remember that the purpose of storytelling is to emotionally manipulate your audience into feeling as much pain as possible

there are two schools of thought for how to do this, but they both rely on this core insight: your audience will feel the most pain if you trick them into caring about something before you take it away

for example, you could show a complete stranger being horrifically tortured. but they don’t care about that character, so the torture is only painful because of basic empathy - not because of any personal attachment. your audience might even be able to numb themselves to the pain by dissociating

but what if you tricked your audience into loving that character first? then they won’t be able to escape the pain no matter what they do. it will linger in their minds for months or even years

remember that any time you’re able to make the audience care about something or someone - this could be a person, a place, an ideal, a culture, or anything else - this is an opportunity to deeply hurt them later, proportionally to how much you tricked them into caring. remember that the only purpose for having an idyllic society, a cute and innocent character, or anything else that is positive or upbeat, is so that you can rip it away to inflict pain

as mentioned before, there are two schools of thought for how to manipulate people into caring about aspects of your story, but both involve making your audience feel hope

the first is the Harry Potter method: show a character who is a helpless victim of abuse (make sure to cover a broad spectrum of abuse in order to trigger as many people as possible), then give that character hope of a better life. the audience will want the abuse to stop, and the hope will make them think that they can safely care about this character

the second school of thought is the Lord of the Rings method. this is for audiences who have caught on to the Harry Potter method and try to avoid stories with horrific abuse. in the Lord of the Rings method, you start by setting the tone light and wholesome, and trying to endear the audience to as many people and things as possible. then ease them in to a slightly darker tone, but not so much that they can’t handle it. over time, make the tone worse and worse. gradually tarnish things that the audience loves, and make this process more overt and painful over time. as things continue to get worse, the audience will unconsciously hope that this is a temporary dip in tone and that things will become light and wholesome again soon

as mentioned earlier, an important aspect of both styles of storytelling is hope. if your audience doesn’t have hope that things will get better, they’ll stop reading. so make sure to stoke the embers of their hope for as long as possible to maximize the pain that you can inflict

hope is the reason for the happy ending technique: if your audience knows that there is going to be what people describe as a “happy ending” eventually (no matter how rushed or bittersweet it is) they’re more likely to keep reading. remember that a few short paragraphs or even a whole chapter of happy ending will never be enough to heal the pain that you’ve inflicted over the course of an entire novel, so a happy ending is a small price to pay for unrestricted access to your victim’s mind

@kasdeya and then, in comes slice of life and yiashikei content, completely ignoring all of this and just doing lighthearted fun stories for anybody to watch and feel nice