[UA] Seven basic Stories (was Archetype complexes (Was: Kevin Matchstick))

[Nick Wedig]

>1.  Romance.
>2.  Revenge.
>3.  Mistaken Identity.
>4.  Traveler in a Foriegn Land. 
>5.  Wheel of fortune.
>6.  Man Redeemed.
>7.  The Journey.

There's a lot of overlap there.  Many stories are more than one of these, such as how Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" (first example to come to mind, actually) involves #1, 3, 4, possibly some of the others to a lesser extent.  

>  Traveller in a foriegn
>land would cover The Illiad (but not the oddesy),

Are you sure you didn't confuse those?  The Iliad does have Achilles and the rest away from home, but it's never really a point.  The focus is one the war.  The Oddyssey is about Oddyseus travelling to foreign countries on his way home, and discovering what these other lands are like.   (I'm a little unclear on what each of these is though, so you may mean something other than what I understand it to).

>So if the IC somehow caused the seven stories to be relived, they could be
>relived differently each times, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes justly, and
>sometimes tragically.  The cabal would be trying to create more happy
>endings.

Or perhaps they have to balance happy endings with sad ones, for some reason.  Perhaps they work through stories appropriate to each appropriate Muse, one each year (I'm curious what they'd do for the Muse of astronomy... science fiction?) thus requiring tragedy every nine years or so.

S.John Ross has a list of basic plots much longer than seven.  Perhaps he's not condensed/abstracted them enough.
http://www.io.com/~sjohn/plots.htm

Mr. Teapot
stranger in a strange land

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