Twelve Stories?

[Sloth]

I keep on hearing about it, that the world only has Twelve Stories and they just keep on getting re-used.

Where / Who did the research?

Current googlings and wikipedia trawling has come up bare.

 

[Tyguy]

can you elaborate on that?

 

[Jintor]

Genres? Typical stories? I guess if you trace stories down far enough they might become just "Girl meets Guy, Guy likes someone else, Conflict happens, Girl ends up with Guy", but you could say the same with people really - underneath it all, they're just walking Meatbags, right?

 

[CptStern]

I keep on hearing about it, that the world only has Twelve Stories and they just keep on getting re-used.

Where / Who did the research?

Current googlings and wikipedia trawling has come up bare.

heh, there's no database that has the stories listed ..what they're saying is that there are a handful of stories that are resused over and over .."boy meets, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back" ..almost every single romanitic movie ever made follows that formula in one respect or other ...a more direct "lifting of story ideas" is Pretty woman ..a prostitute joins high society ..it's been done, the settings and characters are different but the movie is thematically the same as My Fair lady, which is exactly the same thematically as the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion. which is retelling of the classic roman poem by Ovid written around the time of jesus ..then there's the greek tragedies (every single melodrama, drama takes something from greek tragedy), the prodigal son etc etc ..all classic stories that are retold over and over again

 

[Stingey]

http://tvtropes.org/ might not be exactly what you're looking for but

 

[Dan]

Where does Waking Life fit into those 12 stories? Or Spring Summer Fall Winter and Spring

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Where does Waking Life fit into those 12 stories? Or Spring Summer Fall Winter and Spring

Waking Life has no coherent storyline, you just have to decide what you want that flick to be about.

 

[Stigmata]

Waking Life has no coherent storyline, you just have to decide what you want that flick to be about.

And invariably the story you come up with on your own will be a derivative of the original 12 story archetypes

 

[Sulkdodds]

Dunno who it was but it's mentioned in Robert McKee's book 'Story' and reminds me of the Hero's Journey.

 

[AKIRA]

i thought you were talking in terms of height lol

 

[Sloth]

mmhmm, thanks - sorry if I was a little bit too vauge, didn't have much to go on...

 

[Taboo]

In my theater class we learned that most of them were originally Shakespearian. He was probably just the first to document them officially or get recognized though...

When you get to the core of anything theres always only a few sources. You could just as easily say that all stories come from the same one story that involves atleast one being. But I know what you mean and Im not sure what the "official" 12 stories are. Maybe its just a saying?

 

[Taboo]

i thought you were talking in terms of height lol

I lol'd

 

[PvtRyan]

Porn has only one core story:
"Guy meets girl and they have sex"

Ok ok, so there's variations, like two girls, two girls and a guy, two guys and a girl or just two guys..

So it would be:
"Person meets person and they have sex"

Hm.. but not every actor in porn is always human of course. There's the dogs, ponies and Ron Jeremy.

That would make:
"Vertebrate meets vertebrate and they have sex"

And I'm NOT going into the porn that doesn't limit itself to vertebrates and/or living things!

 

[Dog--]

By co-incidence, in the movie "The Island", they only have 12 stories with small details changed that they implant into the clones' minds.