Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="two" data-source="post: 1503957" data-attributes="member: 9002">troll-baitWhy do I have the funny feeling I'm gnawing on troll-bait?OK I'll make this VERY easy on you.  Since every story told in movies has been told before somewhere (as you put it), please explicate/explain/tell me the plot predecessors for:1)  The Sweet Hereafter2)  Memento3)  Dr. StrangeloveThe movies I have picked feature some obvious problems for you.  The first is a very complicated, touching, horrific, human story, which has no major plot predecessor (that I can tell).  The seconds is relatively complicated from a structural standpoint, and inverts expectations on a number of levels.  The third features a plot/narrative from a cultural moment including technological aspects that were unavalable even 50 year previous.On the other hand, all these were distributed via Hollywood, which cuts down dramatically on various narrative experiments.  Still.  have it it.There.  Go.  And it does not count to say "they are all love stories."  All humans breathe.  This is true but trivial.  It does not tell you much about a given human to say he/she breathes.You have not shown in any way that movies either encompass all possible narrative forms or that every movie conforms to a given narrative form.  In fact, all you have done is state it as fact.  Just a few examples, heck, just a few hundred, would help your position.This is the most badly-argued, trollish thing I've read in a long time.YES.  You are RIGHT!  Plots are ABOUT SOMETHING!  However, to claim that "all plots have forever and will always be about something...ergo, there are no new plots" you must prove the following:1)  The category of "something" is so limited that it's easy to display all members of this category,2)  all members of the category "something" have already been displayed,ERGO3)  Any new plot must pick from category = "something" which has a limited variety, and display this selection (but this too, has already been done).I find it heart-breaking that you take comfort in eliding the difference between, (your example), a cave painting and a television program.  By extension, JS Bach is "roughly doing that same stuff" as B.Spears, and a local sportswriter is "writing the same types of stories" as Milton or Melville.The world must be a very bland, very uniform place in your eyes...Granted, you CAN see things in the way your describe, but what beauty, what details, what truths you are missing!  The loss is not ours, my friend, but your own.  That's what makes me a little sad.</blockquote>

Verification