Yamamoto: Story 4

Chris Carr
Yamamoto: Story 4

For my final project, I was thinking of connecting the feelings of anxiety and nervousness to storylines. During the last blogpost, I realized why I did not connect well with Story 3. There was very little conflict. Stories of Ibis seem to be trying to put a positive spin of future technology rather than fear. It is done well in the first two stories because their is parts that do have conflict in Stories 1, 2, and 4. I think that this feeling on conflict is what keeps a story interesting, and without conflict, it is much more difficult to keep someone interested.

A "happy ending" usually means that there was much less conflict than many other successful fictional stories, but people like happy endings as well. I am much more of an individual that cares about the story of getting to the end, rather than the end itself. For example, my favorite show currently coming out is Westworld. Every single episode if full of situations that evoke anxiousness and nervousness, and it keeps me extremely interested in what is to come next.

Without conflict, I find much less of a reason to continue with a storyline. Yamamoto has been able to create stories with conflict for the most part, as well leading them to happy endings. Story 1 revolved mainly around a murder, which definitely evokes nervousness, Story 2 creates some anxiety because you are unsure of what is to come of the couple, Story 4 involves lots of death within a black hole and one hero who MAY be able to make it through, but the not knowing is what keeps you reading. Story 3 on the other hand, it seemed like everything they did when teaching this AI how to act, nothing ever went wrong and I quickly began to lose that feeling of nervousness, and began to lose interest in the story very quickly.

To demonstrate the use of conflict in storytelling, i would like to use examples of TV shows and recent Movies, ones with lots of conflict and ones with very little conflict, to show how people tend to gravitate towards media which shocks them, and is not really examples of a happy life.