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0271 - Lowly peasant labour - 2022.12.12 |
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Comment: Yes, I'm aware that "prince" and "princess" both derive from an original gender-neutral term, "princeps", not "princex". Yes, I'm also aware that "Mx" is the preferred gender-neutral honorific, not "Mezzer". There's going to be a lot of linguistic drift in the coming century, as anatomy is decoupled from genetics and gender is decoupled from anatomy. That's not what I want to talk about in this note. I want to talk about three-act structures. I do think that Lee is right, and that Zoa's story, ideally, should be crammed into a three-act structure. I disagree, however, that the essential nature of a three-act story is "little happy, big sad, big happy". I wrote about this in the Bard's Guide To Life: first you establish what is possible, then you show what is likely, then finally you show something that's unlikely but possible. In Star Wars: A New Hope, for example, we start by showing that space travel and Jedi magic are possible, then we show that defeating the Empire is unlikely, then finally we get to see Luke do something improbable without violating what we've established as possible. In the case of Forward, here, we started with what is possible - Lee lives in a world with widespread AI, transhumanist medicine, and post-scarcity abundance. Once that's established, we show what's likely - Lee is probably going to sulk and pout their way through a few classes, lose interest, crash and burn, and be evicted. But, of course, no one wants to read a dog-bites-man story. The whole point of telling a story (rather than simply recounting a statistic) is that you want to describe something interesting, and improbable things are interesting. What's something that the story until now would indicate is unlikely, but, as per the setting and characters we've seen so far, is still possible? What's something that you might not see coming, but that, once, it happens, won't make you yell "oh, bullSHIT!" at your screen? |
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