Óscar Reyes Matute
In philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte described the dialectical movement of consciousness: the “I” (thesis) collides with the external world, or “Not-I” (antithesis), and through overcoming that resistance, achieves self-awareness (synthesis). Fichte, a pillar of German Idealism, never drew a graph. Yet, modern storytelling took his principle of tension and constant collision and transformed it into an addictive monster: the Fichtean Curve (or Fichte Curve).
If classical Aristotelian structure asks us to take a leisurely introductory stroll along the shores of Ilium and count the Achaean ships before unleashing Achilles’ conflict, the Fichtean Curve throws us out of the airplane without a parachute in the very first scene.
Here, conflict never rests. It is a staircase where each step, instead of lifting the character upward, sinks them into increasingly serious trouble.
Anatomy of an audiovisual collapse
When applied to film and miniseries, the Fichtean Curve operates according to a relentless logic divided into three acts of pure adrenaline:
1. Rising action (No Anesthesia)
Forget the “calm beginning.”
The story starts with the truck crashing or the secret being exposed.
From that moment on, the protagonist faces a chain reaction of successive crises.
The character tries to solve Problem A, but that decision creates Problem B, which is twice as serious.
Moments of lower tension do not exist so the audience can catch its breath; they exist to reveal the character’s psychology just before the next crushing blow.
2. The climax (The point of no return)
This is the peak of the roller coaster.
After accumulating suffering and bad decisions, the protagonist collides with the ultimate obstacle.
Everything explodes.
3. Lightning-fast resolution
After the climax, the descent is vertical.
The audience does not want a twenty-minute epilogue filled with prolonged reflections; it demands the final impact and the credits.
From an iranian Oscar to the TikTok algorithm
This structure drives the most fast-paced genres.
In auteur cinema, I saw the great Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi apply it masterfully.
In his Oscar-winning film A Separation, domestic tension escalates to such a degree that, glued to your seat, you find yourself asking: Can this possibly continue? How much further can the conflict grow?
Yes, it keeps growing all the way to the end, magnificently so—a formula he repeated in The Salesman.
Farhadi uses Fichte to dissect human morality through a form of civilized suffocation.
Today, however, the Fichtean Curve has fallen captive to the tyranny of the algorithm.
It forms the superstructure behind the short-form miniseries exported by Chinese and Korean creators—sometimes only three minutes per episode—and the fragmented fiction we devour on TikTok.
This is storytelling engineered to produce endorphins: nonstop action that hooks young audiences for hours.
Even when these formats still contain the Hero’s Journey beneath the surface, their building blocks consist of pure Fichte: stimulus, crisis, hook, cut; repeat the electric shock—I want more because I like it.
Lessons from the trenches
Far from contradicting Aristotle, this approach pushes the central principle of his Poetics—agón (conflict)—to its limit: it is what drives dramatic action.
I learned that lesson from my teacher, Ibraihm Guerra, through unforgettable knocks to the head while we wrote the telenovela La Magia del Amor for Televisa.
Ibraihm constantly repeated the golden rule:
Every action, every line of dialogue, must push the story forward.
If it does not move the game, it has no place in the script.
We spent days locked away, turning every line spoken by the protagonists, every kiss, every sigh, into dramatic action that grew relentlessly, without anticlimax, until the episode left you hanging through a final cliffhanger, desperate to watch more the next day.
We felt the same way.
And they even paid us for it.
The Fichtean Curve proves that conflict on screen is not an accessory; it is reality itself evolving under pressure.
It is a lethal tool that reminds us that, in cinema as in life, we only discover who we are when the world resists us.
You can fit whatever stories you want into the curve, or inject the curve into whatever stories you want—it works.
As Galileo said:
Eppur, si muove.
And yet, it moves.
