Using Agile user-story logic to redefine antagonist and protagonist

So a few weeks ago I was sitting in an Agile/Scrum training session and talking about User Stories, and the elements of a User Story and it got me thinking more about traditional storytelling methods than about the kind of business oriented story telling that we were there to do. 

The basic idea behind a User Story is to see a business project, usually software development, from various points of view -- ideally from all points of view -- and frame the experience that those Users most desire in terms of a very short story, generally in the format: 

"I am a {user type/role} and I want to {achieve goal} by {action} and/or {with resource}."

This got me thinking about the various roles that make up traditional stories, since I had just seen Mirror, Mirror I naturally started thinking about fairy tales. 

Snow White is complex to dissect, so I started thinking about stories that have fewer roles, like Little Red Riding Hood (which I will call LRRH for brevity).  

So, if we use the pattern above, at the start of LRRH you have the following active user stories:

"I am a little girl and I want to help my grandmother by traveling through these woods with this basket of nourishing provisions."

"I am a concerned daughter and I want to help my mother by sending my daughter to care for her with a basket of provisions."

"I am an intelligent wolf and I want to obtain nourishment by eating other creatures."

This was where something interesting struck me about the user stories. It is much easier to write a user story for someone with agency; the desire to initially accomplish a goal. At this stage it's harder to write about characters like the Kindly Woodsman, or the Granny, because they don't know that they're about to be involved. As far as we know, at the beginning of the story, Granny isn't expecting a visit from Little Red. The Woodsman is not expecting to have to kill a Wolf or save a little girl.

Of course, you could also say that the Wolf isn't expecting to encounter Little Red, that he's also a passive character. I would argue that what makes the difference is that the Wolf has some agency from the start, in the form of his reputation. There's a reason that the Wolf is often called The Big Bad Wolf. His profile in this story is largely a manifestation of human fear, so he's not so much a character at this stage in the story as the stereotype of The Cunning Animal, but it does give him a position in the minds of the characters, even before he makes an appearance.

This makes the Wolf's character into something of a middle category. While he's not actively a part of the start of the story, in many versions the mother explicitly warns Little Red about the dangers of straying off the path, including the danger of wolves. The wolf doesn't come up by name the way the grandmother does, but he's definitely implied in many versions. Since he has a specific intention, he becomes the story's antagonist by default, because his goals are in opposition to those of the protagonist.

However, the three user stories I shared at the beginning, those of the protagonist (Little Red), the protagonist's mother, and the antagonist (the Big Bad Wolf) are all easy to draw. These characters have experiences that actively change as the story progresses, but their initial user stories don't really shift; Red still wants to succeed in helping her grandmother, even though it's possible that Granny is already dead. And while Little Red's encounter with the Wolf at Granny's house causes her to act in her own interests against the Wolf, the idea that she can still somehow help her grandmother is present in many of the modern versions of the story.

In contrast, the mother becomes a passive character almost immediately. Her active role in the story is over the minute that Red Riding Hood leaves the house. We get the impression that she will become active again when Little Red gets home, but in the meantime, her role stays the same throughout because she is not observing the action.

The hand-off between an active and a passive character is pretty much a function of whether someone with agency is interacting with that character. When two people with agency encounter each other, we have conflict. When one person with agency encounters another person, we have action. These are the things that drive the plot.

Consider the user stories of Granny and the Woodsman before they encounter Little Red and the Wolf: 

"I am an older woman who wants to recover my strength and become independent of outside help."

"I am a woodcutter who wants to chop down trees so that I can support myself." 

These are very simple user stories. So simple in fact that they also carry right through the action of LRRH. When Granny is rescued she goes back to healing, and the Woodcutter comes in, provides a heroic action and then goes back to cutting down trees. A lot of humor has been derived from having these characters deviate from these roles, but when we're telling the basic story, we don't actually question their return to the path of their previous activities. Life goes on as it has. 

In fact, the only lives that are changed are the ones that come into direct conflict. Granny is restored or in some cases, dead, but it's Red who is really changed by what's happened to her. Some people talk about Little Red Riding Hood as a story about loss of innocence, and there's something to that, but it's also a story about what happens when you try to take something unjustly from someone else, in this case, the wolf tries to take Granny's life, and Little Red's and in turn the Woodcutter takes his. Red sees this basic adult exchange; a life for a life,  and it changes her.

Many modern retellings try to give Red her own agency in either letting her kill the wolf herself or in having her ultimately swap her red cloak for the Wolf's pelt, but I would argue that the story's essential exchange of a life for a life is echoed in that gesture. In giving Red the wolf's skin, she is taking on some knowledge of the unknown, and it changes the shape of her consciousness and shifts her skin.

Red's mother might have a pang about sending her daughter out on more adventures , or may start thinking about relocating closer to Granny, but really, in the end, the only one whose User Story is changed is Red. If the Wolf were alive, he'd still be trying to eat people, but Red has now seen more of life and death and the unexpected than her initial User Story indicated, so her fate is wide open. While the experience with the wolf may be the most exiting or tragic thing that ever happens to her, it opens the door to a different story, one that she might not have experienced if not for her meeting in the woods.

> Tune in next time, when we'll start to talk about reductionist fairy tales.