#core plot

The difference essentially comes down to genre.

The genre defines the expectations for a story. And within genre, there also things like tone and themes and audience.

Cass Morgan wrote this idea as a YA romance in the post apocalypse.

JR wrote this idea as an ADULT post apocalyptic action adventure tragedy.... via HBO-like prestige tv. 

Incidentally, the change in genre/expectations/audience is also why the PILOT is so different from the rest of the show. Because the PILOT was written as a teen soap opera in the apocalypse, closer to Cass Morgan’s version, but dirtier and more melodramatic. BUT The CW asked him to CHANGE the story to be more like HBO and AMC, like a Game of Thrones, or Walking Dead. And you can find both those influences within The 100. 

BUT...but... and I’m really excited for this because I have started watching this SFF writing class by Brandon Sanderson (who wrote Mistborn, which I love,) and he said this thing about plot which made me go AH HA!!!!

So what he said is that a lot of stories are really, essentially, romances. But the way the plot is structured, that’s not what’s on top of the story.

He said that there are two concepts of plot at play. The main plot is The Umbrella Plot. That’s your basic, “X must do X to get to X” plot. That’s your structural plot, how the story moves forward.

But underneath that there’s a CORE PLOT, and THAT is often “X+X fall in love.”

That’s where we see the character development and payoff that was promised.

So a story for many narratives is really more like this. “Watch X+X fall in love while X2 must do X to get to X.”  

THAT is essentially the 7 season narrative of The 100. We are watching Bellarke fall in love while they fight the bad guys to save/redeem humanity in the apocalypse.

The part that made me go AH HA was when Sanderson said that most romance novels DON’T have the umbrella plot. The core plot is the one that is on top, and I have mostly found this to be true, even while the romantic duo have to face down evil dukes or or lies about their fake marriage or a kidnapping or that OTHER girl that the love interest is fascinated with.

So. Like. The difference between Bellarke in the book vs Bellarke in the show is a difference of genre. Romance is the top level story in the books. And in tv show it’s the CORE story underneath the top level Umbrella story. 

Shoot. I am actually in the middle of an examination of top level romance story WITHIN The 100 (hint hint it’s MEMORI, not Bellarke) which is more like the romance of Bellarke in the book. I have it open on another tab right now.

Oh. But you know also? Bellarke in the book got together fast. First book so they were an established couple early. 

But another difference with Bellarke is that the allusions, and the inspirations are from love stories (not necessarily romance genre stories) that are from different traditions. Like Penelope and Odysseus (one of the rare happy ever after endings in classical greek lit, right?) or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.  BOTH of those were stories that kept our lovers apart until the very end, and most of THEIR adventures were separate, meeting infrequently or not until the end. 

There are SO many ways to tell a story, and making them turn out differently does not mean that one story is bad and one story is good. The book fills certain needs for a certain audience that has certain expectations. The show fills entirely different needs for a different audience with very different expectations. I’ve often said that I thought the fandom disappointment comes from genre mismatches. The audience EXPECTS something that they are used to from the YA genre, from the PILOT, from the channel that usually has soapy teen dramas, and those expectations are not met.

DESPITE the fact that they have told us in no uncertain terms that those are not the promises they are making to the audience. Earth Kills. Post apocalyptic action survival show, not a romance. Anyone can die. This show DOES go for twists, but most of the twists are not surprises. I think the audience can be shocked by them because they refuse to listen to the BLATANT story that is being told and keep trying to force the show back into the YA Romance or Queer Fantasy Romance, or even Slow Burn Post Apocalyptic Romance genres.

This show has its own allusions and tropes and story track. The Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey are NOT romances. But the core plot is the Hero and Heroine fall in love while they are fighting to save and redeem humanity. 

This morning before class Ned went over reuse identifiers - how they're used along with the dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier method to reuse cells that go off screen in a table view instead of continually creating new ones. If you don't use the dequeue method, you run the risk of running out of memory. 

Most of the day was spent working on our poll apps. Mike and I got a lot done in 1 day.  In addition to the required specs, we added a few niceties, like limiting the number of characters a user can type in the text fields, and being able to hide the keypad by typing anywhere else on the screen.  We still had a couple hours to spare at the end of the day so we dove into the Core Plot framework and created some nice looking pie charts to represent the data.  I was pretty happy with our finished app.  

After class Ned gave another algorithm lecture. Tonight's topic was data structures - specifically binary trees.  A binary tree is a data structure where each node has at most 2 children.  Indexing, adding an item, and removing an item can all be done in O(log n).  A linked list, to contrast, is faster when it comes to adding/removing - O(1) - but slower when it comes to indexing - O(n).  The creation of a binary tree is n(log n).  A key characteristic of binary trees is that the left subtree of a node contains only nodes with a key less than the value of the node.  The opposite is true of the right subtree of the same node.  Binary trees can be very useful (read: fast) when it comes to sorting and search algorithms.