i keep pondering wile e. coyote river now. what does make gravity his biggest enemy mean? is it like no matter what he does there will always be some external, invisible force that prevents him from his goal? what is river’s version of gravity?
ok i cant promise this is going to be Coherent. on account of it being midnight. but i think thats in line with the rest of my coyotewright posting. i have to be honest when i made the initial post it was because i thought the action shot of river halfway through the roof was very funny and because he falls off stuff a lot though I think originally that rule was supposed to be over an image of the paint pot. which is also a notable gravity ruining river's day moment. but there Is a lot to think about here in terms of the Coyote v roadrunner framework and how the rest of the story fits into it.
the thing is that the road runner, abiding by rule one
cannot actually harm the Coyote. we kind of established in the last post that river's road runner is getting back to the park. but not the park as an Entity in the 'does the park know' 'I'm not going to tell the fucking park' sense. it's more of a nebulous Being Good At My Job goal which is what he is always working towards. the no 1 thing keeping him from doing this is that he is bad at his job but also the park (and taverner) doesnt want him back. in my original post i had the failure of the acme products standing in for the ways in which the park itself harms river. so acme is kind of the park in that they supposedly give him the tools to do his job that backfire on several occasions (s1, s3). but this is where the metaphor gets shaky. so
gravity in this sense. i think you're right about it being an external invisible force that prevents him from reaching his goal. and often times causes injuries but generally they are more humiliating than harmful in the long term. as per the Rules. in this case the force is quite simply that he can't get back to the park because the story can't let him. a prime example of give your character something they really want and never let them have it. the thing about river is he is kind of held back by the fact that he thinks he is in james bond and is definitively not. he's actively going i was born in the wrong era in the books because he wants to be a cold war spy sooo bad. at the end of the day he IS in a thriller he's not wrong about that but he's got the tone wrong. river getting back to the park isn't possible because then he wouldn't be in slough house, which IS the story.
we can also take gravity here in the way it literally causes problems for river in line with the rule of comedy. he goes on his escape the park temple run and jumps between walkways but twists his ankle. he gets out of the house in france and walks off making his cool exit and immediately falls through a roof. he goes charging off after a perceived assassin and the guy he's trying to save is killed by a rube goldberg level environmental hazard. every action has an equal opposite fuckup. river is also held back by being an eternal punchline. its funny for him to keep failing despite it also being tragic. Much like the Coyote
