
The basic dramatic situations, according to 1919 manual for screenwriters - sharjeelsayed
http://www.openculture.com/2020/08/37-possible-stories.html
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jasode
When looking at human-generated categories or labels, it's useful to think
about the meta layer of "lumpers vs splitters":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters)

This thread's article divides drama situations into 37 buckets. And another
person divides stories into 7 types:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots)

In music... a Lumper might think of only 2 types of music -- instrumentals vs
songs with vocals. A Splitter says there are 1000s of genres because even
within sub-category of rap music, East coast Miami rap is _totally different_
and 180 degrees opposite from West coast Los Angeles rap.

Lumping vs Splitting type of thinking happens in programming topics too. E.g.
A lumper has no problem saying, _" C/C++ are low-level languages with manual
memory management"_ ; but a splitter will object with, _" I hate it when C and
C++ are lumped together! They are TOTALLY different languages!"_

Depending on what you focus on, everybody's customized taxonomy is "correct".

~~~
BaronSamedi
Lumpers vs Splitters is a fun categorization. When I see a group of things
categorized I view it as a set partition and I wonder what equivalence
relation is being used to distinguish the partitions (categories). The
relation is usually unstated so it becomes a mental exercise to steelman the
categorization by trying to think of one.

~~~
klawed
“Lumpers vs Splitters” is itself a splitting or a lumping?

~~~
smichel17
Lumping, for sure. There's people in the middle who recognize the difference
between rap and jazz, but not the different variants within.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
This is a special case of the observation that no discretization of a
continuous space is "correct". They are inherently subjective, and some may be
more useful for any given purpose than others.

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teddyh
This reminds me of two things:

1\. The _Save The Cat!_ books by Blake Snyder.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Snyder#Save_the_Cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Snyder#Save_the_Cat)!

2\. TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes)
[https://tvtropes.org/](https://tvtropes.org/)

~~~
takinola
TV Tropes is basically the only NSFW website that does not feature any nudity
or erotica. The big issue with it is that once you click on it, you find
yourself wondering how the last 6 hours of your life flew past without you
knowing

~~~
stevula
Last time I went to TV Tropes I ended up with 60 tabs open to read later and
it took me over a month to get though them all (every article led to me
opening 3-10 new tabs).

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tudorw
[https://youtu.be/oP3c1h8v2ZQ](https://youtu.be/oP3c1h8v2ZQ)

Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories.

~~~
dmos62
That's a fun bit. Someone did this with sentiment analysis on texts and
clustering. They looked at how sentiment changed during the book (the curve)
and then they clustered them to identify 6-12 archetypical story "curves".

~~~
Pet_Ant
Source? That sounds interesting. I did my graduate work in a related field but
never came across that. May have been before that of course...

~~~
Marcus316
He might be referring to this:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772v2.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772v2.pdf)

There's a link to it from the actual article.

~~~
dmos62
Looks like exactly what I'm talking about. The paper I'm thinking of used a
self-organizing map (SOM) for comparing arcs, if I recall correctly.

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Udo
The categorization is interesting, from today's perspective. Things that the
author asserts are "without criminal intent": rebellion, vengeance,
involuntary criminal love. And then even more interesting, "with criminal
intent": struggle against god, sacrifice all for a passion, adultry.

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goto11
Note that the article talks about 37 "possible stories", while the manual
talks about "basic dramatic situations" which is a different thing.

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bryanrasmussen
To Sacrifice all for a passion -> 62 things to be passionate about
[https://designepiclife.com/things-to-be-passionate-
about/](https://designepiclife.com/things-to-be-passionate-about/)

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johncoltrane
s/stories/situations

~~~
dang
We've put situations in the title.

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mamon
Given that:

1\. Some of those 37 situations are more interesting than others

2\. You need more than one of them for a good screenplay

3\. Some situations do not mix well in one story

You will come to conlusion that there is limited number of possible stories.

Now, Hollywood has been producing dozens of movies every year for over a
century it becomes clear that it is slowly running out of stories to tell.
That's why you see so many remakes/sequels: Star Wars, Rambo, Die Hard, etc.
Or remakes with a twist: let's make main characters black/women/gay/trans and
pretend that we created a brand new, original story.

Hollywood is eating its own tail.

~~~
jp555
Hey, have you heard of "books"? over 1 million new books are published every
year, and people have been writing them for like a really long long time.

