In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.
I remember watching TV as a kid, and whenever there was some sort of jeopardy involving the hero, I could reassure myself that they were what I'd call a 'can't-die' character, so everything would be OK.
Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?
Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.
I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?
Audiences know the form in their bones, they know that romantic comedies end in an uplifting way.
The cliché I tried to avoid was I hated "teenage sidekicks." I always figured if I were a superhero, there's no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager. So my publisher insisted I have a teenager in the series, because they always felt teenagers won't read the books unless there's a teenager in the story; which is nonsense.
Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore
Every Pixar movie has its own rules that viewers have to accept, understand, and enjoy understanding. The voices of the toys in the 'Toy Story' films, for example, are never audible to humans.
Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.
We have in our head something called story grammar. We see the world as a series of episodes rather than logical propositions... In our serious society, storytelling is seen as being soft. But people process the world through story.
Though 'Child's Play' is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader.
Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.
BoJack' is a very much a format-based show. The story should always match the format, but I don't necessarily think the story has to come first.
Soft fantasy worlds have a much looser cause-and-effect relationship. Alchemists can turn lead into gold and nobody wonders about how it will impact the currency system. Someone waves a wand and turns an elephant into a mouse and nobody worries about conservation of mass.
