Love Introduced

With the transition from Fire to Earth, the way the elements of the psyche relate to one another changes, and the psyche itself changes course on its path of transformation. In Fire, identity is unstable, the heart awakens through projection, and the hero decides to move forward.

In the first encounter with Earth, that movement takes shape in reality. Through projection, the hero’s soul now asks: How will I live? How will my wish become real? It is therefore no coincidence that through the Lover, the wish archetype, the possibility of an emotional relationship and its manifestation appears here for the first time in the story. What is perhaps even more interesting structurally is that, through the opposing archetype of the stage, we encounter Water here for the first time, the element that will play a crucial role in the integration at the end of the story.

In other words, at the beginning of Act II, through the Caregiver as both the need archetype and the Shadow of the hero’s Ego in Water, the emotional realm becomes tangible. Although we are still in a wish-dominant stage, we can already see quite clearly what truly has to change for the hero to be reborn.

In classical screenwriting theory, this is precisely the point where a second storyline begins, in counterpoint to the first. It is often said that screenplays begin with an A story, the action storyline, opposed by a B story, the emotional or love storyline. Blake Snyder defines it in his Beat Sheet: “The B story begins on page 30. And the B story of most screenplays is ‘the love story.’ It is also the story that carries the theme of the movie.”

However, if we always understand the A story as the action or wish story, and the B story as the love or need story that carries the theme, here the Wheel introduces an important distinction. Genre reveals whether, through the Defining archetype in the first quadrant of the four-act structure, wish or need develops first. That, in turn, determines which storyline will be activated as the counterpoint in Act II.

In other words, the Lover–Caregiver stage opens Act II on the Clock while, on the Cross, it activates the counterpoint storyline through the Opposing Archetype at the level of genre, which makes this stage structurally especially rich.

So, in order to get as much useful information for writing as possible, it makes sense to look at this stage both through its basic archetypal dynamics and through the additional structural coordinates offered by the Wheel.