Subject: Periodic table of storytelling
Author:
Posted on: 2014-02-17 03:07:00 UTC
Anyone seen this yet?
http://designthroughstorytelling.net/periodic/
Basically a periodic table constructed out of Tropes (from TV Tropes).
Elcalion
That "conflict" is the least-linked element. Of course, it could be because conflict is more of a required basic component of storytelling (except in stories that use contrast and transition as their driving factors... though it's easy to see those kind of plots as being driven by a thousand miniscule conflicts,) and it could be because TVTropes is focused on the specific.
The fact that Face-Heel Turn is the trope most linked suggests that either it's prominent in the most referenced fandoms on TVTropes, or that it's being overused or become overly general...
I need to stop thinking now. Funny graphic, should probably give it to my writing group...
Unfortunately, as pointed out by others, it kinda appears to just be a bunch of tropes, thrown together in a table-shaped format.
I'll bet we could do better, if we tried. What if you made "character archetypes" roughly analogous, to, say, metals? What about 'verse tropes - like dystopias and utopias and so on - roughly analogous to noble gases?
So it's just... a bunch of assorted tropes? Thrown together in a rougly table-like format? What makes these ones particularly distinctive? Why are they arranged like that? Normally, a periodic table groups elements that share similar properties into columns, and groups related columns into sections, but this just seems to dump any tropes that might be found in a single index into an arbitrary number of periodic columns and then moves on immediately to something else. At least the left columns seem to have sort of a theme, namely the factors involved in a story's construction, or at least tied to its construction out-of-universe, but after that, it just goes off the walls. And why are the fandom tropes in the same spot as the noble gases? Noble gases are the least reactive of all elements, while fandom is traditionally the most reactive group in all of the human collective consiousness!
Okay, that last one might have been a joke.
I do love TVTropes, and as many do, I reference it and spend time on it more than is probably mentally healthy, so I'm not anti-trope. I just have no idea what this table is trying to do.
The problem is, I thought it might be popularity? Number of links determine the placement on the board. But that doesn't seem to be it.
Popularity calculated by number of pages that link to those specific pages. (Measured, for some reason, in kilowinks (Links within the tropes community pages.)) But that doesn't make much sense because the numbers are all over. Is it a mesh of the author's personal bias and an arbitrary pool of tropes pulled from the most 'popular' on the site? I dunno. It seems confusing to me. There doesn't seem like much rhyme or reason to how the individual columns (horizontal or vertical) are placed or chosen. But it's a neat idea, I guess?
I mean, if you guys want to. It could be an interesting project.
How about we do one for fanfiction tropes instead of for tropes in general?
We need vertical groups that depend on how the elements of a story interact with each other. For example, the noble gases could be Generics, the unnoticed and unreactive parts of the setting that don't really do much except fill in space.
Down at the bottom, where things get radioactive, put the Mary Sues.
Out of character would be represented by isotopes... you know, the kind that come from radioactive decay. :)
How closely do you want it to match the chemistry of the elements? For instance, do you want some sort of linking between the Group I and Group VII elements - so that you can create analogues of, say, salt, in a way that makes sense? And are you (heaven help you) thinking about electronegativity?
hS
I mean, who better to create a periodic table than a chemist?
I suspect that would be more useful than chemistry at this stage.
But... eh, let's at least outline. Ignoring the proton count (because it doesn't apply here), we have three or four criteria for laying out the table:
-Electronegativity, or rather reactivity. This increases towards the top right and bottom left corners (specifically, e-neg increases to top right, but e-pos increases towards bottom left). The exception is the noble gases, which are virtually zero.
Reactivity would seem to correlate with how popular a concept is, or rather, how well it meshes with others. No, rather, I think it's how prone it is to taking over the story. To take a chemistry analogy, if you add potassium to sodium chloride solution, the more reactive potassium will drive out the sodium.
-Group, or column. These group elements which are similar in some way - and also, which can easily replace each other. So in each column you'd have a set of elements which can be interchanged, in order of their ability to dominate the story.
Related to this is the electron count, which in our case is 'elements they go well with'. Group VII elements, for instance, will go very nicely with Group I elements - but need extra work to compound with Group II. So, for instance, songfic-Mary Sue is a simple compound that clearly works easily, while CYOA-Mary Sue is more difficult, and requires more to work.
-Block, or maybe element type. There are four 'blocks' on the Periodic Table: the s-block of reactive metals, the p-block of (mostly) non-metals, the d-block of metals, and the f-block of unstable elements (this is a simplification, naturally). Someone already suggested putting the pure-badfic elements at the bottom, which is the f-block. Then I guess we'd split into cast/plot, and further divide cast into setting and characters.
The main thing that needs to be done to keep it analogous is making sure that the first and second columns from the left and right work well together - that is, that aspects of plot that are affected by setting are in the last two columns of the plot-block.
(For fun, the blocks should of course be Setting, Plot, Demographic, and wtF, to match their real names)
The generics are things like Generic Foodstuff, Generic Surface (Generic Ability to Not Go To The Toilet?), which appear virtually everywhere, but have no impact on everything.
hS