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More importantly what Dan Harmon is describing is what I would call a 4-act “Descent into Hell,” with acts “Setup, Descent, Belly of the Beast, Escape.” This is a very general structure, but the phrasing of that last act as “Escape” makes it fundamentally a comedy (Substitute your favorite rom-com! Or, for a really interesting case, the Amy Poehler/Tina Fey comedy Sisters is a descent-into-hell where the hell in question is the stereotypical-High-School-drinking-party trope). It also isn't even universal for comedies: if we diagram the descent-into-hell as ____ _
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Then there is clearly an inversion of this story structure which is an ascent into heaven, looking instead like ____
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This is actually so common of a Far-Eastern storytelling device that it is best known by a Japanese name, Kishotenketsu[1].The basic idea is that you still need a setup act to tell the people who the characters are, and those characters still are not perfect and still have flaws which may be addressed by the end of the work, but you do not need to motivate their ascent to heaven: everybody wants to go to heaven, it's obvious why they wanted to go too. Similarly unlike the Descent phase where everything is difficult to make the story believable, in the Ascent phase everything is candy bars and ice cream, the character is unreasonably successful, beyond what we would have imagined. Where the Belly of the Beast in Hell amounts to mounting successes in the face of overwhelming odds, the Belly of the Beast in heaven amounts to mounting friction in this place that is supposed to be paradise. And that needs to build up to a sudden explanation of the friction, a twist, where paradise is not what it seemed and the character must flee, having acquired nevertheless what they need to resolve their difficulties at home. Another interesting subversion is when the last act of descent into hell is not Escape, is not Tragic Collapse, but is Redemption: Hell is turned into the mundane world. That's just a different sort of comedy that can work very well, I am thinking for example of Will Ferrell’s classic Elf where Hell is clearly NYC and its utter lack of Christmas Spirit, and Buddy the Elf brings that spirit back to NYC. This I would call a “Light-bringer” structure because it doesn't have the same motifs of descent or ascent... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu |