The promises grow faster than the stories
- Facts3Pairs to check3
Picture a story with three facts. Before a fourth is added, the three must agree with each other. Fact one with fact two. One with three. Two with three. Three facts, three pairs to check. Not many. Now watch what happens as the facts grow.
- 3 facts3 pairs4 facts6 pairs5 facts10 pairs10 facts45 pairs
Four facts make six pairs. Five make ten. Ten facts make 45 pairs. Each new fact has to be checked against every fact that came before it, so the fifth fact adds four pairs, the tenth adds nine. The pairs grow faster than the facts do.
- 6 factseach against each? pairs
A story has six facts. How many pairs of facts must agree with each other?
pairsEach new fact adds as many pairs as there were facts before it: 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5.
Right. Fifteen. One plus two plus three plus four plus five. Six facts, fifteen things that can disagree, and the story only showed six. - 100 facts100Pairs to check4,950
There is a rule for it. Take the number of facts, multiply by one less than that, and halve it. A hundred facts is a hundred times 99, halved: 4,950 pairs. Nobody checks 4,950 pairs. A writer checks the ones they remember, and the rest are left to luck.
Move the number of facts in a story and watch the pairs that have to agree. The rule is facts times one less, halved.
10Facts45PairsFacts in the story: 10 facts
Ten facts: 45 pairs. One careful writer can hold that.
100Facts4,950PairsFacts in the story: 100 facts
A hundred facts: 4,950 pairs. A long game, or a season of a show. Beyond one head.
1,000Facts499,500PairsFacts in the story: 1,000 facts
A thousand facts: 499,500 pairs. A series. Nobody has ever checked them all.
10,000Facts49,995,000PairsFacts in the story: 10,000 facts
Ten thousand facts: about 50 million pairs. A franchise with decades behind it. The list is now a database, or it is nothing.
Ten times the facts means how many times the pairs?
About a hundred times.
Right. From 100 facts to 1,000, the pairs went from 4,950 to 499,500: a hundredfold. Multiply the facts by ten and the pairs multiply by about ten times ten.The same. A story is a story.
Not yet. Read the frames again: 45, then 4,950, then 499,500. The pairs are what a writer must keep straight, and they run away from the facts.Ten times.
Not yet. If pairs grew as fast as facts, 1,000 facts would make about 49,500 pairs. The frame shows 499,500. Each new fact meets every old one, not just one.Move the control.
- Pokémon1,025 speciesA databasekeeps the facts
Real franchises are at the top of that slope. Pokémon had 1,025 species by 2025, and each has a type, a home, a size, a weight, the moves it learns and what it turns into. That is many thousands of facts. The games keep them in a database, not in anyone's head.
Star Wars has had a keeper of its facts since 2000, with a database called the Holocron. By 2012, how many entries did it hold?
Pick one. Nothing is scored.
Star WarsThe Holocron55,000 entries, 2012About 55,000.More than 19,000 of them were characters. A film series of six films had, by then, more than thirty years of books, comics and games hanging off it, and the only way to know what had been promised was to write every promise down.- Pairs in a story of 10 facts45 pairsPairs in a story of 100 facts4,950 pairs
So a tangle is not only carelessness. Past a hundred or so facts, no head can hold the pairs, and a story with no written list will contradict itself sooner or later. It is arithmetic. The question for the rest of the course is what people do about it.
- 1,225 pairs50 facts124,750 pairs500 facts
Two careful writers join two series. One series has 50 facts and the other 500. Which writer is more likely to break a promise without noticing?
The one with 50 facts. A smaller story gets less attention.
Not yet. Attention is not the difference here. The small story has 1,225 pairs; the big one has a hundred times more, and the same care spread over them.The one with 500 facts. There are a hundred times as many pairs to get wrong.
Right. Fifty facts is 1,225 pairs; five hundred is 124,750. Care is the same in both; the number of ways to slip is not.Equal. Both are careful, so neither will slip.
Not yet. Being careful means checking the pairs you remember. With 124,750 of them, the ones you do not remember are most of them.
Lesson complete
Every new fact must agree with every old one, so the pairs to check grow faster than the facts.