Category II

“Semi-Flexible Rules”

These laws are structurally elastic but emotionally strict. 

In Auntrolye, semi-flexibility does not mean looseness, it means the visual or logical presentation can shift as long as the emotional law beneath it remains unbroken. These are not stylistic freedoms; they are bounded allowances, designed to retain immersion without sacrificing the genre’s psychological integrity.

1. Hallucinated People Must Feel Real But Be Surreal

Imagined or hallucinated characters must be rendered with full cinematic realism, sharp audio capture, consistent environmental interaction, and diegetic camera grounding, so that they feel indistinguishable from actual people. But beneath this realism, their behavior must subtly betray their unreality. This is where the rule's subtlety lies: these characters should behave in ways that only slightly disobey the natural world, such as ignoring social cues, asking circular questions, or reappearing in inconsistent locations.

They should not be floating specters or visual glitches. They are perceptual constructs, and as such, must honor the realism of the protagonist's experience, while also hinting at a breach. If they behave overtly unreal, the audience exits immersion. But if their unreality is only sensed (not declared), the Auntrolye immersion deepens.

2. Symbols Must Be Emotional, Not Logical

Symbolism in Auntrolye cannot be constructed like a riddle to be solved. A recurring object, image, or motif must emerge organically from emotional recurrence, not narrative foreshadowing. A moth might symbolize anxiety, not because it leads to a moth-related event, but because it appears during anxious states, flickers in scenes of internal rupture, and thus becomes felt rather than decoded.

Logical symbolism belongs to allegory. Auntrolye denies that kind of clarity. Instead, symbols arise the way memory associations do: irrational but deeply real. They are to be absorbed, not solved. The viewer might never understand what the object “means,” but they’ll know when it matters.

3. Emotional Consistency Overrides Continuity

Traditional continuity (matching shots, props, angles, locations) is permitted to break if emotional progression is preserved. For example, two characters may begin a conversation in a kitchen and finish it in a hallway, with no transition, if the spatial change represents an internal shift, such as one character withdrawing emotionally.

This law allows Auntrolye to resist cinematic literalism. Emotional truth reorders physical reality. The scene is not about time or geography, it’s about affect. The visual discontinuity must, however, feel smooth within the emotional current. If the audience senses discontinuity without justification, the rule is broken. If they ride the flow of emotion and only later realize the visuals didn’t match, that’s successful execution.