Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Blog Day 3

This morning's writing prompt, "...and they lived happily ever after," kept us busy for the first part of the morning. It set us in the mood for fairy tales and fantasy, which was the focus of the day.




We read On Fairy Stories by Tolkien to help us gain an understanding of what a fairy tale is. We realized that many stories typically categorized as fairy tales don't have the attributions that would fit the original qualifications of one. This reading was our guide that we could refer back to as we looked at traditional fairy tales and the characters, elements, and story arcs associated with those stories.







After learning about fairy tales from On Fairy Stories we watched the pilot episode of Once Upon a Time as an example of how a fairy tale world could be represented. 



This afternoon's writing prompt, "Pick a character from a fairy tale (not the protagonist or antagonist) and go..." resulted in stories about side characters that had little to do with the fairy tale of their origin.

Then we watched the first episode of season one as opposed to characters knowledge of the world, Most of us found that Grimm was more intriguing because we learned about the world along with the protagonist and we are thrown into the story right away. While the episode of Once Upon a Time felt more like an "information dump" because much of the world is explained to the audience when most of the characters were still oblivious to the supernatural properties of their environment. Storytelling from different perspectives can effect how the audience receives the story.


We watched a short video of Kurt Vonnegut describing the "Shapes of Stories" based on the fluctuations of "good fortune" and "ill fortune" and how they would be translated onto a graph. We took several popular fairy tales and attempted to plot them in the way that Kurt Vonnegut had. Then we altered two aspects of the fairy tale to and plotted the new story to compare to the graph of the original version. We concluded our discussion by explaining how the changes would take effect in the story.

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