/lit/ - Literature

>>2992478
Those all have conflict. They are combative to societal norms or telling a persons struggle to look cool. No conflict:
I walked down the street happily.
The End.

There's more to books and films than just the story, but the story can't be good without a conflict.

I think you'll find that stories without conflict are just plain boring, like your example "story" and the comic you posted. They're just not interesting. One-shot anecdotes and jokes that make you chuckle a bit may not need conflict, but they also aren't stories.

Also, "conflict" doesn't have to be interpersonal, it can be vs. nature, society, etc.

>>2992535
Doing a series of funny or embarrassing things has no conflict but is still a connected series of events that form a story.

>>2992545
Prove it to me

For myself I find the blank page to be conflicting enough.

>>2992550
They aren't one thing, though. If you have, say, a really lucky day— you get up and pour your cereal and get a second toy prize, find 10 dollars on the sidewalk, high five the mayor because he happened to be on the bus, your project at work succeeds and you're rewarded with a raise, you get dinner at your favorite restaurant and the cute waitress flirts with you, and then you catch a great movie you haven't seen on TCM before going to bed. No conflict.

>>2992563
Wonderfully poetic

>>2992581
And again, *boring*. Why should I, the reader, give a shit about you or your good fortune? The most this elicits is an insincere "congratulations." I won't remember a single word of that anecdote 5 minutes from now. The OP specifically asked why *good* books and movies can't be written with no conflict, and you've provided nothing to suggest that they can.

>>2992478
I agree with you. I like stories with as little conflict as possible or at least very subtle conflict. But I also agree with
>>2992535
That all the examples you gave have conflict. Even the comic (which I love, by the way) has conflict, but it is derived from the form rather than the content. It juxtaposes three similar images to create a montage effect, what happens in between is up to the readers imagination, which is in itself, conflict.

Read some of this guy's essays.

>>2992598
You're the boring one. Does anything without a conflict interest you? Like studies that show interesting causal relationships? Like a theory about how material and time are formed that is proven with technology? Those can tell stories as well.

>>2992609
Are you seriously trying to pass scientific literature off as "stories"?

>>2992605
I didn't say whether I liked conflict or not. I just don't see why it has been determined to be necessary. The comic may have VISUAL conflict, or juxtaposition, has no conflict within the story itself. The girl likes the guy's joke, the girl laughs, the guy and the girl have sex while she laughs. No intra or inter conflict.

>>2992615
Evolution is a story of life. Microorganism mutates, survives over others, mutates, survives, eventually becomes a highly complex animal. A correlation between second hand smoke and cancer rates is a story of cancer development. Friends smoke a lot, you don't, you develop cancer because the exposure is not so different, you die. Stories without specific characters and places are not original. Think, "a man walks into a bar..." "a fool does X, a wiser man does Y, wiser man is successful, fool is not."

>>2992605
This, it's not that a story NEEDS conflict, it's that you can find conflict within every story.

>>2992535
Even this is conflicting against expectations of a story, similar to how an "anti-joke" is humorous precisely because it tries not to be. The conflict is in finding the conflict, the humor is in finding the humor.

>>2992616
>The comic may have VISUAL conflict, or juxtaposition, has no conflict within the story itself.

That's what I said, it's derived from form rather than content, which are fundamentals of storytelling and art. It may not be a grandiose conflict based on centuries of storytelling, but it's still conflict. How you out the images together is conflict. Read Eisenstein's "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" and you'll understand what I mean.

>>2992634
>out

put*

>>2992633
The rule of fives: you can find fives in everything, if you look for them. Being able to find something if you look reaaaally hard for it does not make it an overarching principle of storytelling.

You make a good argument for this conflict of expectations and reality thing, but it still seems forced. It's not a true conflict, merely a surprise. You overcome, resolve conflicts. You don't resolve surprises. (although you can if the surprise presents a conflict)

>>2992665
Okay, but now you're not arguing against the principle, you're arguing against the definition.

Redefining conflict will just make that definition irrelevant to the principle's context.

I'm not looking really hard, I'm just looking at it from a different perspective than you.

>I walked down the street happily.
It's very clear that this was written specifically to create something without conflict to prove how it doesn't work, which is conflict in itself. The point he's trying to make relies on that conflict.

Here's Rabbits by David Lynch, you'll enjoy it, it could be purported as an example of conflictless. Completely nonsequitur dialogue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFyTy8Rhfas

You could say 'nothing happens' but the absence of 'something' is something itself. The conflict has just shifted, just because it's becoming more meta doesn't mean it's any less genuine.

Though I guess there being more humor in it than just the dialogue does strip it of it's "nothing"-ness, plus the visual and aural aesthetic of the set and score.

Who's the artist in your OP?

>>2992478
Trying to look cool, catch jacket on nail, spaghetti falls out of pockets, burst into tears.

But all of this IS conflict. It might not be conflict in a traditional sense, but it is conflict. Remember that it doen't ust mean people fighting, it means any sort of attempt at anything.

You realize that a;ll your examples have conflict in them right? It's not antagonistic, opposed person type of conflict, but it is conflict. In the comic there is the conflict (or tension, in writing they're pretty much the same thing) in the moment where she laughs at him. It is a conflict that we all fill in with details from our own expectation of what happens when someone laughs like that on a date. Buddha went seeking enlightenment and had the conflict of waiting, starving beneath the tree until enlightenment came. Ever moment of his waiting is a conflict between his belief and faith, and the possibility that he could just get up and go do as he wants at any point. Your jacket story has a conflict between your attempt to look cool and the forces of the world negating that. You're just thinking of conflict too narrowly.

>>2992690
>>2992665
>>2992633
>>2992629

I'm sensing a conflict in this thread.

The twist? You all actually agree with each other.

>>2992690
That's not a redefinition of conflict. Conflict is two things against each other, creating tension, making you wonder what might happen. A surprise is something which you didn't anticipate, because you had never seen it before or because it is highly unusual. "I walked down the street happily" is an isolated event. Of course it's not a story. I think we can agree that a story involves more than one events which are connected, probably by a causal relationship. The video is creepy, but doesn't much represent a story because the things they say aren't really connected or linear, things happen/are done/are said without meaning and are isolated.

>>2992692
Conflict isn't an attempt. That's a pathetic explanation. Conflict involves forces which contradict each other.

Why are you guys bullshitting these paper-thin definitions for conflict?

>>2992706
Shut up Lain you didn't even finish school because you became God

>>2992694
I give on the Buddha story, I had forgotten about that part, but there is no tension nor any conflict in the comic because curiosity is not conflict. You wonder, yes, but your wondering is not against anything and even if it were a story's conflict is supposed to be inherent in the story itself, not between you and the story (like, say, if the story presented itself as true and you were a historian and you knew it was false. That's a conflict caused by the details of a story, but it doesn't imply that the story itself has a conflict) I am unsure of the jacket thing, it may not have been the best example to make up and you are probably right, but there are still plenty of entertaining examples of stories without conflict.

>>2992710
>The video is creepy
ugh fuck you faggot pleb

>>2992735
That's obviously the intention of the piece, though, to give the viewer the creeps. It's got fursuits for fuck's sake

>>2992478
Gonna need the name of that artist, OP.

>>2992743
No it isn't, you're a fucking idiot.
No wonder you're having so much trouble understanding conflict. Go back to comics, pleb.
Not even any decent underground shit either, just your marketed superhero trash. Fuck you /co/, you have the worst taste in any board's respective medium on 4chan, except maybe /a/, and it's because you're all so fucking nice to each other, jump back into your pile of shit and don't come back