# there isn't just one story.
it's been a popular conjecture that most narratives told by humans can all be categorized into the same archetypes of narratives, and further that all of these narratives can all be categorized into a single type of narrative with broad similarities that echo across all the narrative subtypes.
explain the one author that popularized this, seemingly just because it was a fun idea
there are actually decent justifications for this conjecture being true. a great number of stories have a main character — or in the case of non-fictional narratives, perhaps a focal group of historical people — and most main characters, in general, take the form of a Subject. this means that most stories will, in general, always center themselves around the core characteristics of all Subjects: the presence of biological needs, the expression of the desire to fulfil individual needs, the ability to learn new information and replace signifier contents, and the ability to grow and develop.
however, our ability to understand every kind of narrative has been biased by everyone's tacit acceptance of Existentialism.
because nearly everyone believes Existentialism, we are predisposed to think that every story must actually revolve around a specific identifiable person or a group of people, rather than consisting of several separate story tracks that within the context of the fictional world each proceed separately.
there are at least two kinds of narratives: the type-I story in which the rest of the world exists purely for the development of its main character, and the type-II meta-story which chronicles how different stories influence each other and merge into larger stories.
it is truly baffling how much authors and academics have overlooked the type-II meta-story when by the year 2000, they were hardly even rare.
for one example, we can examine fighting games. in the _Street Fighter_ series, players can select various characters which each embody a certain outward archetype of what some particular country-specific martial art or specialized skill set is.
by later games in the series, each character's route through the game to defeat the others and achieve their objective is accompanied by a short and simple yet lore-filled narrative. Guile, United States airman, visits the grave of his fellow soldier Charlie Nash. The seemingly basic stories of Ryu and Ken introduce "darkness" techniques and characters which represent the warped and improperly-used versions of their powers. Some thematic associations of various characters simply repeat themselves, including characters trapped in evil organizations who are named after calendar months (Juni, Juli), who become followed up by further Evil-aligned characters named after calendars (Urien is named for the Julian calendar); as the series goes on, various Evil-aligned characters become suddenly affiliated back to each other in elaborate new conspiracies.
new protagonists become connected back to older protagonists through shared techniques or shared organizations. Sean Matsuda copies Ken's techniques because this was his inspiration to begin his journey in-universe; Rashid's interactions with previous protagonists inspire him to join their efforts and fight alongside them as he knows this will give him important experiences to build his own unique abilities.
throughout the series, the narratives of each game have been important for the purpose of introducing new characters. after the first mention of Charlie Nash, _Street Fighter Alpha_'s story mode would go on to visually detail his larger-than-life story. later, _Street Fighter V_'s character roster would feature some of the dark forces attempting to resurrect the dead body of Nash and transform him into their weapon. In Street Fighter III, a new story arc begins involving a new evil organization, and new collections of characters unfold as this story evolves: first comes Gill, who runs the thing, then comes Urien, who is creating his own forbidden experiments in hopes of besting Gill, and then come different waves of experiments including Necro and Twelve.
to anyone who is not analyzing _Street Fighter_ for its story, perhaps to instead focus on its game mechanics or individual character design, these observations might not seem remarkable. it may simply seem obvious that in a game involving interactions between otherwise separate characters, if there is to be any story the separate stories of different characters will ultimately have to connect back to each other. but if you are inclined to think this way, you are not truly thinking about the nature of how stories connect themselves to external and internal forms of causality. the presence of multiple characters with separate story modes within a single fictional narrative really is remarkable. it is an entirely different thing for a narrative to present itself from only one point of view tied to one character from beginning to end than it is for a player to be able to play through the mythical action narrative of Charlie Nash and then also through the ominous conspiracy around the Psychic Dictator. in a series like _Street Fighter_ which presents a relatively flat understanding of morality, it does not make much sense for players to expect there to be a lot of deep philosophical insights coming to light through the exercise of comparing different perspectives of the same event, and yet, it is still the case that _something_ is added to the experience through the ability to see the same narrative from different angles and explore and expand on the same exaggerated action story in a wider field of view with richer detail. play through Guile's story, and you bring in Nash, the "allied powers" of martial arts, and Kolin. play through Shadaloo's story and you bring in Sagat, FANG, and the calendar month characters. each separate track of characters pulls in different clusters of friends and foes that interact with each other horizontally and all feed back to produce the overall character roster; in a way, _Street Fighter_ lore is its own odd little exercise in graph theory.
in contrast, a lot of supposedly "better-written" stories do not necessarily present this same kind of satisfying narrative structure with similar amounts of depth and thought given to all their major characters.
comparing _Street Fighter_ to _Dragon Ball_, the latter mostly only gives any significant amount of effort to developing Goku. throughout the course of the original manga series, Goku only seems to find further and further ways of getting more powerful while, in the eyes of a certain chunk of fans, every single other character gets slowly forgotten. as story arcs pile up and every story arc is written from Goku's perspective, this ends up feeding into a strange dynamic of Goku racking up all the available character development versus other characters and character development also becoming largely about becoming stronger. at any given moment if Goku is to develop further he has to run into stronger and more terrifying obstacles — Vegeta, Freeza, Broly, Beerus, all the other universes. in the process, there is almost necessarily less and less time to develop each of these "obstacle" characters versus the time and number of events that would have been required to produce their level of power. Vegeta has the history of a whole other planet around him, and all its cultural baggage. Beerus holds the history of a complicated fantasy cosmology that produced him. a whole array of more than six other universes has, logically, a whole array of complex histories orders of magnitude more involved than the series of events surrounding Vegeta, or surrounding Beerus. yet the great majority of all the history of the multiverse almost necessarily has to get discarded when a journey across the world makes the decision it needs to conceptualize itself as the story of one particular character.
the same kind of fallacy also easily applies to console role-playing games. although a tabletop role-playing game may or may not have more ability to prepare for a greater range of possibilities for its more peripheral characters, console role-playing games are often locked into a sort of "Matrix" limitation to their simulation where given the real-world constraints on producing a simulated world, rendering computations and development time each need to be devoted almost entirely toward the protagonist's view of the simulation simply for the visible parts of it to look good. as such, many console RPGs are type I narratives. _Dragon Quest_ is structured like _Dragon Ball_ not because the two stories had the same character designer, but specifically because the two stories happen to use the same conceit of assuming the story of their world is the same as the story of their main character.
much has been said over the years about the relationship between hero-stories and the violence of empire. most obviously, any number of stories featuring motifs of castles, kings, or battles end up lazily copying from the real-world history of medieval Europe, or failing that, the real-world history of warring states periods in other countries such as China or Japan. great portions of the literature around the theme of empire, racism or xenophobia, and fantasy stories or console games seem to focus themselves on variations of the notion that people reproduce patterns of empire in art because they have _hidden biases in their minds_ related to the kinds of limited information and deliberately-limited perspectives they have been fed from all the people around them — because people have been fed biased information about the importance of Europe, they replicate Europe. however, while these kinds of explanations may seem appealing when applied to the United States and the former territories of the British Empire, these sorts of academic narratives do not go very far to explain why stories about warring states periods specific to China are so popular in China or stories about the warring states of Japan are so popular in Japan. throughout Japan alone, the number of historical simulation games and fantasy works that have been produced on the topics of Europe, China, _and_ Japan combined is staggering. if someone in Japan were interested in real warring states periods, they could pick up _Nobunaga's Ambition_, any number of Three Kingdoms period simulations, or _Warrior of Rome_, or if fantasy warring states periods were more their speed, they could pick up _Pokémon Conquest_, _Fire Emblem_, _Gemfire_, or _Romancing SaGa 2_. for a country that across any number of works of non-interactive fiction is so tied to the notion of people spontaneously deciding to create peace, from works like the _Pokémon_ and _Ultraman_ series to Miyazaki films, Japan sure does have a bizarre number of games simulating warring states periods.
this observation taken by itself does not inherently suggest any kind of disease of Japanese society. a pile of fantasy books or a pile of Westerns may or may not mean anything more than people being obsessed with the fakely-educational qualities of any sort of accurate or inaccurate image of the past, much as people are obsessed with prehistoric scenes of dinosaurs. should someone start to take Japan's great pile of strategy games as some kind of evidence of something, it would be worth pointing out the great abundance of urban fantasy stories featuring modern settings and modern technology in Japan.
when shown Japan's plethora of console RPGs and medieval strategy games, it would be very tempting for academics to show up claiming that the Chinese or Japanese examples are only separate instances of the same pattern as seen in the United States, and people in Japan replicate feudal Japan because they have only been fed information about Japan. but should somebody view this phenomenon from a worldwide vantage point, this supposed explanation would not seem very explanatory. if people from Europe replicate Europe, and people from Japan replicate China and Japan, did people in Europe replicating Europe _cause_ people in Japan to replicate Japan? certainly this is not a claim people typically make, and for anyone to actually claim it would seem silly. but this is still a very important pattern to notice, because if people replicating warring states periods is a phenomenon that can arise all the way in another country around different history _without_ anybody in the United States feeding people information that they should do that, it calls into question whether people in the United States feeding other people in the United States information that they should replicate warring states periods is truly the most important cause of people doing that behavior, or other underlying causes are more important. if someone in the United States replicates warring states periods, and someone in Australia replicates warring states periods, then there could be an argument that the historical reach of the British empire across the two regions fed into some kind of causal link between those events. but if someone in Japan replicates warring states periods, it probably was not the work of the British Empire. in previous times of global empire, Japan had its own global empire with which it committed its own unique atrocities. the British Empire did not create the Japanese Empire. worse, the Japanese empire was ultimately defeated, with all its territories either given back or ceded to other global empires. if the great pile of Japanese media inspired by empire is coming out of a country which is no longer a global empire, while so many theories about the cultural effect of empire are coming out of the United States while it _is_ a global empire, then we should really begin to doubt the link between global empire and the reproduction of images of warring states periods in general. if images of warring states periods in fact come from "colonialism", which is another name for global empire and the practice of forcefully converting countries to territories of global empire, then it would stand to reason that a case of global empire actually physically being challenged and dismantled would be one way to break up all the tendrils of Colonial Racism that supposedly reside in our heads. yet, recent history would seem to have provided small bits of evidence _against_ this hypothesis, and instead given us the suggestion that changing a country's history of Colonial Exploitation does not actually affect the prevalence of fictional imagery of empire. why would this be?
we can find a possible explanation for why people reproduce imagery of empire by simply beginning with the way fictional narratives are constructed. when analyzing a fictional narrative, it is important to begin with the unique building blocks of fiction that lend a fictional world or cosmos its own internal physics; every story, in general, must begin with coherent internal rules which would be comprehensible as their own self-contained unit without the use of any other real or fictional narratives. taking this into consideration, empire inside fiction must be produced through the patterns of empire that uniquely exist inside fiction for whatever reason they exist, just as magic inside fiction must be produced through the sets of fictional rules that lead to there being magic, and tokusatsu action sequences must be produced through the fictional axioms that produce fantastical action sequences. a tabletop roleplaying game begins with the axiom that certain events are calculated using a twenty-sided die, and this underlying axiom will then lead to subsequent rules such as defining what a roll of 1 means and what a "natural 20" is. a similar process applies to the design of console RPGs, fantasy TV shows, and all type I narratives.
when somebody begins with the assumptions of Existentialism, that the world is nothing more than a bunch of free-floating Subjects and one can surely get to the story of the world from the individual vantage point and story of any particular Subject, the story almost necessarily turns into a downward spiral of attaching more and more importance to some particular Subject. the thing that is critical to realize is that this maximally important Subject may or may not actually be the main character — it only needs to be an individual _somewhere_. say we analyze _Pokémon Sword/Shield_, and pull out the series of past events that occurs before the main character appears. these events are neatly tied to the first-person narrative of any main character that is able to explore Galar and find the history murals. has the narrative successfully escaped being a type I hero-journey narrative through persuading us that the protagonist is not one of the most important historical figures of Galar and the two kings have up to now been more important? no. even if you did not have the rest of the _Pokémon Sword/Shield_ main storyline to compare with this, and this was the only part you were allowed to analyze, even if you had never played another Pokémon game involving a large-scale catastrophe, it should already be clear that the story is presenting itself as a temporal series of successive type I narratives. one main character pursues a hero's journey, and then _in neat succession_ another main character journeys to become either the hero or the gym champion, and the two narratives do not combine to produce any interesting new narratives that could not be told with just one of the two sets of characters. despite the presence of multiple heroes, despite there being a good four or so heroes if Legendary Pokémon count, _Pokémon_ still typically tells a type I narrative. a _Pokémon_ game has to be about the player, so the player has to be able to catch thousands of Pokémon even though by the standards of the NPC trainers in the games or the standards of the shows that would not seem to make any sense. how could this error be fixed? well, one rather bad idea that would not necessarily be a good game design would be for there to be a limited number of Pokémon at a given time so that when different players catch them they actually have to go to particular players. this sort of local-server-based structure would not be very efficient compared to the game being self-contained, but it does illustrate one of the basic design challenges for making a simulated world make sense: if the world of a _Pokémon_ game worked like the real world, the total number of Pokémon available would have to be somehow divided between the NPC trainers and the player, as well as whatever the Pokémon world considers to be a natural assortment of wild populations. by tweaking its physics and giving the simulated trainers a kind of simple physicality, a _Pokémon_ game could come at least somewhat closer to achieving a type II narrative.
_Pokémon_ is a startling case study in how the biases we think we have are not the biases we actually have. academics like to tell themselves the story that we all reproduce the patterns of empire because we are just that hateful and ignorant, but the people who made _Pokémon_ are clearly the opposite of hateful, and yet they still reproduced the same very recognizable console RPG pattern of experience points and because you must be the most important character in the world cutting down tens or hundreds of other characters to get stronger, complete with an additional notion that you recruit thousands of characters because they can't hope to stand up to you. how did this happen? how can it be that _Pokémon_ is possibly the most kid-friendly console RPG in existence preaching messages about living things existing in harmony with each other, halting wars, and preserving nature, and yet it simultaneously still reproduces the imagery of empire? is this because of the quality of art that it can nonsensically combine any two contradictory things imaginable and try to convince us they make sense? or is there something more complicated going on here?
early console role-playing games focused on the traditional imagery of fantasy works: kings, knights, and heroes. at this point existed _Dragon Quest_. as the genre developed, more console RPGs would make use of the motifs found in paranormal folklore and science fiction. at this level existed _Shin Megami Tensei_, and eventually _Earthbound_. the _Earthbound_ or _Mother_ series made a solid point of playing its story almost exactly like a United States science fiction film, with quirky children, suburbs, angry dogs, and uncanny-looking alien organisms. the kinds of things that occur shortly into the first _Mother_ game call to mind the kinds of whimsical and improbable but otherwise nearly-mundane events on United States sitcoms like _Leave it to Beaver_, _I dream of Jeannie_, and _Mr. Ed_ — precisely the kinds of events that are too silly for real life but despite the chosen _Mother_ series art style just a bit too serious for cartoons. there's an RPG encounter which is a lamp falling and hitting someone. there are encounters with quirky or suspicious people from around each neighborhood. an _Earthbound_ encounter is basically like an improbable sitcom plot around a character of the day while the ongoing, overarching story is like a dramatic science fiction movie. the _Earthbound_ trilogy was effective at more or less shaking up everyone's internal image of what a console RPG is by walking a careful line of attempting to use every single encounter to creatively portray many different types of general-sense conflict. it is somewhat likely that the existence of the _Earthbound_ series eased the further development of console RPGs from the comfortable position of "meaningful" fantasy and science-fiction narratives to the creation of either deeply mysterious or intentionally-desolate horror stories such as _Yume Nikki_ and _OFF_. but, this is just the superficial art-history view of things. the real question to be asked is, did the _Earthbound_ series merely show that everything in a console RPG could be given any number of different new coats of paint, or did it really, /actually/ change the relationship between console RPGs and narratives?
if you were one of the developers of _Pokémon_, you might be tempted to assume it did. but _Undertale_ developer Toby Fox famously remarked that the world of the _Earthbound_ series didn't entirely make sense to him, as on some emotional level it did not really seem to add up why the main characters were going around "killing all these people". the stated answer in _Earthbound_ is that nobody is dying to a kid with a baseball bat, they are more just snapping out of alien mind control or ceasing their senseless attacks and getting out of the way. but clearly, the stated in-universe lore reasons for things are not always enough for people; _Pokémon_ has had its own share of surface-level criticisms by people who are confused why Pokémon would let anyone catch them and why Pokémon don't effectively serve the purpose of forcefully-captured slaves. for some people, stating that a thousand Pokémon are happier being caught than anywhere else sounds a bit off. for other people, saying that the inhabitants of _Earthbound_'s world are safe from what are seemingly the country's most powerful children sounds dubious. this is ultimately because in all physical systems, real or fictional, certain mathematical patterns have certain kinds of associated results. a tea kettle with fire under it heats up, because the mathematical pattern of molecules moving quickly transfers that particular mathematical pattern into the water. this is part of what it means to be physical. as much as a fictional narrative has the ability to assert that certain kinds of fire turn a tea kettle to ice, there will be points at which the audience starts asking questions, and as the dissonance between the expected result and the actual result gets greater, the questions only get uglier, delving deeper into the thematic and rhetorical significance of the narrative's particular choices and in rare cases, what exact errors about the real world are reflected underneath a narrative's use of magical duct tape.
it's very simple. conflicts occur because living organisms trample over each other's ability to live.
_Pokémon_ feels off, approximately speaking, because ordinary animals fight to push each other out of a particular place, rather than remaining in the same place. if two animals fight each other, and one of them is still there, then something is very wrong — either those two animals were eternal enemies and one just killed the other, or one of them was killed for food. if either of these things is not the case, animals probably will not fight. there are exceptions, of course. many predatory animals like cats will spar with each other as a matter of play, and normal growth. this is closer to what is intended in the case of Pokémon. however, the presence of animals that fight each other for fun typically implies that although these animals are on friendly terms with each other they will at some point kill and eat other kinds of animals. if an animal is _practicing a behavior_, there are going to be reasons for that. as soon as we realize this much, all the information that _Dragon Ball_ tells us about Saiyans falls into place. as beings likened to ferocious beasts, it would stand to reason that the tendency of Saiyans to compete against each other to practice their skills correlates with the larger-scale behavior of the Saiyan population against other populations or species. this alone does not make it obvious why exactly the population should commit _specific_ kinds of aggression, but it does establish one basic relationship: fierce individuals lead up toward living populations which are in competition with other living populations, each one against the other one's ability to exist.
of course, one of the most interesting things about _Pokémon_ is that it actually admits the existence of ecology. particularly around generation 7, when faced with having to explain what exactly is bad about invasive species being introduced to an ecosystem, several Pokédex entries had to begin admitting that Pokémon eat other Pokémon — a horror that is not quite bad enough to be unspeakable in a kids' game, yet is just awful enough to make children think for a moment about what Yungoos has _done_ to the Pokémon world. Yungoos may or may not have taken out Alola's lizards, while its counterparts Necrozma and the Ultra Beasts arise from other parts of the cosmos to cause trouble in their own greater way. from this information it would appear the stated fact that Pokémon are happier caught is no contradiction — if Pokémon are caught, other Pokémon are not going to be able to eat them, and for the most part they are safe. in rare cases, trainers may treat them so badly it is better for them to run away, but there are only around three cases of this outlined in the Pokémon TV show in contrast to what would be some hundreds of acceptable trainers assuming there is at least an average of one new character per episode. the mathematical patterns don't lie: if there is something bad about Pokémon being caught, then it is clearly hiding in some more subtle characteristic of the overall socially-linked population of humans and Pokémon.
both narratives were born in the same general era when the world was looking for globally-scoped stories yet nobody held authors to any strict standard of authentically representing any real-world thing beyond superficial "armchair" kinds of diversity. _Street Fighter_ gives us Thunder Hawk, _Dragon Ball_ gives us Bora and Upa. _Street Fighter_ gives us generic evil empires in the form of Shadaloo and the Secret Society, _Dragon Ball_ gives us Freeza and the Saiyan kingdom, and neither narrative very seriously addresses the uncomfortable connection of empire to the ongoing processes of national culture and national identity.
even in spite of this comparable non-commitment to diversity and believable Media Representation, there is a great difference between the two narratives.
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[*ut] Although it would have been fascinating to properly analyze _Undertale_ and whether it is truly a type I or type II narrative in this same chapter, I had to make the decision not to do it due to the complex relationship between _Undertale_ and its unfinished companion game _Deltarune_. At the current moment, it is tempting to label _Undertale_ a type I narrative that sneakily splits an internal conflict across multiple entities, but it could be the case that when _Deltarune_ finishes releasing chapters several years past the time of writing, _Deltarune_ will introduce enough extra information about the Undertale-Deltarune cosmos that the two games taken together would have to be classified as a type II narrative.
;=> reaching "Voltron" through the prisoner's dilemma
=> 1741393040 v5.2 scraps/ who is sans? ; 1121 who-is-sans
;=> 1741321232 v5.2/ who is sans? ; 1121 who-is-sans
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:: cr. 2025-04-23T04:49:28Z
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:: t. v5-1_1131_two-stories
