crazrick
Liger
Joined: 28 Mar 2008
Posts: 780
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 Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:22 am Post subject: |
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here's how I'd break it down:
The Fred Savage/Peter Falk bookends of the sick boy visited by his grandpa are Buddy Love, I think....
BUDDY LOVE
1) an incomplete hero
2) a counterpart lacking something the hero has
3) a complication that must be overcome for completion
Grandpa is the hero, incomplete because he hasn't passed on his 'favorite fairy tale' to his young grandson. Fred is the young boy who has the vitality of his youth which has long since been lost on Gramps; but Fred is sick this day, and lacks the patience to stomach reading a book in the age of TVs and computer games and all that technology.... so Gramps brings the fairy tale ('in my day, television was called BOOKS!') to lift Fred's spirits and complete Gramps' own Hero arc... the complication is that the book is, to Fred's dismay, a kissing book, but it's also got swordfights, monsters, revenge, death... everything a good video game has in it! so, Gramps gets his wish, as Fred allows him to read the fairy tale, and all ends well...
the Princess Bride fairy tale itself, I'd say is Golden Fleece...
GOLDEN FLEECE
1) a road the story travels, often including a road apple which stops the story cold
2) a team gathered to represent things the hero needs
3) a prize, something the hero wants so bad he chases it
the 'road' is the Frontier between the Kingdom of Gilder and the City of Floren
the team is Wesley, Inigo Montoya, and Fezzik as the Brains, Steel and Brawn and Buttercup as the heart vs the vile Prince Humperdink who plots to start a war between Floren and Gilder.
The prize is true love of Buttercup, whom Wesley chases (first as a lowly farm boy, then as the Dread Pirate Roberts, as he has to recover her from Inigo, Fezzik and the original Brains of the operation, Vincini, and finally, as reborn Wesley again...)
and, the road apple is the point in the story when Wesley dies (again, for the first time) in the Pit of Despair...
fortunately for Buttercup, Miracle Max takes house-calls! and it turns out, Wesley was only mostly dead... mostly dead means partly alive, all dead, all you can do is go thru his pockets looking for loose change!
or something...
write on!
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