AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Nov 13, 2021 10:54 pm
idlecuriosity wrote: ↑Sat Nov 13, 2021 6:31 pm
I have no concrete reason to believe any of that but it does remind me a lot of this:
Belief is for the birds! If belief is what you are after, then it's best to adopt materialism, mystical nondualism, Schop idealism, or religious fundamentalism and call it a day. Free beings are only satisfied with knowledge. Archetypal knowledge that our best fictional stories cannot be more creatively, precisely, and richly structured than the Reality which gave rise to all of them; that our fantasy of an 'empty unconscious void' standing behind the visible world has no relation to our structured, ever-evolving experience. We are afraid that our deepest motivations, hopes, longings, and intuitions may actually be true, so we instead of choose to live in darkness and complain about our lack of motivation and hope. It's a very tragic circumstance humanity finds itself in today.
Why would anyone be afraid of that? Most of them are outright saying it's because they know a good deal of it is fabricated and being sold to them so JP can make a buck while they languish, that's why they don't feel very good. Everyone is looking for people to 'join a cause' to absolve their suffering or loneliness and they tend to predate upon these exact intuitive leanings. Loosely topical; you should start a youtube channel, I'd have a better overview of your premise so I could formulate a better understanding of it and you'd probably enjoy the money too.
>saying I have to see his subjective opinion as objective or I don't have any basis to believe mine-
no u, you might have already died in the 1930s. See the above story. Same here, btw.
There are tons of stories which are intelligently written and have absolutely nothing to do with the base three act structure culminating in a christ analogue that you see stemming from big budget cheeseball westerns like the Matrix, even if a bulk of them are eastern (Kino no Tabi, HxH, Berserk, the third is extremely popular at least) or delegated to a late night Channel 4 slot for publicity (At least until someone makes a 7 hour video with 5,000,000 views lavishing commentary on it; that show would be Utopia. The original/UK version. Watching at least a little of that might show how different that TV show was and it sits at the top of most viewer/critic aggregates too.) The rest are in actual books.
I'm a writer/artist myself so I'm aware of how a cultural zeitgeist builds cumulative expectations that you can then use as a sort of linguistic code to subvert or direct expectations, it's an exposed science that's easy for the experienced to codify; it has no especial preference for the analogues you point out as prevalent for a story. That's a language we built up to sell things. It's mostly that westerns (generally films, with recent TV such as the Sopranos or Breaking Bad finally breaking form on this) are too short to diversify the focus on a group of protagonists or go through the individuation of personalities in scrutiny since they often fail to really develop one, that and the rudimentary three act structure rather than the four act one Japan uses is really good at sophisticating a premise for a fight scene that can allow the audience to go mad with mindless explosions for the twilight of a story's three hours.
The Matrix or LOTR are not reflections of a spiritual exaltation, unless you're going to say the Big Mac also is. In the case of those two you've probably been mislead by degenerates in suits plagiarizing a few other authors that're powerless to intervene, at least in Tolkien's sake; the man is dead. Stories are a fetishistic medium so I'm abstaining from affixing my own appraisal of them to those who enjoy these in turn; what you order at McDonalds is your life and same here. But I will say those characters hardly even do anything meaningful or think. If Mickey Mouse just 'did' things' and Tom & Jerry finally added characterization with a train of thought behind the wheel leading protagonists between exacting their plans then the bulk of big budget cinema has remained firmly as the former. I know this because a famous visual novel artist underscored this change when going from his first protagonist in the late 80s to the protagonist's grandson and changing how fights were portrayed in his medium forever; the first of his stories was written when his medium strongly derived from tropes in James Cameron era cinema and it showed. Largely unaffected and financially complacent with not changing this, western cinema doesn't have to show a character doing anything surprising or spur pause for reflection to fill in their thoughts.
The Matrix is cool and if the questions it brings up makes you think then that's great; you may exude a greater propensity for it than me even. But come on, it's Rambo ft. Plato's Cave. It had about 2 hours to establish itself so what else was it ever going to be? Easier way to put it; if I had a good shot at delivering a ring to a volcano and I'd be revered as a hero for the rest of my life doing it do you think I wouldn't? The dominoes are set up for these protagonists to exact their course without scruples, Neo was chosen before he was aware of it and didn't have to explore more than one forking decision of minutiae or make difficult choices in making manifest his ascension. Is Rambo a spiritual journey now?
Some of the most uplifting stories are the ones that violently exclaim and venerate our atomized individuation because they don't run from reality while carefully reasoning through the prospects that would require someone to live happily in a 'maelstrom of uniformity', Berserk being the standout here. There is something infinitesimally more charismatic to me about an individual finding their way in a world of darkness despite being cursed to fail by that universe's representation of god himself; it's the same reason I enjoy hard magic with solid rules and drawbacks (Mistborn, HxH, Avatar Last Airbender) as opposed to 'a wizard did it.' But stories don't even need to climax. You can literally just make talking with each other interesting, GRRM built a career off of that and the entire ascension allegory of many a good story's main arc often plays second fiddle to the little moments of people interacting and working out the emotions that punctuated the road there.
I don't even think the Christ ascension analogy style writing works for plots that inspire that gratuitous sense of wonder as well as you think either. I'm serious. One Piece is the most popular graphic novel of all time more or less and as much as I've grown out of it (it's aimed at kids and has taken way too long to finish), some of why is that after the timeskip he got concerned with morality or the general well being of the world. To a lot if it's readerbase it had such a majestically optimistic plot when he was starting out and only cared about him and his crew as a pirate, the way just seeing things how they were and intervening in countries' affairs often led people to a more wholesome tomorrow and paved the way to free themselves from the heel of a world government that's tantamount to the global technofascism smothering us in our world.
I don't know. It's just that I spend a lot time in stories and thinking about them. You can maybe say some stories do this but a lot of stories really don't, where would Lovecraft's fables even sit on this spectrum?