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Fan Works

Octavia: Look, I will admit this is... creative... but you just can't have an opera where nonsensical things happen for no reason!
Vinyl: Clearly, you've never heard a rock opera before.

Web Original

Juice: basically the story goes, a man named Grimaldi is feeling depressed. way down in the dumps. so he goes to see a doctor
and the doctor says, “ah, i have just the cure for you! you must go into town and see Grimaldi the clown! he can really put on a show. i was just there the other night and laughed the entire time. yes sir, Grimaldi the clown will cheer you right up!”
and Grimaldi responds, “that is also my name! what a coincidence! i’ll go see him tonight!” and he goes and has a great time and feels a lot better
Mimi: Now, you know that’s not the way that story goes.
Juice: it’s the way mine goes
Mimi: There’s no arc! Nothing, you know, nothing develops!
Juice: yeah it does he feels better
Mimi: What’s the point, though? What’s the story trying to say?
Juice: nothing
sometimes a story can just be some shit that happened. i refuse to have a point and you can’t make me
20020, chapter 11

Web Video

"So, 13 minutes into this 40-minute special, and you notice something missing? It starts with 'P', and—it's 'plot'. There is no plot."

"You know, I've finally come to realize the core problem with this comic. It's not the disregard for continuity; it's not the sexism or the brutal violence or the piss-poor attempts at being relevant; it's that this whole thing is a collection of random, pointless scenes that go nowhere and contribute nothing to the plot! Characters arrive and leave as they please; plot points are introduced and then quickly forgotten!"

"There's a presentation by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the two dudes who created South Park, and Parker details a very simple story structure that they try to capture for every episode to make each one feel cohesive, no matter how batshit they end up being. Did my summary of the Mario movie's plot feel like things were just sort of happening one after the other? Yeah, that's because they kinda do. Trey suggests that you should never make scenes follow an 'and then' structure because that creates a disconnect between the scenes. Instead, each story beat should be followed by either 'but', 'because' or 'therefore', and while the Mario movie does have a fair bit of instances where something in the story happens as a consequence of something else, I'd argue that most of the movie is just random event after random event, that is either not relevant to the rest of the movie or it never resolves in any way. I don't care that the main antagonist is a giant fire-breathing turtle, or that there are talking penguins and mushroom people and Seth Rogen monkey with a red tie, or nihilist talking puff-star that awaits the sweet embrace of oblivion that will one day meet us all, all that is perfectly fine because this world is supposed to be fantastical. Beyond that, the movie doesn't really feel like it has a theme other than 'Mario' because who the hell doesn't know Mario?"

Real Life

All art needs structure. Structure helps you put your ideas in an effective order. It gives you a hierarchy: Your story needs a main purpose, and all the gags and bits in the story should fit basically into the story. Your details should hang neatly on the major points and help emphasize them. You don't want to get lost in tangents that confuse the audience.

Of simple plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of episodes.

Whereas books like Oliver Twist, or Bleak House, or Great Expectations, have a central theme which can in some cases be reduced to a single word, the various parts of Martin Chuzzlewit have not much more relationship to one another than the sounds produced by a cat walking across the piano.
George Orwell, "A Hundred Up"

If the words "and then" belong between those beats, you're fucked.

I think my tastes tend to not be very mainstream, but I also think making a quarter-hour show and writing it and editing it, you tend to cut out a lot of the stuff, a lot of the boring lines that explain why things happen so that you just have the jokes. Maybe there’s this thread and this through-line that’s missing so you’re sort of extrapolating from your own opinions and projecting your own thoughts onto it.
— Dave Willis on Aqua Teen Hunger Force

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