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Comment by squirrelicus | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to the intent. Upton Sinclair's Jungle was a socialist manifesto that accidentally missed America's heart and hit her gut instead.

What I can say is approximately 100% of material that gets popular is simply the retelling of something like 7 archetypal stories that our human minds resonate with. Watch Moana and Wreck it Ralph, they're the same story: the Resurrection of the Spirit of the Father. Watch Harry Potter and LOTR and the 5th Element, they're the same story as David and Goliath: the Overcoming the Impossible. Death Note and Faust are the same story: the Pact with the Devil.

I could go on.

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I always hated this sort of statement because it confuses story with theme. Sure Harry Potter and LOTR and the 5th Element all might have some superficial similarities, but each of them is very different in ways aside from mere set dressing.

You can call anything equivalent if you pick and chose what factors matter

Indeed. It's always "just" or "simply" the same <n> basic stories. But it's hardly simple to go from the 3 words "overcoming the impossible" to Lord of the Rings.

Specifically, the power of the <n> basic stories meme is that it implies a lower information content of our stories than we supposedly realize. The meme makes you feel smart by inducting you into the enlightened set. But in fact, the low information content is in the supposed categories, not our stories. They throw out all the details that actually make a story. Even if one of the categories was the ridiculously specific "tiny man makes treacherous journey to destroy dangerous magical object, also there's a wizard", that's still a far cry from reconstituting LotR.

Hang on. I think you're missing the point. It's not about how "if you've read one, you've read them all". The fact that MacBeth is another way to tell the Futile Struggle Against Fate story doesn't in any way diminish the creativity or power or uniqueness of the work. The point is that if it's not an archetypical story it won't resonate with the human mind, and the writer will fail.

We tell the same stories again and again because there's a finite set of stories that engage our mind, whether we like it or not.

But my point is the archetypes are so broad they may as well be meaningless. "Futile Struggle Against Fate" encompasses so much.

May as well say all stories are "Man vs Man" or "Man vs Nature" or "Man vs God". Sure you can categorize basically every story into one of those three things but it is almost never useful to do so

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