{"id":19504,"date":"2022-07-30T09:16:19","date_gmt":"2022-07-30T16:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19504"},"modified":"2022-07-30T09:16:19","modified_gmt":"2022-07-30T16:16:19","slug":"treating-reading-like-a-game-of-once-upon-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2022\/07\/30\/treating-reading-like-a-game-of-once-upon-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Treating reading like a game of Once Upon a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

It occurs to me that often, when I\u2019m reading or watching a work of fiction, one part of what I\u2019m doing is essentially like playing the storytelling card game Once Upon a Time<\/cite> in my head.<\/p>\r\n

When I play OUaT, at any given moment I usually have a pretty clear path in mind from where the story currently is to my desired ending, using the cards that I have in hand. Which is to say, if the story were suddenly handed over to me and if nobody interrupted me, I could pretty easily finish the story and win.<\/p>\r\n

And I recently realized that I do something similar (though not quite the same) when I\u2019m (for example) reading a story.<\/p>\r\n

I don\u2019t necessarily have a specific<\/em> ending in mind, but I do often have a general sense of how I would like the story to end up, and\/or how I think the author is likely to end the story.<\/p>\r\n

And I often have a rough sort of mental map of how to get to such an ending, using the kinds of tools\/tropes that the author has indicated are available in this particular story.<\/p>\r\n

That\u2019s especially true with the romantic aspects of a story\u2014I\u2019m usually on the lookout, semi-consciously, for who the sympathetic characters might end up being romantic with, and how they might get together. (For example: Hmm, this character who I like is a lesbian, and that other character who I like is a lesbian, and they may be the only two lesbians in the story. They\u2019re currently in different universes, but that can be fixed\u2026<\/i>) (For characters who are clearly not into romance or sex, I look for other kinds of happy endings.)<\/p>\r\n

It\u2019s usually not nearly as specific a path as it is when I\u2019m playing OUaT. And as with OUaT, the story quite often ends up not following the path I have in mind\u2014my planning-out isn\u2019t necessarily an accurate prediction, it\u2019s just a rough map of where I want some aspects of the story to go. And as with OUaT, once in a while I have absolutely no idea how one could get from the current situation to where I want or hope or expect that things will end up.<\/p>\r\n

But still, I think it\u2019s interesting that I approach stories that I\u2019m reading this way.<\/p>\r\n

I don\u2019t know whether I did this before I had ever played OUaT. (I first played OUaT in the mid-1990s, a few years after college.) I think I probably did; I think the find-a-narrative-path approach came first, and I later applied it to OUaT as well as to prose and visual media. But I\u2019m not sure; it\u2019s possible that I learned it while playing OUaT, and later started applying it to other media.<\/p>\r\n

\u2026To be clear, I\u2019m not saying that I have some amazing or unique ability here. I assume lots of people do this or something similar, and I know people who are much better at predicting where a story will really go than I am. The point of this post is just that I hadn\u2019t thought about all this in OUaT terms before.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19505,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504\/revisions\/19505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}