That means they can explore regions of the Set of all Possible Story Ideas which are less extraordinary and less laden with tropes. AI story generators will also just produce massive quantities of stories. Regardless of whatever woke biases or trope-seeking behaviors are programmed into them, the sheer quantity of stories generated will result in the Set of all Possible Story Ideas becoming more fleshed out and explored. Maybe most of these stories will never be adapted for television or made into movies. But when audiences tune on their television and see Genius Black Lady #3547 triumphing over Angry White Man #7821, maybe they will draw some comfort knowing that an AI story generator created a simulated universe containing billions of stories where the underdogs lose most of the time.
What's the opposite trope here? An all-white family? White father and black mother?
There are obviously plenty of white families in media and entertainment. When it comes to romantic pairings with a white male and a black female, well, the highest-grossing film (in US and globally) in 2021 was the new Spiderman. I haven't seen it, but still, Wikipedia shows that it has a white Spidey (Tom Holland) and black Mary Jane equivalent (Zendaya). The only movie I did see in a movie theater was Dune, which also did pretty good and got both critical appraisal and online appraisal, including from people who would dismiss Spiderman as capeshit; it had white Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and black Chani (again, Zendaya). If Villeneuve manages to film two more Dune movies, they're eventually going to become a family.
Maybe it really, really is the case that white guys tend to be more sensitive to the pairing you mentioned than the opposite way around? One source I've seen complaining about all these movies where a white guy gets the black girl is Tariq Nasheed; one might also gather he has his particular reasons for being sensitive about movie pairings that are that way round.
Yes.
What movie was he referring to? The last one I saw, funnily enough, was Dear White People.
I don't remember the exact list, I think the Spiderman movie was mentioned. I also recall that either him or some other black nationalist activists made a lot of hay about this movie.
Who remembers that some time ago they made a remake of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner with Aston Kutchner coming to grips with his black girlfriend's dad?
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Well, it's a natural catch-22, isn't it? Subvert expectations in the same way often enough and you will have established a new expectation that could use subverting. One of my pet peeves about recent genre storytelling is the twist-on-a-twist trope; I spend a good deal of my time watching new thrillers anticipating the requisite multiple twists -- to the point that the most refreshing surprise would be if there are no twists at all.
But then I think a lot of this drive for originality is largely missing the greater point. There are, as the book says, only 36 Dramatic Situations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations), so we are bound to revisit the same stories over and over, What makes them matter is not necessarily originality, but rather genuine investment and honesty. If a creator is driven to tell a certain story and does so honestly, it will resonate in a way that the same story, created to sell products or fit in a certain # of ideological platitudes, won't resonate.
Look at Rocky. It takes the common underdog trope and, with real emotional investment by its writer, seems original because it tells the story honestly. Spoiler: Rocky does lose his final match, but that doesn't matter to audiences who were invested in his emotional goals, which were fulfilled by genuine storytelling that insulted neither the characters nor the audience.
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About a month ago, I re-watched Top Gun. One of the subplots in the movie is the pilots of the Top Gun program competing to be the best pilot. The protagonist, Maverick, was his commanding officer's second choice to be sent to the program. When he gets there we are introduced to Iceman, the clear favorite to win the prize. Maverick is the clear underdog here.
Maverick does not win, and in fact nearly drops out of the program altogether.
So, yeah, a good story is a good story, regardless of whether the underdog wins in the end.
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Trope is a bad word for what's happening because it's too contaminated to really use to get any real meaning across, really, in any capacity. Everything is somehow a trope and its immediately negative. Tropes aren't really good or bad but woke tropes are almost invariably bad for several reasons. A black person instead of a white person isn't a subversion of expectations, it's a meta-subversion of expectations which should be meaningless to the plot but isn't. The reason it's a woke trope is the reason it's bad. The black person will not be the underdog. They will say they're the underdog, but nothing in the story usually holds that to be true. And almost always, conversely, when they make a genius woke character they will say they're a genius, but no actions or dialogue demonstrate this except that it is said to be so. "Sansa is the smartest woman I know." It's betraying the narrative for the sake of making these woke tropes true if only because the writers have written it to be so.
Also, the rules of the world are not the rules of a story. The underdog losing is a subversion of expectations because it's a story. The heroes are supposed to win and when it doesn't happen that's the subversion. Earning the subversion or making the trope not bad is about having it make sense once all is said and done. If they lose or win it needs to build to that in some way. A lot of stories don't bother to do this anymore. The subversion comes because the writers just write it to be so. It's stories written by people who kind of understand what goes into a story but don't understand what makes it good. Underdogs do not have to lose greater than 50% of the time, they should be, as set up in the story, worse than the antagonists, that's all. But this clashes innately with the meta-woke insertions. Black people and women need to be the heroes but they can't be portrayed as worse, so they just portray them as perfect. Perfect people are boring and also they're not subverting anything anymore when they do this. The audience expects them to be perfect, there's no subversion going on here except in the writer's and some critics' minds. What we expect of the world is not what we expect of a story. Anyone who watches sports and roots for one specific team knows this. But you rarely make a story out of a losing team's season, that'd be the subversion because the winning season is almost always the more interesting one.
It's just lazy. They want a black girl genius with no flaws and no interesting dialogue or actions and nothing done to even suggest they are a genius and they also expect that to be as engaging as a flawed, drunken white man who uses his genius to deflect and cover his weaknesses. Why is it the same in their eyes? Because she's black. Race, gender identity, sexuality, are a replacement for personality for many writers and uniquely stifling because no one really has the guts to give their characters flaws so they're all the same character which is not nearly as interesting. If you woke trope a story you will get a worse story almost invariably because its really hard for writers to not inject a new personality into a character that has been race/gender swapped and the personality of that character will suffer making the story worse. The idea of doing the woke trope swapping is pretty telling to begin with because it usually means a not healthy amount of presentism will be brought to bare on the story. Any british show that takes place hundreds of years ago will have a superbly able black person who acts as if its the current year and they will talk about their plight to others as if its the current year and a good portion of the story will include a woke sideplot that has nothing to do with the main plot.
In my mind, the things don't make a story bad, but they're a hallmark of people who don't care if they've told a good story but just that their propaganda/fetish/social commentary is out there. The more annoying thing, to me, is that it's obvious when this is done even on a small scale. Anyone who says it's not done is a liar. But once it's done it has an aura of protection because people are only criticizing the story because of its woke agenda (it also doesn't help that the reviews that do criticize often only talk about the woke agenda as why it's bad but that's just another level of why this deflection is so annoying) and if you criticize it you're only doing it because you're a racist/misogynist/nazi. I'm not sure it makes normal people more likely to like it but they won't believe bad reviews and will slog through a whole season before they think something might not be right with it. I think that's reason enough for Amazon to go full hog into protecting properties by having them critic proof before they air just by diversifying the cast.
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Seen this?
It's only Law and Order, but it's about what I expected.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2856766
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The short story Flowers for Algernon shows it can be done. Underdog stories are popular probably because people want to believe they are true and they identify as the underdog. I find the obsession with the downtrodden to be annoying but I guess that's what people want.
yeah - "exploring mental disability in novel form is never done" is just wrong. Hate this kind of article, but a lot of popular books explore mental disability
the popular, if not necessarily most popular (lol yud) stories on fanfiction.net or wattpad are ... clearly written by ordinary people. Now, they may not explore the lives of ordinary people in a deep or illuminating way for that reason. Many ordinary people also try to write novels and fail to sell them - and are the writers popular romance novels like these really that intelligent?
I couldn't get into it for this reason, but isn't Faullkner's The Sound and the Fury told partially from the POV of a retarded character? I found those early chapters unreadable.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is also a first-person narrative from the POV of a character with arguably limited mental resources.
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