The Cyclical Story of a Chump and His Cheese

The Cyclical Story of a Chump and His Cheese

And Repeat...

The Human Mind is adept at finding patterns and forming stories. Put a series of pictures in a row, and the human mind can easily create a story out of it. A detective can find disparate evidence and data and form a narrative conclusion about what happened at the scene of a crime. It is human nature. This narrative can take many forms. There is the “Standard Linear Narratives” that have a beginning, middle, and an end, sporting conflict and resolution. There are narratives that through chronology out the window, and there are narratives that go in a circle, ending where they began. Many narratives, especially in Asia, have no real conflict, but rather a twist at the end. A new media way of telling stories is with a database where the user gets to pick their way through mostly unstructured data and create their own stories, or choose your own adventure. No matter how the narrative is structured, the Narrative is a common human experience, deeply ingrained into the human psyche.

I have never told a circular story before. I had always considered it to be very unsatisfying. The protagonist always ends up where they began, no net progress has been made, and to me, that is very frustrating. It makes the time spent in reading the story seem wasted. However, I learned when creating this story, that if implemented correctly, it could be satisfying, funny even. I took inspiration for this story from the well-known tongue twister about Betty Botter buying a bit of better butter because her butter made her batter bitter. I however wondered if the butter she had bought was any better than the previous batch. In this story, I wanted the cheese to always be bad. A circular story made satisfying by the goofy nature of the acting, and the highly reactionary or circular nature of the GIFS used to tell the story. Thanks to this experience, I consider, tentatively, circular narratives to be not necessarily an unsatisfying way of telling a story.

For this story, I could have gone several directions with the GIFs. I could have made them simple clips of a larger story without necessarily making them useful for anything other than the narrative, or I could have worked hard to make each of them usable in conversations that I might actually have when texting people. I focused on the later for my aesthetic. This means that for the most part, the acting was exaggerated, and clips of the story were chosen that could be applicable elsewhere. If my friend is texting about passing gas, I could send them the GIF of the cheese being cut, or the puking. Everything is usable out of context, on purpose. When there are captions, they are vague enough that they are versatile. Except for the continuity of acting, I want it to seem like I created a story out of a database of GIFs.