>>5704777>>5704995A thing I am quite interested in is narremes, think of them as like the basic plot actions / encounter setups of a genre. You may have seen in the old qtg thead a while back I tried to break down and mix and match narremes in the Tom Clancy and Jane Austen genres respectively lol.
https://archived.moe/qst/thread/5644579/#5647190For example, a well-recognised narreme that recurs in Shakespeare is when the young female heroine has to undergo a perilous journey, so she disguises herself as a man to protect her maidenly virtue whilst travelling etc (unfortunately, all Shakespearean actors were historically men, so it is a man pretending to be a woman dressed as a man). Here are some other good Shakespeare narremes:
- feigning madness
- adopting the guise of a beggar
- a person who is falsely accused
- an naive or innocent person who is manipulated by another
- a messenger who delivers bad news piecemeal, gets increasingly worse. (sometimes it is comical, other times tragic)
- a character thinking aloud to themselves in soliloquy, who undergoes an abrupt sudden emotional breakdown, just through their own stream of thought. This almost never occurs in Hollywood or modern cinema (emotions always provoked by "external things happening", never just mere reflection / thought) This is pretty unique to Shakespearean era drama and the soliloquy form
A narreme in cyberpunk might be when the hacker tries to seize control of a rival mind or hijack the consciousness of another hacker via a neural interface etc. A narreme in dark fantasy might be when the hero encounters a cursed sword that tries to encourage him to slay those he loves. A narreme in sci-fi space opera might be when a spaceship needs to evade a massive armada by hiding in an asteroid field.
So I think the reason why I am unfamiliar with wuxia is I just do not know the narremes. I can imagine some of them, eg
- some apprentice seeks out a master to teach them a secret ancestral art?
- emperor sends out an edict to fight against xiongnu barbarians beyond the wall? (Careful, this is straying into the warhammer chaos warriors again lol)
etc. but inevitably when I try to imagine it I just transpose all my Western videogame narreme stuff into vaguely pseudoAsian looking settings and ruin the feel.
I guess you could use tvtropes to look up some narremes but there is not really an indication of what is distinct and unique to the genre storytelling. Tvtropes is just a dump of all the narrative stuff, ideally someone should make it searchable through decomposition etc. Like it would be really cool to see the most and least popular narrative microstructures and conventional fictional encounters by genre etc.