Iron Mal said:
Again, this is the internet, there are people out there who will publicly humiliate themselves just for a small bit of the spotlight and some attention (see trolls and most Youtube celebrities for startling examples of this in action).
Yes. But as I said, this is an anonymous persona. I could be anyone and no one. Thus anything I say or do wouldn't really reflect on me as a person in a positive or negative way.
Youtube celebrities do the mistake of actually filming themselves and thus exposing their true identities to everyone. I don't. In fact, I could be lying though my teeth about everything I say and no one would really truly know if I did or not.
That's the way I prefer it. I don't find debates interesting when people spend way too much time trying to masturbate with their empathy too much and never really focus on the arguments presented, but instead guess WHY people say what they say.
The less real and human I act, and the less information I give you or anyone else to know the real true me, the less accurate any such guesses will be, making the entire effort moot to begin with.
Iron Mal said:
And if you insist that I use my Jedi mind reading powers then fine, let the baby have it's bottle.
You were always a quiet child growing up in the vineyards of the old country until an old man who would forever change your life approached you and said, 'son, you ain't never gonna amount to nothing', determined to prove this strange fellow wrong you embarked on an epic journey of self-realisation and spiritual enlightenment to discover just what it means to do something with your life.
The name 'Housebroken Lunatic' stemmed from an unfortuneate incident involving two dead cats, a bar magnet and a heroic amount of smelling salts (there were no other survivors).
Sorry, but no. Points for effort and creativity though.
Iron Mal said:
No, that's just my loose understanding of the idea surrounding the seven basic plots. Makes enough sense to me.
Well it doesn't to me. There are just too many inconsistensies and too much arbitrary judgement for the theory to work.
Iron Mal said:
Just because you made something doesn't nessercarily mean that you know everything there is to know about it (I'm pretty certain that Shakespeare probably had no idea about half of the imagery and meaning that we attach to his plays when we examine them).
But that wouldn't be a mistake or lack of in-depth understanding on Shakespeare's part but more a mistake on our part for trying to interpret his plays in ways that he had no original thought or intention of doing.
A surrealist painting might be perfectly acceptable to interpret in any number of ways, but when it comes to a tangible story with conrecte planning, there are only so much room for interpretation, and the size of that room is largely up to the writer to decide (as you may know, some plays/stories are more ambiguous and easy to interpret freely than others). Consider the movie "Eraserhead". Surrealist flick that you can pretty much interpret in an infinite number of ways. How could such a work of fiction possibly conform to seven "universal" and basic principles?
Iron Mal said:
And then of course there's the effec of subtle influence, we're all influenced by something and this is very difficult (if not neigh-impossible) to avoid succumbing to (we all secretly copy and plagarise, even if we don't realise it).
Actually, that's impossible. If every story is a willing or unwilling piece of plagiarism, then how did the first work of fiction ever get created? If there were no previous narratives to plagiarize, then how did the first one came to be?
Im not denying that subtle influence does occur, im just saying that claiming that it to be a universal fact doesn't really make sense, since that would imply that the "primordial" story just came to be on it's own without any predecessors (which would be impossible if the definition of subtle influence always held sway).
But even if plagiarism does occur, it still doesn't mean that you have to adhere to these "basic seven" plots.
If we look at these "basic seven" as seven different Lego kits, intended to build seven different models of Lego cars. What's to stop you from taking bits of pieces from each and building nothing like a car at all of them? (perhaps a model of an aeroplane, a spaceship or a motorcykle?)
As long as you're sufficiently introspective and analyze your own creative decisions during the process of writing or creating something, it's not too hard to discern if you're actually plagiarizing something or if you're following an archetypical plot or not. In fact, it's more fun to create if you do that instead of just "going nuts". Because when you go nuts without afterthought, that's when subtle influence becomes the most apparent in your work.
Iron Mal said:
It takes two to argue, and you did respond to me.
Who's the bigger idiot? The idiot? Or the idiot who follows him?
Oh but I didn't folow you, since we're not discussing the original subject matter anymore. I said that I wasn't interested in proving or convincing you of the fact that my work differs from these archetypes, and I haven't. I haven't even tried to present any proof, and I won't. Because im completely satisified with being the only one who knows, and im the only person that really matters so.
