Comment by kaybe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaybe | Hacker News Reader

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It might be similar to the reason/a stronger version of/ why people still keep taking in stories of the same kind.

There are a few ideas rehashed over and over, and some of them go a loooong way back (one reason why stories of other cultures are interesting - they have other patterns). Forbidden love, son-father relationships, coming-of-age, ... (look at Star Wars and find those, for example)

If you take care, you can probably predict the storyline for most movies as you go along, save for a few variations the themes have (so you'd have to predict for two storylines and guess which one it is going to be). It is a human ability, really, that builds our societies when we agree on what can happen. And most people seem to like this kind of storytelling. It's rare to find new ideas.

Just some thoughts. </rant>

That stuff is formulaic, absolutely, which is why you don't watch movies for that stuff, right?

That stuff just becomes background noise for the contained art: be that art acting, cinematography, art direction, dialogue writing, etc.

Which is what we read for too, right? The poetry in the prose, the setting, the interesting facts sprinkled in the story, the art of the dialogue -- the story is background to the art of novel writing, it seems to me, the same way that plot is background to film.

It's been my opinion for a while that the "meaning" in a work of art or in the sentences we use to communicate is found where it differs from the established pattern. For example, this very sentence follows the same general outline of thousands of other sentences. The actual meaning is found where it breaks with the pattern.

Another simple example would be image macros. They often follow a very strict pattern; the new information the user wishes to convey is where the pattern is broken.

In the same way, stories often follow a number of tropes. These tropes help to establish some basic information about the story, but what really makes it interesting is when the story breaks from the pattern and does something new.

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