The Power of Storytelling

When you realize that most times, all it takes for someone to like or hate you is a good story, you get to discover the power of storytelling.

_{photo by Florian Klauer}

Earlier this evening, I saw a clip from the Ipman movie, in this scene, an American fighter had gone to challenge some of the masters in Asia and while he was whooping all of them, the guy whose intention had been to film the fight, had quickly brought down his camera and waited until when Ipman came to the rescue of the masters, after three of them had been dealt with by the fighter.

The moment the camera guy noticed that Ipman had entered the fight, he quickly raised up his camera and began filming. When I saw that, I had quickly rushed to the comment section hoping to at least see one person complain about that, but instead I saw people laughing at it, someone even said that the guy decided to save his camera battery for the real fight.

Now while none of this is really important (as its a part of the movie that doesn't really hold any significant meaning), I was able to take note of the fact that the reason no one complained about that (among other reasons), was probably because Ipman was the protagonist in the movie, hence everyone watching the movie liked him. So seeing how that whole camera thing happened to someone we all liked, we saw nothing wrong with it.

Again, I know that it might seem to you all that I'm overthinking this whole thing, but the truth is that I'm only trying to explain to you guys how sometimes, having a good story to tell of a bad guy, could end up making everyone love him, even if they know he's not a good person.

Another good example is the series "The day of the Jackal" where all of us were literally rooting for the protagonist who happens to be a serial killer that kills people for money. What was even crazier was the fact that I found myself hating the MI6 agent who literally was trying to do her job by capturing the serial killer but ended up getting killed instead.

All of this things just shows you how easy it is to make something or someone either likeable or the opposite of that, it all just depends on who's telling the story and how they're telling it.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't really care about their story, and this is why sometimes some good people are mistaken to be bad people because they had refused to take charge and be the author of their story, they had refused to write a good story about themselves.

For now, it might have little or no effect on their life, but when the time comes for those effects to take place, they would be both shocked and surprised to learn about these things and the kind of person everyone perceive them to be.