Doing a lot of development in the past couple of weeks on Relationships in Narrative. Everyone struggles with the concept that We is not I, nor You. This Reddit post on emergent properties confirms my discoveries:
Emergent properties are probably one of the coolest things in science at the moment. The idea that by the way two things interact, the interaction itself can be defined as something else with its own unique properties that don’t directly correlate to the two things interacting gives us a lot more freedom in terms of how things can behave. It’s currently our best idea about consciousness, as it’s not just a physical property of the gooey lump, but rather the interaction of everything in the gooey lump to form something else. What that something else is? Well we have no fucking clue
In a story, that “something else” is the Relationship Story Throughline.
