Vertical integration : stories :: horizontal integration : ?
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I’m think sitcoms are more horizontal. So situations. Revealing that with streaming more situational things have long arcs across seasons.
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The analogy puzzle is not quite well posed. It’s more like:
Vertical integration : (story > X) :: horizontal integration : (X > story)
X = situation is a reasonable solve
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Traditional folktales are properly situational. Like British murder mysteries or American procedurals. In the former, the situation is lesser nobility. The butler-having class short of dukes. In latter, each layer (uniforms, detectives, CSI, DA) is a setting for a subgenre.
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How come there’s never been a procedural around a single courtroom with a judge as the star. I guess they’re too passive.
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Hero’s journeys proper are often thinly disguised class mobility stories. You journey bravely 2 classes away and your return prize is a permanent move 1 class up.
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Bilbo (lower class) beat dragon (upper class) and earned place in middle class (Elves). Frodo same.
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Horizontal stories never break class. So they are disproportionately either comedies or conservative institutional validations. Horizontal journeys are adventures abroad within a class.
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In Psych, Shawn and Gus often have traveling adventures but always in their own class. Their upper and lower class journeys are never aspirational. More gawking voyeurism.
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Prizes are regulated stories. Dull unless they go wrong somehow. It’s interesting that stories about prizes are always about discovering a higher value that makes the prize not really the point (eg top gun, karate kid, sports movies, music/dance movies)
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It’s kinda interesting that there are no real prizes on the internet. There’s the Webby awards modeled on the oscars I guess but afaik nobody really gives a shit. Maybe you need scarcity and gatekeepers to make prizes meaningful.
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The quoted thread is about lack of prizes online. This suggests class and class mobility are ill-posed and not a thing online, regulated or otherwise.
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An online story pretty much has to go offline to work. Like a blogger getting a book deal or scooping a print journalist on a big story. Pure online stories don’t exist. There’s nowhere to go/return to.
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What’s your hero going to do? Rise up from YouTube comments to Twitter fame and then return to Yelp comments? While there’s localized pairwise status inequalities online among b media, it’s not really a class system. So no regular stories.
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