#agency in storytelling

[captaingimpy]

A review AND THOUGHTS ON Secret Level - “Honor of Kings: The Way of All Things”

In the animated anthology series Secret Level, the episode titled “Honor of Kings: The Way of All Things” stands out as a profound exploration of choice, sacrifice, and the delicate balance between determinism and free will. This narrative delves deep into philosophical themes, using the strategic board game Weiqi (known as Go) as a central metaphor. Synopsis The story follows Yi Xing, a…

[lagosbratzdoll]

This is a very very unfinished thought but I've been thinking a lot as I reread the books about how the women of House of the Dragon don't really get catharsis and how that'll likely be worse in S2. Say what you want about asoiaf but a number of named women there experience catharsis.

They kill their abusers (Lysa, Cersei, Dany). They regain some agency after a violation (Lysa, Cersei, Lady Stoneheart, Dany), and they refuse to forgive the people complicit in their subjugation (Lysa, Cersei, Dany, Lady Stoneheart, Jeyne Westerling).

Obviously, three or four isn't enough in such an expansive cast of characters but the point remains that they claw back their autonomy however they have to. They're allowed to be angry, bitter, unforgiving and cruel to their abusers in a way women in House of the Dragon just aren't allowed. They're allowed grief, grief that is violent and destructive.

The women of House of the Dragon don't get angry. They stand around and stare plaintively at the camera, they cry prettily, and they plead for peace and non-violence. They suffer and suffer and suffer and there's no relief.

[witsserviceablesubstitute]

A ramble that's not in good faith, sorry, I know this online discourse gets under my skin. Anyway, context, Tumblr fandoms are very queer inclusive spaces that can forget how queer exclusionary many areas of storytelling can still be. Queer characters are a staple on US and UK television now but continue to have a lot of caveats and constraints.

Fandoms are likely a big part of why queerness in television has come as far as it has in the last few decades. Not for their constructive conversations about queer representation with an industry, but because they make queerness visible and viable. Creators started fighting back. Shows like Xena, whose actors and writers refused to let Gabrielle and Xena be seen as simply 'gal pals'. Refused to let the clear queer subtext be erased. Shows like Steven Universe and The Owl House, who actively went against their networks to ensure their queer romances couldn't be censored.

Can you remember the last time the "let them be friends" arguments applied to anything but the potential canonization of queer subtext? Cast your mind on the major same sex ships over the past 15 years. How many are canonically romantic? The vast majority are, in canon, intimate male friendships. Friendships that hold more importance in the story than any romance. Perhaps ask why this same argument is being applied to a queer relationship with clear romantic subtext? What does erasing that subtext serve and who does it hurt.

[montydrawsstuff]

stuff in vector's desk .. and cat

[katyobsesses]

Sorry, but saying Tommy is the reason Buddie ain’t together is straight up taking Buck’s agency away from him. HE is the reason they aren’t together. Because Tommy is the one he likes and wanna be with rn

I meant in terms of the story, not in terms of the universe.

Yeah in the universe Buck has chosen Tommy to be with rn, he likes him and wants to be with him and I'm enjoying their dynamic (my problems with Lou's acting and some of his dialogue aside), but i do believe that storytelling wise Tommy is very much a stepping stone to Buddie. He's a midgame relationship for Buck to explore his sexuality, and find peace with that side of himself that he's never thought to explore before. and I like Tommy as that stepping stone, he's an interesting character.

Tommy as a character (not a a person in the 9-1-1 universe) is just there as a barrier and a stepping stone towards Buck's endgame, and that's okay, it's good. The show needs a reason for Buck to not go straight to Eddie after realising his sexuality, and I'm enjoying Tommy as that reason. but his character very much is a plot device.

It would be boring if Buck had just realised he was bi and launched straight into a relationship with Eddie, and that's not even discussing the Eddie side of things. (i.e. his catholic guilt being the reason he isn't going to buck... or even realising/accepting his sexuality)

I watch shows from a very analytical view point, I have a media studies degree and it's hard to switch off and honestly i don't want to. I like how i watch the shows i'm interested in. I like trying to figure out where the puzzle pieces will land, what the show runners are planning and the roles the characters have in the stories and arcs to push them to their conclusion.

Tommy and Buck are fictional characters they're plot devices they aren't real humans. so I can't take their agency away from them when discussing their stories, because they don't have agency, because they are puppets and dolls being played by the showrunners and writers.

[shaylogic]

"Shallow Sound" Cemetery name reveal in environmental storytelling

paralleling the projected, hurtful words that Charles and Crystal are saying to each other

Crystal & Charles perhaps thinking each other's motives shallow, while Edwin is probably finding the fighting petty in the midst of a serious case

the shallow motives of the killer clients

the shallow ring of the bell to summon the girl who doesn't want to return

[wardensantoineandevka]

wait, wait, wait, are some people SO upset about the Those Across the Sea stinger that they're offhandedly framing it as a matter of debate about whether Meredith is awful and horrific as a narrative agent? yeah, like, the oppressive systems of the Chantry is the real root cause here, but one part of the material expression of the awfulness and evil of those systems within the narrative is in how it enables people like Meredith to do all that and pursue her prejudices in that manner without resistance? like, DA2 isn't really presenting Meredith herself with a lot of nuance and is kinda landing simply at "Meredith is kinda evil / doing evil things (for whatever measure of evil even is)". what drove her to develop this perspective and what ALLOWED her to do and accomplish all this harm and enact all that violence because of her prejudices and fear is where a bit more complexity comes in, but the fact that she is doing awful shit is not really, like, that up for debate, and I'm kinda baffled that this is something that's being put out there by some because they didn't like the stinger.

[howifeltabouthim]

. . . he would have to write the story himself now or all the worst people would do it for him.

Lev Grossman, from The Bright Sword

[artist-issues]

Oh boy no anon lol. Anyway. I was wondering where you learned so much about the fundamentals of storytelling? I have a very deep appreciation of storytelling and can tell you what little details make stories good or weak, but when it comes to my own writing, it's like I don't know anything. Which I guess is true because my understanding, while maybe more literate than the average person, is still very surface level. I can't say I agree with all of your analyses lol but I agree with 99% because of your insight on how each element of a story relates back to its message. I don't think most people, even modern authors, have the ability to do that. Storytelling has definitely become a lost art, which is so unfortunate because I think it's so fundamental to human culture.

I really try to deconstruct the idea of "storytelling" and then say, "what did God do with this? Obviously He invented stories, Reality is the story He's telling, so how does He do it? What's the thing He uses it for? Now, how can humans also do that (because we're made in His image) and how has The Fall affected the way we do it?"

But, when it comes to articulating my "fundamentals of storytelling" understanding, I'm not very original. I learned a lot from the Belief Agency (especially Brian MacDonald's Invisible Ink. I don't agree with all of it but it was helpful in understanding how to communicate the main idea thing.) and from Lewis and Tolkien's thoughts on storytelling.

I think humans can't help but storytell. Even people who've never created a character or put pen to paper, consciously, are telling themselves a story every day in their head. They're observing the world, processing it, and then repackaging those observations according to what they've decided is true. Worldviews. And then they'll tell stories to the people around them.

What's getting lost is telling stories about things that are true. Like my pinned post says, stories reposed to be signposts that point your brain and emotions back to Reality when they've wandered. Nowadays even people who get the "This is supposed to communicate a main point" thing make that main point about ugliness or hate or straight-up lies. (I'm usually thinking about Riann Johnson's Knives Out movies.)

Thanks for your kind thoughts! If I ever hit the mark or say anything good or true, it's thanks to God, not me.

[sean-parnell]

How Manufacturers Can Leverage Content Marketing to Grow

Cold calls, print advertising, tradeshow participation, and knocking on doors once worked well manufacturers can no longer rely on them to generate leads that fuel sustainable, double-digit growth despite having an effective sales team that may still have some skills in these areas.

Inbound lead generation in commercial and industrial markets requires compelling brand storytelling and thought leadership that educates prospects along the buyer’s journey, who don’t want to talk with salespeople before they’re good and ready as they fear being “sold to” by people that don’t have their best interest in mind.

Problems Solved vs. Products & Services, Features & Benefits

Powerfully resonating with prospects requires brand storytelling that converts website visitors into prospects then into customers.

Your brand story begins with having a deep understanding of the problems faced by your prospects, what they need to overcome them, and the value to them in doing so before promoting all of your products and services and their features and benefits. Prospects are searching for who can solve their problems and may have a limited understanding of what will solve their problems, so claiming your solutions are “the best” and that you’re an “industry leader” may mean nothing until they have an understanding of how your products will help them.

The hero of your prospects’ story is themselves, so you need to educate them on how you can solve their problems, and how your people, process, products, and services – not just products – do so. This is what will resonate powerfully with them. In this way, you serve as a guide for achieving success and avoiding failure. Your products and services with their features and benefits are how you solve these problems..

Thus, your “brand story” needs to be told throughout all of your marketing: on your home and about pages, blogs, guides, case studies, marketing collateral, presentations, proposals, press releases, third-party website profiles, direct mail, email campaigns, your tagline, and anywhere else you promote your company.

A brand story for each product and service you sell can also be developed as each of them solves different problems in different ways for different markets. This “sub-brand storytelling” is also effective for different vertical and geographic markets as each has different requirements.

Extracting & Promoting Thought Leadership

When they have a problem that they want to solve – because the pain of not changing exceeds the pain of the change – prospects self-educate themselves by researching the internet before speaking with any vendors, so it’s important to provide educational content that will help them understand how you can solve their problems:

TOFU: Top of Funnel: this content builds awareness by providing an overview of the problems you solve and how your products solve them

MOFU: Middle Funnel: this content goes one level deeper and helps them consider between different options that can solve their problem

BOFU: Bottom Funnel: this content gets very specific and helps prospects make their final decisions

OOFU: Out of Funnel: this content is created in a misguided attempt to maximize keyword rankings and website traffic as part of a flawed search engine optimization strategy (SEO) but fails to generate leads though can be quite costly

Tip: it’s important to have a good balance of all types of content (except OOFU).

It’s especially important for manufacturers to understand that, in addition to learning about how you solve their problems with your products and services, your prospects want to know how your solutions and business practices compare with both direct and indirect competitors. They also want to understand how their investment can be cost-justified so they can sell the idea of buying from you to internal decision makers that may not be in communication with you. Product comparisons are very useful because this is what prospects try to compile themselves, especially if they include areas where your competitors have an advantage over yours. Case studies that include return on investment (ROI) estimates are also highly useful for prospects.

Lead-Generating Content Begins with Keyword Research

Understanding and prioritizing what your prospects are searching for is a critical first step for lead generation, which begins with conducting keyword research on all the different terms your prospects may use.

Onsite SEO then fully leverages the content you’ve already developed when you work the highest priority keyword phrases into your page titles, meta descriptions, H1 headers, and throughout the content of each page – just remember it has to read well and should only be performed by someone that thoroughly understands your business and what prospects value.

Brainstorming content ideas that incorporate these keyword phrases and educates prospects along the buyer’s journey is the next step, following by prioritizing these content ideas into an editorial calendar. The best content comes from getting a professional copywriter to interview your company’s thought leaders and then writing up what is learned in the form of foundational website content, blogs and guides.

Best Practice: Google Search Console reports the keywords people searched for to find you.

Creating Lead Magnets

When your prospects discover that you are providing education and thought leadership for how you can solve their problems, many will be willing to provide their contact information to download this gated content – especially long-form, MOFU and BOFU content including guides, whitepapers, ebooks, and webinars. It’s also important that your contact forms ask prospects where they found out about you so you can attribute each download to the marketing or other activities that generated them. It’s not recommend to gate promotional material that prospects expect to be freely available, including blogs, brochures, data sheets, infographics, case studies, and similar materials.

Promoting MOFU and BOFU also generate even more website traffic and leads, including in Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaigns, Microsoft Ads and other pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, your social media profiles (especially LinkedIn and Twitter), on third-party article publishing sites (e.g. Medium), and throughout your public relations activities.

The Manufacturing Content Creation & Lead Generation Process

Here are the steps for creating content that has been proven to generate leads and product sales from many commercial and industrial manufacturers:

Conduct keyword research and optimize all of your current content for search

Develop brand storytelling and implement it throughout your home and about pages, marketing collateral, presentations, and all other marketing materials

Write blogs and publish them on a consistent schedule, educating prospects on a wide variety of topics that help them understand how your products and services will solve their problems

Syndicate unique versions of this content on high ranking, third-party websites

Launch Google ads and email campaigns to bring more prospects in

Create microsites to promote how you solve specific problems in your top vertical markets

Launch ecommerce to supplement sales through your channel partners for people that want to speak with and buy directly from you – just don’t undercut them, so selling only at list price is recommended

Evaluate new market opportunities where your current competitors are irrelevant with Blue Ocean Strategy

This approach routinely generates sustainable, double-digit sales growth with an ROI of over 300% within 12-18 months when executed by an experienced industrial marketing agency – and your company will no longer be a well-kept secret in your markets.

The Case for a Marketing Audit

While it may be appealing to hire a full-time content marketer, SEO specialist, or to outsource to a manufacturing marketing agency that may wow you with shiny objects, conducting deep dive marketing due diligence with an experience marketing consulting resource understands your industry is typically a better way to start.

An effective marketing audit will identify what it will take for you to generate sustainable, double-digit growth by leveraging brand storytelling, content marketing, SEO, content syndication, email campaigns, marketing automation, social media, advertising, PR, and more.

Most marketing audits focus only on promotional marketing communications, so you may want to find an industrial marketing agency that can auditing the other three Ps of your marketing: products and services, pricing and placement (selling through channels and go-to-market strategy).

[sskk-manifesto]

Ep 10!

[dearest-lady-disdain]

daniel molloy and john silver are a genre of characters with identities that are so fragile and maybe even built on lies...

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

charming and good: dr prism and solaris, both being ex-zoraxis operatives who don't feel safe enough to turn to the agency, working together post the events of 3 to pursue their crafts without death or capture looming above their necks

charming and evil: solaris- through prism- learns that anna is alive, and immediately drops everything she is doing to find her and tear her limb from limb for being the catalyst to the destruction of her death engine

[witsserviceablesubstitute]

Stories are not reality. They use many tools to reflect reality but they are not beholden to the same rules. What's more, they reflect Romance just as readily as they reflect Realism. Stories require a suspension of disbelief. Some willingness to look outside yourself to pick apart meaning. An ability to empathize with experiences not your own so you can better see why and how it was put together the way it was. Stories are ephemeral and intangible, a collective fever dream with meanings that shift depending on the dreamer. They are also deliberately constructed and come with their own concrete intentions, histories, and baggage unique to each culture, genre, and medium the story is told in.

If I had one wish when it comes to critiques of fiction, it's that people come at a story from where it is first and everything else can come later. For example, critiques of YA are going to be different to that of Adult works. Those teenagers are heroes and sexual agents because it's important teenagers be allowed their own coming of age journeys— explorations of sex and sexuality a big part of that period of self discovery for many. (That doesn't mean sex has to be a PSA either, it can be raw and awkward and weird and uninhabited). E.g. No, that immortal/older supernatural being falling for our teen hero isn't a predator (well... there are layers). What they are is a extremely common teen power fantasy. (However, if you did want to read a YA series that deconstructs that particular trope and explores how horrific such a dynamic would be, I'd recommend 'The Fever King' and 'The Electric Heir' by Victoria Lee. Brilliant and harrowing books).

Okay, so, anyway. I've been watching a very good YA show called Dead Boy Detectives. (I have a feeling the people following me are reading those words with exasperation, "No shit"). It's fun spooky hijinks but it's also a beautiful piece of cinematic storytelling that uses a variety of mixed mediums to get its points across. It makes this queer nerds heart happy and deserves more space to tell the story it wants to tell and subvert the tropes it wants to subvert. However, in case it doesn't get that space, I wanted to recommend two queer book series that fans of the show may want to look into. The 'Whyborne & Griffin' series by Jordan L. Hawk (each book gets better and better, and also, the actor that plays Edwin would make an excellent Whyborne) and 'The Last Binding' series by Freya Marske.

[khruschevshoe]

Being a true galaxy-brained Doctor Who fan is hitting the epiphany that every showrunner had their strengths and their weaknesses and their own interpretations of the Doctor and you can like or dislike any aspect of any showrunner and acknowledge their genuine mistakes/bad choices/yikes decisions (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, questionable undertones, lack of agency for female characters, etc.) and it is COMPLETELY VALID to have that turn you off of a Doctor/showrunner but also acknowledge that some of the things that people have considered bad writing over the years are often personal preference (valid opinion, not always valid fact) and that just as there are clunkers in every season, there's something to appreciate about every showrunner and every Doctor.

After all, "The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant."

[bluerambling]

People appear to like my first unhinged Renfield post so here’s another one:

The scene where Bobert Montague Renfield talks about his wife and kid. This is a scene that feels really out of place because it’s right between two high energy action scenes and a lot of people on first watch will be like “why do we care about this?” In a lesser movie, this scene would have an explicitly romantic overtone, an “I failed my wife and kid but I won’t fail you, love interest.” We don’t get that and the movie is BETTER FOR IT (but that’s a post for later.) People might especially be confused by this scene because when we see Dracu-Cage doing his best manipulate mansplain manslaughter earlier in the movie, he pulled this exact piece of information: (paraphrasing) “you abandoned your wife and kids because you wanted my power, you’re the evil one who took advantage of me!!” And the instinct is of course to say that’s not true!! That’s just Dracu-Cage manipulating the facts!! It’s Drac’s fault Renfield left, not his!!

And I personally (personal taste alert) really like that this movie didn’t go there. Instead, there is a grain of truth there. Renfield did have a choice, he had agency then to turn down the power and he has agency now to walk away. That is something a lot of stories of abuse overlook because it’s VERY hard to do it without looking like you’re blaming the victim for their abuse. “Oh if it’s so bad why don’t you just leave?” type shit, not a fan, I don’t have to explain that. But this movie has motherfuckin DRACULA as its antagonist!! We see this guy literally commit mass murder to punish Renfield for exercising his agency, we see why it’s not as simple as “just walk away.”

This scene establishes that there is a reason that Renfield was drawn to him in the first place, there is a vulnerability that Dracula exploited, and it’s not altruistic, it’s a little selfish!! And that’s okay!! Renfield still isn’t shown as deserving the abuse because of it, and it’s clear that his own lack of self esteem and subsequent lust for power is a FLAW that he needs to OVERCOME in order to be FREE and JOYFUL. Giving up his power to Dracula and BEING a poor little meow meow who can’t do anything is PART OF what started the cycle of abuse in the first place, allowed Dracula to take advantage of him, and perpetuates the cycle. In taking his power back, acknowledging his own weakness but affirming his own strength, Renfield can leave, move on, and find joy.

It preserves Renfield’s agency in a way I don’t know if I’ve seen before!!!! That’s pretty fucking nuanced for a slapstick gore comedy!!!!!!