🌡️ #313 - Achieving your (character's) fundraising goals

There's something satisfying and tangible when characters need to raise money for a goal. The audience quickly understands the difficulty based on the number the characters need to hit. That money also connects to a larger purpose, because it's hard to rally people around the idea of "Help me raise $10,000 so that I can have $10,000!"

These stories often contain a morality play in the details. Who needs this money? For what? What keeps them from having this money already? What creates this immediate, urgent need?

Let's take a look at some examples to tease out what builds a story that has audience's cheering on the protagonist's drive to get that paper.

While the original longer cut of Tex Richman's song from The Muppets (2011) gave some deeper character motivations for his anger toward all things Muppety, his primary role in the fundraising narrative remains the same: the antagonistic money haver. His wealth creates the hurdle that the protagonists need to overcome.

Dwight Longnecker highlights how Hell or High Water is a Robin Hood story that focuses on two men robbing banks illegally to take back money that the bank legally stole from their mother through a predatory reverse mortgage. Josh Matthews looks at the way that the setting of West Texas is used to reinforce the desperation of the film's bank robbers. This is an area that’s in decay, things are coming to an end as banks take advantage of the area’s economic collapse creates opportunities to take ownership of the land.

The end of the film sticks to these ideals about the purpose of the theft and explaining it to the retired Texas Ranger who hunted the brothers. It’s a film about using a certain amount of money to break the cycle of generational poverty and debt:

Wesley Edits considers how Empire Records is a kind of time capsule, showing a pre-influencer fairy tale of an independent, alternative community collectively raising money to avoid having to sell out to corporate interests. For example, the treatment of “Warren,” the shoplifter who later comes back to brandish a gun loaded with blanks shows more care and concern than anger with someone disrupting the business of the store. The staff recognizes someone like themselves, as opposed to the corporate interests represented by Rex Manning and Musictown.

Jono Simpson compares the film’s story to its real life economics and reception. The film’s initial release was lackluster in both promotion and ticket sales, and it arrived mid-decade as trends in music, fashion, and film were in flux. Its resuscitation by home video audiences even echoes the spirit of a group rejecting the corporate-driven narrative that the film was a failure.

Rosemarie Ho points to how Ralph Breaks the Internet complicates the initial premise (Ralph and Vanellope need to make enough money to buy a replacement wheel for the Sugar Rush arcade machine so all the sprites inside don’t lose their home) by showing a virtual world where all work is gig work. In this world, humans are the adversarial force with the economic power.

The steering wheel costs more than the arcade game brings in in one year, tying housing and safety for the residents of Sugar Rush to the patronage of humans. Ralph’s attempts to make money involve stealing in-game items for paying human customers and debasing himself to capture human attention.

Takeaways

• The money that characters need to raise is to prevent the loss of something precious. It's a last-ditch effort, not just an attempt to afford something that would be nice.
• The antagonistic force is flush with cash. This means the stakes are always about the money. It's not the battleground that the protagonist(s) want, but there are no end runs around reaching the goal amount.
• There's a larger schism between protagonist and antagonist than just who has money and who needs it. There's a corresponding difference in identity and values.

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Fully Funded (and it feels so good)

This Tuesday we launched the Kickstarter campaign for the Character Creator Kit, a companion for the original Writer Emergency Pack.

And less than seven hours later, the project was fully funded!

If you haven't already, take a moment to look over how it works, and how this deck of cards can help you start your story on the right foot with clear ideas of who your characters are and how they interact.

There's still time to pledge and get your own deck (or to secure early bird shipping for the holidays)!

In case you missed it...

In the most clicked link from our last issue, Miles Granger provides a quick reference guide of the original 12 Jungian character archetypes, featuring examples from books and films.

What else is Inneresting?

• For those in need of a new rabbit hole to fall down, try Wikipedia’s page on Inventors killed by their own invention.
• It doesn’t get much more Autumnal than Chuck Wendig’s Reviews of Apples.
• Stephen Nothum posits that Digger is less a direct satire about ecological disaster, but a warning about what happens when the powerful control the means of producing entertainment and sanitize the stories about themselves.

And that’s what’s inneresting this week!

Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team. 

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