When I thought about what kind of story we're in, my instinctive response was a smartass remark about how this is clearly the precursor to a dystopian hellscape straight out of a YA novel. You know the kind, the ones that eventually get turned into a summer movie that erases any actual social commentary the author intended in favor of focusing on the inevitable love triangle. However, when I thought about it more, the part of me that once described myself as "a happy endings kind of girl" remembered one of those quotes with no real, traceable attribution: "Everything is okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."
This essence of this quote got me through some of the worst years of my life, and it still gives me a bit of hope now. The story we're in may be dystopian, but it's also unfinished. If life imitates art, this is the rising action, or maybe even the exposition. We just have to keep writing towards the denouement and hope that it turns out more Hallmark movie than horror show.
Beyond the fact that the story is still being written, there's also the fact that there are infinite stories interacting with ours. Another unattributable quote: "A villian is the hero of another story." I usually hate this quote because it gets used so much by apologists for irredeemable villains (Magneto is a valid exception), but the point stands. We are our own protagonists, but there are still 7.7 billion other protagonists out there that will never affect or be affected by us, but are still technically a part of our story.
The fact is, any story that we're in is incomplete. We really only know the story we live, with only a fraction of the information from the greater story that society is living. And despite the world without stories pitched at the beginning of McQuillan's introduction to The Narrative Reader, the whole story will only be complete when there’s no one left around to read it.
This essence of this quote got me through some of the worst years of my life, and it still gives me a bit of hope now. The story we're in may be dystopian, but it's also unfinished. If life imitates art, this is the rising action, or maybe even the exposition. We just have to keep writing towards the denouement and hope that it turns out more Hallmark movie than horror show.
Beyond the fact that the story is still being written, there's also the fact that there are infinite stories interacting with ours. Another unattributable quote: "A villian is the hero of another story." I usually hate this quote because it gets used so much by apologists for irredeemable villains (Magneto is a valid exception), but the point stands. We are our own protagonists, but there are still 7.7 billion other protagonists out there that will never affect or be affected by us, but are still technically a part of our story.
The fact is, any story that we're in is incomplete. We really only know the story we live, with only a fraction of the information from the greater story that society is living. And despite the world without stories pitched at the beginning of McQuillan's introduction to The Narrative Reader, the whole story will only be complete when there’s no one left around to read it.
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