Plot, Setting, Character | Art

[@buffkangaroo3765]

Another reason why Shrek is a perfect story.

[@Nosteponsneksss]

Thanks for sharing your *3am* musings with us Greg!

[@therealx1ras453]

The Muse works on its own time

[@blueaether6923]

you know your sleep schedule is fucked when you catch these videos right as they're uploaded

[@ihaverabies17]

Where i live these come out early in the morning so its nice to wake up to them!

[@adolw3266]

I think there are ways to shine light on some elements of art by excluding others. For example, having an interesting plot go down in a bland or typical world can be used to shine light on the plot - or to have interesting characters in an interesting world living normal lives etc. Dialing down some of those sliders can be part of what makes that art interesting - maybe even moreso than dialing them all up to the max in some cases.

[@mosshotep]

This legit sounds like some formal classic literature advice, great job greg

[@Henrytorybot]

If you are interested in setting, you should watch classic cinema. You have whole movements, like Italian Neorrealism, that almost exclusively focus around setting.

[@cassiopeia8066]

I love waking up to these in the morning. Also I hadn't really thought about storytelling like that before, thank you! Usually when I write (short)stories I write too much about the environment and the people, and I sort of forget having something of importance happen lmfao uhh but I may give it another shot

[@pizza134]

U forget about the plot? Same, create worlds and characters but then im like what are they gonna do? Whats the conflict?? Why can't i come up with conflict?? Is it cause i run away from conflict in real life?? Maybe

[@cassiopeia8066]

@@pizza134 Last question is a real Enneagram 9 moment. But yeah, generally I have trouble planning ahead so going with the current flow of ideas seems easier for the moment at least. On a broader scale it's probably better to have an overall story before you write though, at least if you want to make a point? Idk.

[@pizza134]

@@cassiopeia8066 yeah, idk, its hard to come up with stuff i guess... Then i rewrite and rewrite the first chapter and get bored and stop Idk, its just hard to come up with the small conflicts and thinking of an ending is kinda hard cause idk if im so unsure of what i want or if i dont have a fixed theme.. but yeah.. idk

[@antonikudlicki1100]

I like it when the plot doesn't care about characters, so you don't treat them like real people, but like plot devices to extract authors' ideas from. Mr Cogito comes to mind for example

[@SoVidushi]

Greg I'm reallyy enjoying this series. Idk how long you plan to keep this up but it has sorta become a part of my routine now and i want it to keep going, thankyou for this content!

[@kyoshinka]

The story logic is so important. The draft in your mind. The intuition is genuinly so underrated. It's always cool to get a little food for thought every once in a while. Our minds truly are indescribable and the way stories are made to be good has to be explained through intuition not logic. Because the human condition isn't just binary code, it's much more random and illogical at its very core.

[@maybvd]

In my opinion bad writing is when you don't deliver information in a sentence. Good writing is when you can deliver a lot of information in the shortest possible sentence and make it easy to understand at the same time. However pacing is important as well because if you deliver too much information at once you can overwhelm people until they can't process all of it or even receive any, which in turn makes it bad writing again. You can also apply this to politics and see how bad the writing and the speeches got, since it sadly became the norm to unclarify and euphemize what you're talking about. Whole other topic though, I recommend George Orwell's essay "politics and the english language". It's 24 pages if you count the review of Mein Kampf. So a general rule when writing or even just talking to anyone really is to keep your sentences short and deliver information in every single one of them. It's not the viewer's/reader's/etc. fault when they don't get dopamine and it's not really about the dopamine in the first place. The writer just genuinely sucks ass. Holy shit I genuinely feel like a redditor rn.

[@KlemensasKozlovas]

I mean if you include emotional information then I 100% agree with you. Cause some people think that just "Vibes" with only some character/plot/setting info isn't enough for a scene or a small chapter of a book ,when in fact it can sometimes even help the whole story flow better

[@hwithumlaut8288]

I dissagree. Some writing is fun to just sit down and understand, the prose’s length. Usually plot or cherecter driven. But prose is its own art element just like plot or cherecter. In some stories lengthy unclear prose is moe enjoyable making stories like a riddle, limiting art to short tightly packed sentences is not nessary as art is a spectrum. Prose can be the cinematography of books, depends how im feeling. Do i want to work to read sometimes this great cause i get a story and a nice mental experience. Sometimes i just want a story. Illread anything, writing poorly is writing in a way that makes the big picture worse. Write to serve your tale or tell tales to write. To a reader they are the same but if you have long unclear ugly sentences that is bad writing. Good writing does things purposefully.

[@maybvd]

@@hwithumlaut8288 Though I couldn't understand half of the things you said I'll still try my best to respond. I didn't say that you have to make short sentences, I said that shortening a sentence by removing unnecessary words makes for clearer and therefore better writing. You want people to understand what you're saying. It doesn't have to be immediately like in a riddle or whatever you meant with that but to make people understand you have to deliver information.

[@maybvd]

@@KlemensasKozlovas If you mean the feelings you get by certain types of writing, how characters act or how a scene looks etc. then I agree.

[@hwithumlaut8288]

@@maybvd I think it seems that we agree but we are just phrasing it diffrently. Although i think your phrasing is problematic as it can be interrpreted as limmited languge to easy to undertsand which is good sometimes and bad othertimes. I think easy to understand writing is good for stephen king bad for edgar allan poe, or Mark Z Danielewski. All three are still good writers.

[@anaconda6346]

I enjoy franchises and series that have heavy lore behind them which can fall into plot setting and character. Centricide is a genuinely good example.

[@MapleMilk]

"No one's gonna read 50 pages about what they had for breakfast" and yet so many people INSIST on making American Psycho their whole identity despite it having paragraphs of descriptions of designer clothing lol I guess that counts as describing an interesting character at that point, maybe

[@cassiopeia8066]

Maybe they watched the movie instead and thought "haha man's got no emotions and likes killing people haha I kinda relate fuck everyone haha they do not know who I am because I am not me" Or do those people who make it their identity read the book as well?

[@danaekoloka9819]

The master of this art will always be Tolkien

[@lifelongstudents233]

Clueless is a good example of a very character-focused story where the setting is generic and the plot has no direction, but it's still good because the characters are all interesting and funny.

[@SoVidushi]

I've never really placed that much importance on the setting, for me characters and plots are more important. But I might consider focusing on setting a bit more because it seems like a very cool device and something that could stick with the readers even more than the plot.

[@isaacp9324]

Very cool observation, I've never thought about stories this way. Loving this series

[@littlekeegs8805]

I've been playing a lot of Elden Ring recently, and this video made me realize a succinct way of explaining something interesting about it: it's nearly all setting.

[@KlemensasKozlovas]

god damn you Greg ,now I'm reevaluating every film I made

[@monnicamii]

That's why i make 25 minute noise collages (◠‿◕)

[@siksparnis]

alternate title: roasting classical literature

[@tianyeG]

Some artist they throw things out without really thinking, reflecting or forming a coherent thought about their piece because they know people are going to come up with interpretations and therefore the piece got value and that's fine because sometimes you create art off of inspiration and sometimes you create art for inspiration or just to GAHHHHAGDADGASGDFGAGEUJ. As long as at some point the artist really starts thinking about the art and then craft the shit out things will be fine because I cannot think of any other reason for a person to keeping making art they don't genuinely want to make(that means you have an idea about it and the want of actualizing that idea drives you) that is not for profit and that's disgusti...... you know what nvm.

[@ConcernedAlien]

I think that, on top of plot-driven, setting-driven, and character-driven stories, there's also theme-driven stories, where everything in the story exists to serve a certain major theme or idea, and the plot, setting, and/or characters would have to be notably altered in order to work well outside of the context of that theme, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it means the creator has a really good handle on the themes of their story and what role everything else in the story serves in relation to that theme. I feel that the majority of Greg/Jreg's content is theme-driven, due to the characters in his videos being either himself with varying degrees of fictionalization and/or irony depending on the video, or, as is the case with Centricide and Mental Illnesses, anthropomorphic personifications of abstract ideas and/or chemical behaviors. The characters in Centricide exist primarily to serve larger ideas about how we exchange political thought, navigate noise, and keep from falling into apathy towards the problems of the world, whereas those in Mental Illnesses exist to serve larger ideas about how mental health issues are treated and discussed in the present. I think that's also why fanmade continuations of Centricide haven't quite been working out like the original did- a lot of Centricide fans can recite everything about the characters and plot, yet only really care about the jokes and songs, and don't care about the political themes outside of what's already talked about on The Daily Show and things like that, which have a long way to go before they'll ever start talking about the obscure ideologies and ideas Greg/Jreg talks about. Without actual knowledge of or interest in deep political, sociological, and psychological thought that goes beyond merely how woke you can be, Centricide really can't be imitated. The closest we ever came to that was with Grej and Realicide, but then all the drama that led to Grej quitting KZbin happened, so there's that. It's not that hard to make woke art nowadays, but if you want to come even close to being like Greg/Jreg, then you need to be willing to make awake art, which is something pretty different from and much more bold than woke art.

[@hwithumlaut8288]

I tthink there are almost infinite of these things. Theme, plot, cherecter, setting, prose, cinematography, aesthetic, symbolism, comedy, ect. I call them core art elements. There is also outer art elements which are things like discussions about books that influence how they are perceived.

[@antonikudlicki1100]

mmmm, Psycho Pass...

[@LordnuggetorxD]

Is the video length 314 on purpose or am I in too deep.

[@cd7002]

how often do you shower?

[@MrSomeDonkus]

I agree Mr. Egg.

[@scuskit6126]

Jregory you think so much keep up the thinking please

[@urmom-zh6zs]

this was posted at 2am sp i couldn't get to it when it was fresh but this was actually pretty helpful, thanks Greg

[@apikmin]

🧡

[@bravesirrobin704]

And here are two ideas from Pascal Boyer's explanation of religion: a catchy representation is one that simultaneously activates more of our innate inference systems. Good supernatural stuffs violate our expectations about their category in one way, but otherwise don't (e.g. supernatural agents are immaterial but otherwise behave as agents would, bleeding statues are otherwise normal statues). "But how do these relate to art" you will ask me, in vain.

[@yecksd]

talk about God

[@ajbc6952]

:)

[@bravesirrobin704]

Ya sure yer not interested in my screenplay 'Weasels'? "Weasels" is a metaphor (for martins), I swear I'm not naif.. it even has some parallels to Gauguin's story, though all sex is between consenting adults.

[@hallwaywarrior5286]

i actually think your comment at the end about audiences not having enough dopamine is weird because when im writing anything with a narrative its basically impossible for me to think of anything to write about besides plot or setting or character. tone, maybe? i usually use tone as an extension of the others so idk

[@AcornBroadcast]

Mr Guevara!!! what did you have for Breakfast?

[@bravesirrobin704]

Foxes!

[@OndrejBaran-y8k]

Existence as art?

[@Concentrum]

please shave love you

[@mrkraffbs9583]

Nah that’s boring. I’d rather write about something with no focus, like what I made for breakfast. Can you guess what I ate? Spicy string beans imported from Chile. I got them from this one man. His name was Raul Paul. You better have pronounced his name right or this all won’t make sense. Raul told me he knows a guy in the Cartel that fucks with agricultural stuffs but if we were going to pick up the goods we had to go to a corner shop over in Colorado. But, when we got there it was just a bait and tackle shop. The only plant-based food there was some grapes I picked up off the ground. They were kinda fresh, honestly. So Raul Paul asks the dude what’s up with these beans, and, this man just looks at us crooked. And next thing I knew I woke up in Chile. It was all basic procedure. We shook it off and shook hands with a tall midget that owned this huge property. Upon asking him about these beans he said it was out by the pool, but I swear he said Paul. I said “Paul’s right here” I knew he didn’t have any string beans I was so perplexed…….Anyway we got those string beans on the cheap and we didn’t have a way to get home, so we ate there. So, I guess you could say we had some Chile beans 👀

[@peterkerj7357]

Stop saying Art you're not fucking Gaugin mate.

[@woe0290]

alright mr fuckin peter kerj

[@duroburo7039]

Must all art be a painting made by Gauguin? I believe that art is a way of communicating an idea, story or belief/opinion in a vast amount of methods and mediums, many of which we have not made yet. Heck, Gauguin himself got heavily critiqued for his expressionist art being "degenerate", and not worthy of being art in the eyes of the Nazis. So if anything he proves that art is ever evolving, and that things such as Jreg's content could be considered art.

[@peterkerj7357]

​@@duroburo7039 "nazis; therefore: a quantum of basic self-distance wrong" "content" Why do zooms talk like Gabe Newell??? And I'm the anti-art right-deviationist, chrissake.

[@tianyeG]

Who's "Gaugin"...?

[@thekingoffailure9967]

Yeah he's JrEg. Clearly not some other guy. Are you confused? The floor is not made of ceiling.

[@Pleasekillmysonsdad]

Thank you sensei