In this paper we provide a critical historical review of emergent narrative (EN) as an academic technical research program from its origins in the late 90’s to the present. We characterize the assumptions that EN research has often relied on but has left largely unexamined, such as realism and social believability. We describe the mobile but central binary problematic that continues to spawn new research problems and approaches in EN: the simultaneous possibility of bottom-up narrative alongside the apparent necessity of some form of top-down story management. By using unnatural narratological theory to critique the dominant assumption of realism in EN, we distill alternative design principles for EN. By emphasizing the exploration of an alternative design space, we propose a form of EN research that goes beyond the binary problematic.