Story Matters Here
The stories we tell, and the stories we take in, are an important aspect of our lives. They may not be as high up on the hierarchy of needs as food and shelter, but they’re far from being completely frivolous.
Stories are the closest thing we have to the ability to emulate being inside a life outside of our own. It’s one of the greatest tools we have for developing empathy, especially when looking at stories created by people who have lived lives that we’ll never have firsthand knowledge of ourselves.
And on the lighter side of things, stories can be incredibly fun! Who doesn’t love to sit back and read a novel, play a video game, watch a TV show, or engage with any other kind of story medium using whatever verb suits it best?
Stories can open us up to so many possibilities. The joyful act of stepping into a new world, be it one that looks just like ours or one that is completely fantastical. It’s just kind of amazing, right? If you want to feel happy, feel sad, feel scared, feel laughter, feel horny, stories can do that!
From 2009 to 2013 AMC advertised itself with the slogan "Story Matters Here". And you know what? As far as TV network slogans go, this one must have done its job pretty well seeing as though it’s still on my mind more than a decade later. And since they’re done with it, I might as well get some use out of it.
"Story Matters Here" fits perfectly with my intentions. I want to use this space to talk about stories. Story in all its forms – not just movies or TV, not any one medium or genre. With my future posts I hope to cumulatively make this a space for discussing everything that fits into the umbrella of story. This will sometimes come in the form of looking deeper at specific elements of it, and sometimes it might be more about just having fun with it.
What this won’t be about is reviews. While I may occasionally mention if I’m enjoying something or not, ultimately all art is subjective, and I don’t have a lot of interest in arguing for what makes “good” and “bad” art. I want to talk about what I find interesting in a story, whether the work as a whole totally sticks every landing or not.
But while these intentions may sound good, what might this actually look like? What are you actually in for if you subscribe?
Thankfully, we can look at some older stuff I’ve posted elsewhere to give examples of what to expect here:
Gender and Sexuality in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate – This is a look at the video game Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and how it handles its representation of gender and sexuality, with a focus on Jacob Frye’s bisexuality.
Romantic Metaphors in “A Dark Quiet Death” – A deep dive into Mythic Quest season 1, episode 5, and how it connects ideas of collaborative art to romantic relationships.
Emotional Power Tropes – Power of friendship isn’t the only way that emotions are used as a source of power, and here I looked at how these kinds of tropes often play out (and why I love them).
Silk and the Potential of a TV Series – This is one that’s more about imagining what a TV adaptation of the comic book hero Silk could look like, rather than looking at how a finished story works.
Digimon (1999) Revisited – Devimon Arc – This is the first in a seven part series looking back at the original Digimon Adventure and Digimon Adventure 02 with a bunch of micro topics in each post.
Why Sidney Becomes Ghostface in Scream – This is a video looking at the end of Scream (1996) and what it means to have Sidney put on the Ghostface costume (I likely won’t be doing any video content on here, but it’s still a worthwhile example of the way I’ll be talking about stories).
Or, because I could see the possibility of using this as a space for posting original fiction from time to time, here are a couple examples of that:
Spec Pilot Script: Modern Legends – A pilot to a monster of the week style series following a man who spent decades during his childhood in a fantasy world (in a very Narnia-esque, come back as though no time has passed, kind of way), and now needs to find a way to open up and connect to the people around him.
Short Story: Relative Truths – A short story about how we tell stories, that happens to be completely true… relatively speaking.
This is crossposted both on the Unsupservised Nerds website and on Substack. If you want to subscribe to the Substack to get email notifications on these posts, click here. I plan to post every second Sunday.