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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24480
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24480
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are an infinite number of plots. The claim is that there is a limited number of _types_ of plots. This list that Aaron Digulla quotes is a list of _types_ of plots.

Being an orderly species and liking simple answers as we do, we like to take anything complex and divide it into parts to help us understand it better. This means finding something that a subset of the objects we are looking at have in common, calling it a type, and continuing until there are no more instances left.

A truly rigorous type system would have no overlaps (nothing could be of more than one type) and nothing, by the very nature of the type system itself, could ever not be of any of the types. Coming up with a type system that rigorous is very difficult and arguably impossible in most cases. Most actual type systems fake the property of being all inclusive by including a category that is a tacit "everything else". I'd say that ascension and descension fulfil that role in this typology.

Once you put an "everything else" category in your type system, you make it impossible for there to be anything that does not fit the type system. But this is fundamentally a cheat.

But the thing is, no such type system is an objective truth. It is an intellectual convenience. It may be useful, but it is not definitive. Someone else can some along and make a type system with more of fewer types or types based on different properties, and as long as they include an implicit "everything else" category, their system too will be logically complete.

So can there be a plot that does not fit in this type system for plots? No? Does that tell us anything? No, because the catch-all categories assure that everything will always fit.

Original score: 1