Are you Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah? This question has divided global fandom since The Summer I Turned Pretty first hit screens and bookshelves. For years, readers have argued over who truly deserves Belly’s heart, the playful golden boy or the golden retriever in human form.

But here’s the real question:

Why do stories about love triangles, heartbreak, and sun-soaked summers make us care so deeply about people who don’t exist?

Part of the answer lies in the emotional architecture of stories themselves, what Kurt Vonnegut once called “the shapes of stories.”

A Thesis Too Simple to Pass

When Vonnegut submitted his master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, it wasn’t about tribes or rituals, as one might expect from an anthropology student. It was about stories.

He proposed that the emotional arc of every story, from fairytales to tragedies, could be plotted on two simple axes:

The G–I Axis, running vertically from Good Fortune to Ill Fortune
The B–E Axis, running horizontally from Beginning to End

The shape of the graph on these axes shows how life changes for the main character. The beauty of it, he said, is that most of them follow a few recognizable shapes. They rise, fall, or loop in predictable ways. Not because writers copy each other, but because people are wired to expect those emotional ups and downs.

The university rejected his thesis. It was, they said, “too simple and too much fun.”

The Beauty of Simple Shapes

Years later, in his famous lecture at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Vonnegut explained his theory with chalk and a grin. On a blackboard, he sketched patterns like:

Man in Hole: Start above misery, fall into trouble, climb back out. The character ends better than they began, a story about recovery, not perfection. “People love this one,” Vonnegut said. “It gives them hope.”

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Boy Meets Girl: Someone living an ordinary life discovers something wonderful, love, success, meaning, and their fortune rises. Then comes loss and heartbreak, followed by renewal. The rhythm is what matters, joy, pain, restoration.

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Cinderella: Vonnegut’s favorite. A staircase shape, up, down, up again. The fairy godmother lifts the heroine, midnight brings her low, the glass slipper saves her. He noted it mirrors creation myths, paradise, fall, redemption.

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Kafka: The opposite of Cinderella. A downward line that never rises. A man wakes as a cockroach, nothing improves. It’s life as absurdity, no hope, no escape.

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Hamlet: Vonnegut called it the masterpiece of uncertainty. The curve looks like Cinderella’s, but we can’t tell which parts are good or bad. Hamlet learns too much, acts too late, and dies. The truth, in life, we rarely know the difference between fortune and misfortune until the end.

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While Vonnegut admitted these diagrams were oversimplifications, he called them his “prettiest contribution” to literature. They helped readers see that storytelling isn’t an abstract art, it’s a mirror of life’s emotional movement.

He even joked, “People don’t like to hear about characters who are poor or sick,” so most stories begin somewhere above misery, in ordinary comfort. From there, the line either rises or falls, depending on how cruel the universe decides to be.

Shape of The Summer I Turned Pretty

If we handed him Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, Vonnegut would probably grin, chalk in hand, and say, “Let’s see how love complicates the data.”

Because Belly’s story follows a classic Boy Meets Girl curve, though the roles, emotions, and power shifts are hers to claim. She begins the summer slightly above the midpoint, safe, loved, but quietly restless. Then comes the rise, she’s noticed, admired, desired for the first time. Vonnegut would draw the line curving upward and say, “Here’s the first high, the dopamine spike of adolescence.”

But love, like any good story, never stays up forever. Jealousy, heartbreak, and loss drag the line down. Family illness darkens the season. Belly falls into her “hole,” the confusion that defines growing up.

And then comes the climb. Slowly, painfully, she rises again, not because she wins the perfect romance, but because she learns to understand herself. The new rise isn’t giddy like the first, it’s steadier, wiser. Vonnegut’s line would keep moving upward, stretching beyond the chart itself.

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What the Shapes Tell Us — Why We Take Sides

When fans argue over Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah, they’re not just picking favorite boys, they’re choosing story shapes. Kurt Vonnegut believed that the kinds of stories a culture loves say a lot about what that culture wants or fears. The way a story rises or falls, its emotional “shape,” reflects what people hope for in real life.

Most popular stories, like Cinderella or Man in Hole, end on a high note. That’s not an accident. It shows we like stories that give us hope, that say no matter how bad things get, everything can still turn out okay. Vonnegut also pointed out that real life doesn’t always look like that. A more honest story might be a straight line, no big highs or lows, just everyday survival. But that’s not what people crave. We want emotion, movement, and meaning.

That’s why fandoms get so passionate, because the stories we love aren’t just entertainment. They’re reflections of what we wish life could be.