# Does a story really need a villain?



## Bearman1 (Aug 29, 2014)

So in my WIP I have realised that there is not really an overall bad guy. 

There are problems for the protaganists to overcome and they are caught up in a war and there are even villainous people who oppose them. But I don't have an actual bad guy running the show. No Sauron type characters. 

I'm not sure if I need one to keep the story focused and a tighter experience or if a main villain really is not needed.

What do you guys think? Do you have a main villain? What do you think are the difficulties in writing a story without one?

Thanks!


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## Gurkhal (Aug 29, 2014)

There is little to no reason to why a story must have a villain and I personally appreciates grey stories far more than black-and-white stories.

For myself I don't have any villains or at least anyone that I myself identify as a villain. I have characters who are in conflict with each other and I view that conflict from one side which may or may not be better or morally superior to the other.


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## Gryphos (Aug 29, 2014)

Bearman1 said:
			
		

> There are problems for the protaganists to overcome and they are caught up in a war and there are even villainous people who oppose them. But I don't have an actual bad guy running the show. No Sauron type characters.



Well there's never been a rule that said there needs to be one main villain. You could by al means have a story with a variety of villains for the protagonists to struggle against. So it sounds like you already have villains.



			
				Gurkhal said:
			
		

> For myself I don't have any villains or at least anyone that I myself identify as a villain. I have characters who are in conflict with each other and I view that conflict from one side which may or may not be better or morally superior to the other.



See, in that context I would see whichever side doesn't have the moral high ground as the villains (at least within the context of the story). A villain doesn't have to be evil incarnate to be seen as one, and of course the best villains have some kind of redeeming quality.


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## T.Allen.Smith (Aug 29, 2014)

You don't need a villain.

Some may debate the need for conflict, but I believe conflict is necessary to have a story. In that light, you could have a cast of characters who are all good people with competing interests. None of them have to be villainous.


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## Aidan of the tavern (Aug 29, 2014)

No, the conflict, trials and struggle for the protagonists is the main thing, I don't think you need a single figurehead to be the main antagonist.  So long as the story isn't a walk in the park for the characters you should be alright.  An example where I think it works great would be _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking Glass_. In both stories Alice overcomes obstacles but there isn't really a single antagonist out to get her, though at various times the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen could be seen as taking on antagonist functions (though this is more temporary and changeable).


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## Shreddies (Aug 29, 2014)

I agree with what has already been posted. I don't think you need a villain (or antagonist) for a story to have conflict.

The setting itself can be a source of conflict too. Such as war, survival in the wild, and so on.


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## Penpilot (Aug 29, 2014)

No, you definitely don't need a villain, but you do need obstacles for your character to overcome.

There's a line of thinking that there are three basic stories.

Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Himself.

In two of these there's no villain.

But take note, these are very broad labels and it's just a tool to organize thoughts. Depending where your story focus is and how you execute it, you could fit almost any story under each of the labels. For example, if you had a story about a person fighting the system and the system had a figure head, then it might be the first type of story. If the system is faceless it might be the second. And finally, if the system is a reflection of the protagonist, it might be the third type of story.

A good example of a novel that has no villain is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, which if memory serves is a Man vs Nature story.


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## Asura Levi (Aug 30, 2014)

Every time I read the post title I remember of Kiki's Delivery Service from Hayao Miyazaki.

The story has no villain at all. Just an incident, yet is really catching (it is one of my favorites).
Albeit it is not exactly the type of story you're writing I think it illustrate it well. So no, you don't need a villain for a story to be good. All you need is conflict.


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## psychotick (Aug 30, 2014)

Hi,

Try Shipwreck by Charles Logan. An excellent read until the bad ending. This is (save for the ending) a well written engaging tale of a man surviving on an alien world after crashing. It has no villains at all. It has no other characters than the MC. So obviously there's no conversation etc. There's not even that much of plot - certainly no plot twists, no mysteries to unravel. It is purely a story about the struggle to survive. And it's good - save for the afore mentioned ending.

Cheers, Greg.


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## wordwalker (Aug 30, 2014)

Another recent example: _Frozen_. Apart from a fairly small number of scenes (powerful, but also disposable), there's no villain at all. And like _Kiki's Delivery Service_, it does a great job of building a story where people are simply making their own choices and pushing through the physical and emotional cost of it.

If you have a story of characters surviving with no central threat, not having a main villain makes it harder to sell, but not harder to enjoy.


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## Mythopoet (Aug 30, 2014)

wordwalker said:


> Another recent example: _Frozen_. Apart from a fairly small number of scenes (powerful, but also disposable), there's no villain at all. And like _Kiki's Delivery Service_, it does a great job of building a story where people are simply making their own choices and pushing through the physical and emotional cost of it.
> 
> If you have a story of characters surviving with no central threat, not having a main villain makes it harder to sell, but not harder to enjoy.



Honestly, I think Frozen would have been A LOT better if they'd lost the stupid power hungry prince (it can't be that hard to think of something else the sisters can argue over) and spent that wasted time focusing more on Elsa and her internal struggle.


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## Steerpike (Aug 30, 2014)

I don't even know about conflict. There is Japanese and Chinese literature that doesn't have conflict. There's a specific name for it, but I can't remember it.


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## Jabrosky (Aug 30, 2014)

Steerpike said:


> I don't even know about conflict. There is Japanese and Chinese literature that doesn't have conflict. There's a specific name for it, but I can't remember it.


I believe you have kishōtenketsu in mind. At least there have been people characterizing it as potentially conflict-free.



> Kishōtenketsu reflects the structure and development of Chinese and Japanese narratives. The Kishōtenketsu model looks similar to the Dramatic Arc, but consists of just four basic stages: Introduction, Development, Twist, and Conclusion. Stories using the Kishōtenketsu structure convey seemingly disconnected events that are tied together by the conclusion of the story. The distinguishing feature of Kishōtenketsu is the element of surprise brought on by the twist. The twist seems disconnected from the introduction and development of the story until the conclusion, at which point the audience begins to make connections to the crux of the story, often reframing earlier interpretations of the events. The narrative is typically left open-ended, with partial resolution. Good examples are the films Rashomon (1950) and Inception (2010).


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## Steerpike (Aug 30, 2014)

Yeah, that's it exactly. I read something about it that mentioned the stories could lack conflict and I wanted to read an example but never did.


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## Helen (Aug 31, 2014)

> Kishōtenketsu reflects the structure and development of Chinese and Japanese narratives. The Kishōtenketsu model looks similar to the Dramatic Arc, but consists of just four basic stages: Introduction, Development, Twist, and Conclusion. Stories using the Kishōtenketsu structure convey seemingly disconnected events that are tied together by the conclusion of the story. The distinguishing feature of Kishōtenketsu is the element of surprise brought on by the twist. The twist seems disconnected from the introduction and development of the story until the conclusion, at which point the audience begins to make connections to the crux of the story, often reframing earlier interpretations of the events. The narrative is typically left open-ended, with partial resolution. Good examples are the films *Rashomon (1950) and Inception (2010)*.



Those films are certainly not conflict-free.


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## wordwalker (Aug 31, 2014)

No conflict? Not possible, if you look closely enough at what you want to write about.

The way I define it, conflict is any *change* (or possible change) that the characters and readers care about. A Kishōtenketsu "surprise" works just as well as an enemy. If there isn't a person who caused it, the story still becomes about how people react to it: can they see it coming? can they change it back? should they? A story might also have nothing "going wrong" at all, but just the hope and uncertainty over something getting better: did I win the lottery?

The rest is just building the story to be sure we do care about what's at stake. Life/death stakes and human enemies are easy ways to orient us in a story, but they aren't the only ones.

Maybe we should retire the word "conflict" in favor of "uncertainty" or "suspense." Anyway, there's more than one variation on the overall theme.


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## Mythopoet (Aug 31, 2014)

wordwalker said:


> The way I define it, conflict is any *change* (or possible change) that the characters and readers care about.



I'm sorry, but this makes no sense. There is a definition for conflict already. You can't just say "well, I'll define it this way because I like this definition better". 

Conflict in literature is defined thus:

In literature, the literary element conflict is an inherent incompatibility between the objectives of two or more characters or forces. (wikipedia)

In literature, a conflict is a literary element that involves a struggle between two opposing forces usually a protagonist and an antagonist. (Literary Devices)

Conflict aka "the Hook": A struggle between two opposing characters or forces (Mrs. Welty's Guide to Literary Elements)

Is that enough references? 

Look, if you're not looking at conflict as a struggle between _*opposing*_ forces, then you're doing it wrong. That is the meaning, the nature of conflict.


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## Steerpike (Aug 31, 2014)

wordwalker said:


> No conflict? Not possible, if you look closely enough at what you want to write about.



I'm always leery of saying thing are not possible. The article I read on Kishōtenketsu was, I  believe, an analysis written by people who study literature. It is difficult for me to believe that after going on at length about how the literature doesn't require conflict, in contrast to western literature, the authors were just so clumsy and ill-informed that they didn't understand their subject. It's possible, I suppose, but it doesn't seem likely. I'll have to seek out that article and see if they cite to some examples, since I can't really make up my mind until I read some of the work for myself. I don't think they were saying all Kishōtenketsu is without conflict, but they were pointing out that some of it has no conflict and their thesis was that conflict as a necessary part of a story is a western concept, which has since come to dominate most of literature but isn't the only way to look at things.

I don't think a change is necessarily a conflict. If I write a story about a man walking down the street at noon and he keeps walking until midnight, there has been a change (e.g. it was light, now it is dark). That's not a conflict. You could certainly tie elements of that change into a conflict (e.g. the night brings danger, for example, or the man knows he will die before the next sunrise so he's dreading the darkness, or whatever), but the fact of change alone doesn't give you a conflict.


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## Penpilot (Aug 31, 2014)

The thing I always wonder about Kishōtenketsu is if conflict is implied by the situation. Eastern cultures are high context vs. Western cultures which are low. Don't understand what I'm saying. Check out this article High- and low-context cultures - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Basically, it says that in a high-context culture, a situation carries certain implied expectations that are never verbalized.

For example, in the west, when a dad demands to meet the boy taking his daughter out on a date before they leave. They'll chit-chat, but regardless of the surface level conversation, the implied conversation is basically this. "I know what you look like. Hurt my daughter and I'll find you."

This sort of thing applies to a greater range of social situations in Eastern cultures and can carry a larger array of implied baggage. At least that's my understanding.


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## Devor (Aug 31, 2014)

I think previous discussions here of Kishōtenketsu mentioned that the conflict was between the story and the reader's expectations. Whether that's really a literary conflict is a matter of semantics - the important thing is to consider the technique.  I don't know about a novel, but you can use it to great effect for a chapter.

As for a villain, I think it's pretty clear that you can have a good story without a villain.  Just, why.  Why. Villains are awesome. That's all I have to say.


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## Addison (Aug 31, 2014)

A story doesn't need a Villain. That's to say it doesn't need a physical person chasing your protagonist with a guns blazing and minions flocking behind him. A story needs conflict. Conflict drives the story, not a horned person with cliche dialogue of world dominance. 

There are four types of conflict. 
1. Person vs person. Ie. Harry Potter vs Voldemort, Sherlock vs Moriarty.
2. Person vs self. Hitchock's "Psycho" in a way, ...that Creepy good Stephen King one with the guy with all those different personalities.
3. Person vs nature. I haven't read many stories with this conflict, but just watch "I Can't Believe I Survived", or "Sanctuary".
4. Person vs supernatural/machine. "Terminator", "I Robot", "Jurassic Park" even. 

What gets on my nerves with villains is when stories get turned into movies but the director and producer think "Oh this conflict is too weak, the viewers won't like it so let's rewrite it entirely!" That just ticks me off. Especially when my kid sister see what they did to her favorite book "Ella Enchanted". I read the story, I saw the movie. While the movie was good it was nothing like the book. The movie had Anne Hathaway versing a person in the end, Carey Elwis a.k.a the evil king. In the story she's versing herself and the curse of obedience she's under. The story was super strong and meaningful as it was, it didn't need a king trying to kill the prince after he killed the first king. Especially with a talking snake as a sidekick. 

So the villain isn't as important as the conflict that drives the story. If a person can drive the conflict better than a poltergeist, dinosaur, second personality or extreme internal troubles, then go for it. Just remember to make the villain as real and dimensional as the protagonist.


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## Caged Maiden (Sep 1, 2014)

Okay, so everyone's pointing out stories that didn't have a named antagonist, and I think those are valid points.  However, there's a flip side to that coin and I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment.

I wrote a story in which a young man has a goal and a personality type, let's sum him up as a religious fanatic.  The story is character-based, whereby this young man is doing things and taking actions  to ultimately reach his imagined "goal".  But the characters who have crossed paths with him have other goals and they are all trying to work together to each get to where they need to be.  One of the companions is a blind priestess and she's questing to save her village.  Another is a man with a troubled spirit, a werewolf that's being consumed by his affliction, but worse by far are the spirits of his ancestors, hunting him.  

So, along this journey, they are beset upon by spirits, no one knows what the heck is happening, the journey continues until in the end, the young man has abandoned his fanaticism (I'm skipping like 16 chapters here), and he helps this priestess save her village.

The point is, that there are forces acting against the group, but there is no one antagonist.  I was strongly cautioned that without an antagonist, the story was harder to keep interested in, because each encounter seems rather random.

NOW.  I'm not an awesome writer.  So I'm not saying EVERYONE would get back that review.  I'm just saying, be careful, because if you aren't an awesome writer, it may come off as a similar thing, a series of events that may be interesting, well-written, and plot-driving,  but they don't hold a reader's interest in the same way a connection to one antagonist does.

I prefer a sort of man vs. self struggle, but obviously my execution lacked something necessary to pull it off.  

Unfortunately, since I've begun critting work, I've run into a fair amount of stories that start out in one of two ways that I'd strongly caution people against.  Either the stories begin with an antagonist as the front and center goal, something like, "Oh, if only Doctor Bad didn't exist, we'd all be happy farmers and peasants" or the story comes off as a random series of events, and the antagonist is nonexistent or too small.

I guess my book I mentioned ended in that second category.  An antagonist is a great concept to play with, but it's a piece of the structure of the story.  If you go too big or too small, without striking the right kind of balance with the characters' personal conflicts, the characters' strengths, the story's other plot elements, etc. you run the risk of the whole thing becoming unstable.

So there's my caution.  Keep it in perspective and proportion.  Of course, if I'd figured out the correct formula, my own story would have fared better.


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## Helen (Sep 2, 2014)

Steerpike said:


> I  believe, an analysis written by people who study literature. It is difficult for me to believe that after going on at length about how the literature doesn't require conflict, in contrast to western literature, the authors were just so clumsy and ill-informed that they didn't understand their subject. It's possible, I suppose, but it doesn't seem likely. I'll have to seek out that article and see if they cite to some examples, since I can't really make up my mind until I read some of the work for myself. I don't think they were saying all [/COLOR]Kishōtenketsu is without conflict, but they were pointing out that some of it has no conflict and their thesis was that conflict as a necessary part of a story is a western concept, which has since come to dominate most of literature but isn't the only way to look at things.



When they try to extend it to film and fiction novels, and cite obviously conflict-ridden examples like Rashomon and Inception, then they are being clumsy.


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## Steerpike (Sep 2, 2014)

Helen said:


> When they try to extend it to film and fiction novels, and cite obviously conflict-ridden examples like Rashomon and Inception, then they are being clumsy.



Except that wasn't from the article I was talking about but from someone else's post.


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## Mythopoet (Sep 2, 2014)

I like to think that story is possible without conflict, "conflict" being two or more forces in _opposition_ to each other. I don't think you need to have _opposition_ to have a story. When I first read about Kishoutenketsu it emphasized contrast over conflict. I think it is possible to have contrast without conflict. Contrast is about differences, but differences don't have to lead to opposition. I think what's really at the heart of a story is _change_ and I don't think that change _has_ to come about because of confict. If things at the end of a story are exactly the same as they were at the beginning, that offends my sense of story. (And this is why, despite all the epicness in the middle, I cannot like _The Worm Ouroboros_.) 

I've been watching the anime Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun lately and I think it's a good example of a story that isn't structured around conflict. But it is filled with brilliant contrast. (That doesn't mean there's NEVER conflict, but there is no central conflict.) All of the characters contrast dramatically with each other, even when they're good friends, and much of the "drama" comes about through a contrast in expectations, but usually not an outright opposition. And let me say, I LOVE this anime so far. 

Perhaps one could say that the "comedy of errors" format is structured much more around such contrasts than it is about conflict. If it was about conflict, it wouldn't be so funny.


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## Steerpike (Sep 2, 2014)

Here's an interesting post on the topic:

The significance of plot without conflict - still eating oranges


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## Mythopoet (Sep 2, 2014)

Steerpike said:


> Here's an interesting post on the topic:
> 
> The significance of plot without conflict - still eating oranges



Yeah, that's the post I linked in the thread I started a while back about whether conflict was necessary. But everyone argued with me that the article was wrong. *shrug*


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## Steerpike (Sep 2, 2014)

Mythopoet said:


> Yeah, that's the post I linked in the thread I started a while back about whether conflict was necessary. But everyone argued with me that the article was wrong. *shrug*



Thanks, Mythopoet. I either missed that post or have completely forgotten it. Either one is equally probable 

I think, as argued in the post, we've got a western way of looking at things, and particularly in the west there seems to be a common desire to frame our way of doing things as THE way of doing them, and that what is most popular or best here is most popular or best in the world (which is why, in the U.S. in particular, we like to have "World Champions" in sports, even though the teams only play within the U.S.).


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## Helen (Sep 2, 2014)

Mythopoet said:


> I like to think that story is possible without conflict, "conflict" being two or more forces in _opposition_ to each other. I don't think you need to have _opposition_ to have a story. When I first read about Kishoutenketsu it emphasized contrast over conflict. I think it is possible to have contrast without conflict. Contrast is about differences, but differences don't have to lead to opposition. I think what's really at the heart of a story is _change_ and I don't think that change _has_ to come about because of confict. If things at the end of a story are exactly the same as they were at the beginning, that offends my sense of story. (And this is why, despite all the epicness in the middle, I cannot like _The Worm Ouroboros_.)
> 
> I've been watching the anime Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun lately and I think it's a good example of a story that isn't structured around conflict. But it is filled with brilliant contrast. (That doesn't mean there's NEVER conflict, but there is no central conflict.) All of the characters contrast dramatically with each other, even when they're good friends, and much of the "drama" comes about through a contrast in expectations, but usually not an outright opposition. And let me say, I LOVE this anime so far.
> 
> Perhaps one could say that the "comedy of errors" format is structured much more around such contrasts than it is about conflict. If it was about conflict, it wouldn't be so funny.



The important thing is that there are two sides which cannot overlap.

Beyond that, "contrast" or "compare" or "contradictions" or "weighing up" or whatever, all work within the context of story conflict.



Steerpike said:


> I think, as argued in the post, we've got a western way of looking at things, and particularly in the west there seems to be a common desire to frame our way of doing things as THE way of doing them, and that what is most popular or best here is most popular or best in the world (which is why, in the U.S. in particular, we like to have "World Champions" in sports, even though the teams only play within the U.S.).



If the "West" is guilty of anything here, it's in assuming the "East" is different.

The "East" has been writing conflict-riddled stories since waaay before the "West" began to emerge. A cursory glance at their stories will show you it's the dominant form there. Besides that, there is no hidden genre of conflict-free stories hidden under a Buddha statue somewhere.

It's not that the "West" thinks there's one way of doing it. It's that, if you did away with all the other causes of conflict, there has to be two sides.



Mythopoet said:


> But everyone argued with me that the article was wrong. *shrug*



Kishōtenketsu really is meant for something else and is being taken out of context in that article and being made to incorrectly apply to larger stories, which are far more complex.


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## Mythopoet (Sep 2, 2014)

Helen said:


> The important thing is that there are two sides which cannot overlap.
> 
> Beyond that, "contrast" or "compare" or "contradictions" or "weighing up" or whatever, all work within the context of story conflict.



Certainly they usually do, but the question is _do they have to_? My opinion is that no, contrast does not have to happen within the context of a conflict, which is two forces in opposition to each other. 



Helen said:


> If the "West" is guilty of anything here, it's in assuming the "East" is different.
> 
> The "East" has been writing conflict-riddled stories since waaay before the "West" began to emerge. A cursory glance at their stories will show you it's the dominant form there. Besides that, there is no hidden genre of conflict-free stories hidden under a Buddha statue somewhere.
> 
> It's not that the "West" thinks there's one way of doing it. It's that, if you did away with all the other causes of conflict, there has to be two sides.



The cultures of the "west" and the "east", by which people generally mean "european/american" and "chinese/japanese/korean", are very different from each other. That is not something you can just wave away. The only real questions are how different and in what ways?

However, NO ONE here or in the thread I started (certainly not myself anyway) has suggested that stories in eastern cultures do not have conflict. At most it has been suggested that perhaps eastern storytellers are more open to stories structured around something other than conflict. (Note: again, conflict being two or more forces in opposition to each other.) 

Given the reaction that even suggesting that conflict is not _necessary_ for storytelling has garnered on this website, I'm inclined to think that the answer is a resounding "yes". 



Helen said:


> Kishōtenketsu really is meant for something else and is being taken out of context in that article and being made to incorrectly apply to larger stories, which are far more complex.



I don't actually care if that article was accurate or not. I was merely trying to use it as a jumping off point for the discussion, but people kept on harping on the article rather than the subject in general.


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## Helen (Sep 4, 2014)

Mythopoet said:


> contrast does not have to happen within the context of a conflict



Contrast is conflict, because it recognizes two sides / POVs. Just like "debate" recognizes two sides and is, in essence, conflict.

It's all semantics here, but when you expand it into characters and worlds, you end up creating distinctly separate entities that really are battling for dominance.



Mythopoet said:


> The cultures of the "west" and the "east", by which people generally mean "european/american" and "chinese/japanese/korean", are very different from each other. That is not something you can just wave away. The only real questions are how different and in what ways?



Human nature is pretty consistent the world over and stories reflect that. You only have to look at the murals on their monasteries and temples to see that their storytelling techniques are the same as ours.



Mythopoet said:


> However, NO ONE here or in the thread I started (certainly not myself anyway) has suggested that stories in eastern cultures do not have conflict. At most it has been suggested that perhaps eastern storytellers are more open to stories structured around something other than conflict.



There's been a link between "Kishōtenketsu" and "conflict-free." And "Kishōtenketsu describes the structure and development of Chinese and Japanese narratives" was mentioned earlier in the thread and even on the Kishōtenketsu wiki page.

I don't think anyone's looking for conflict-filled stories; I think the argument is just that conflict will be there in some form or another, which it will be.


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