Upon further investigation, it looks like Woodford repeated it rather than originated it. Also, he was applying it to Hollywood movie plots, and later TV plots.
I think that entire category of quotes is handily won by Pat Conroy:
"My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, "All southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'"
The best canonical song (at least about country music). This is David Allan Coe.
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train
I'm guessing this is far as you're going to acknowledge 'Tolstoy never said a thing Tolstoy would have never said but I claimed he did and thought was a decisive forum killshot'. :)
I don't know what that means. You based some argument on a made-up quote. That argument can't be right, can it?
Edit: I'll summarize the arguments you've made so far and the obvious objections.
- The Odyssey is a trivial story of a dude returning to his wife [Not true, 20-odd centuries of scholarship saying otherwise]
- There is a tiny number of stories all stories reduce to (possibly two), a Major Writer of a World Literature Said So [not true, and, obviously, he did not say that]
- The above idea is somehow supported by tvtropes [tvtropes is wonderful but also full of thousands of tropes rather than two]
Every single one of these things is just deeply and demonstrably wrong. The totality of your evidence is... a made-up Tolstoy quote and a country song? It's hard to tell how to even argue with this.
There just isn't any evidence Tolstoy ever said or wrote that. Nor would it make sense for someone who wrote Anna Karenina. You should read the link in my last reply. And/or Anna Karenina.
- Jack Woodford might have actually said it
- It works (sort of) for Anna Karenina