2000 Years of Roman History Factors Into My Judgement About Whether All Stories Are The Same

 Although the concept that every novel, film, play, game, or any other narrative that humanity has produced can be classified into 6 narrative structures is one that is difficult to believe at first, I found myself seeing its logic after a cursory examination of Roman history. At least, from a surface level perspective, I could see Oedipus in the golden-nosed Justinian II's two rather despotic reigns (he was mutilated after first being deposed), and Claudius' unlikely rise to power could be a dead ringer for Cindarella, narrative wise. 

He doesn't look much like a Cinderella to me...

However, this profound and pseudo-intellectual idea's psychological sheen soon wore off as I, enamored with it, applied it to ever broader periods of history, such as the entirety of Roman history (Oedipus) or the history of humanity (Rags to Riches). At this point, I realized that patterns of rises and falls could be applied to literally anything that experiences change and that a model with such broad classifications is, in actuality, not very useful.

These 6 narrative structures are not the key to some mystical narrative understanding because they are overly reductive. They are the equivalent of saying that English and French are related because they both use a Latin alphabet. Although true, there aren't many meaningful conclusions that can be drawn from considering this. Let's take a look at Avatar and Pocahontas, two narratives used in All Stories Are The Same. Although they share the same basic premise once the setting and context is stripped away, the setting and context are what make stories matter. Simply reducing both narratives to a single archetype completely ignores Avatar's ecological themes, while the tragedies of British imperialism that still affect populations today in Pocahontas is completely discarded as both stories are slotted into the same conceptual box. No one can, or should, be able to convince me that the entirety of Roman history is basically Oedipus because that strips it of its vast complexity and its instructional value. 

 Even Adreinne Lafrance of The Atlantic concedes that most stories have greater narrative complexity, using a chart depicting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows' narrative structure to point out that despite its apparent complexity,  “the emotional arc associated with each sub-narrative is clearly visible.” To me, this statement seems like an admission of the model's lack of detail. What structure inherent in these narrative archetypes prevents me from simply reducing the model further and saying that every story is rise to fall (Icarus) and fall to rise (Rags to Riches)? There aren't any. 

I wonder what the narrative structure of my headphones is

When he read through published stories that he enjoyed, Philip Brewer found that "when [he] looked at award-winning stories, [he] just didn’t see many stories that followed those structures." If a story using these structures is interpreted by readers as overly formulaic and stale, isn't it time to either derive more complex models or abandon the notion that there is some sort of universal narrative structure? Vonnegut says that "there is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers," but that's hardly a logical argument. I can graph my happiness over time on Desmos, but that doesn't make it scientifically valid. 

Let x be age (in years) and y be happiness (blood dopamine level in parts per million)