Emotion 1: Emotional cause and effect

Emotions make events meaningful

Here's the serpent from Grasscutter again:

Comic panel showing a fearsome multi-headed serpent
Scary. But does it mean anything?

Sure, we see the serpent, we see it is a cool, scary, multi-headed serpent.

But it doesn’t mean anything.

Only when we see someone else’s reaction does it mean something:

Panel from a comic strip. Susano-o stares with wide eyes, raised eyebrows, and has an exclamation mark coming out of his mouth.
What meaning does Susano-o's reaction give the serpent?

Now the serpent means Susano-o is in trouble.

Different emotions create different meanings

Have you ever seen Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out?

Even though it’s a family entertainment movie, it describes a pretty solid framework for thinking about emotions.

In the movie, there are five primary emotions:

  • Joy
  • Sadness
  • Anger
  • Fear
  • Disgust

In real life there are more than five emotions but these five are a good starting point.

Inside Out emotions
Different emotions have different jobs.

What’s important is that each emotion has a different job:

  • Disgust: Avoid sources of poison or infection (including social contagion).
  • Fear: Avoid threats.
  • Joy: Move towards things, pursue goals and values.
  • Sadness: Slow down, process loss, and learn from failure.
  • Anger: Stand up for what’s right when some kind of rule or expectation has been broken.

 This is why character emotions convey meaning:

  • Each emotion serves a purpose.
  • Each implies a different relationship between the character and the cause of the emotion.

Here's a sequence from Zita the Spacegirl.

In the last frame she is sad—but why is she sad, and what do you imagine would happen next?

A girl runs through a crowd towards a device on the ground while shouting "Wait!"
The girl can't get through the crowd and a giant alien treads on the device and smashes it
The girl sits and sadly scoops up the device
From 'Zita the Spacegirl' by Ben Hatke (Source)
Why is Zita sad, and what do you think she would do next?

Sadness is a response to loss.

Zita has lost "the gateway"—whatever that red button device is—and now she's sad.

When we're sad we lose energy, we slump, we slow down—you can see Zita doing that here.

In real life, that sadness slow-down isn't a bad thing: we need to slow down to understand the new reality we are in, without the person or thing we cared about.

So, all things being equal, we'd expect Zita to sit there glumly for a while thinking about the future she's lost—whatever that device represented to her—and then start to make alternative plans.

We understand from Zita's emotions that it is important to her, and the loss is significant.

That said, once you know "the gateway" is literally the portal back to her home planet, then her loss becomes even more meaningful.

Zita's loss of the gateway is a simple example: the gateway is smashed, Zita feels sad.

Let's look at a more complex example.

Below are some panels from March.

What does John feel at the end of this sequence? Can you describe it in terms of the five emotions from Inside Out?

What do you think his feelings mean? What do you think he might do after this?

(You'll probably need to click to expand the panels so you can read the text.)

John sits on a pew listening to Jim Lawson talk about various non-violent protests against racism, poverty, and war.
John gazes upwards, reflecting. His words liberated me. I thought, this is it... This is the way out.
From March: Book One, by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (Source)
What does John feel in this sequence? What is the 'job' of this (or these) emotions?

John’s emotions are more complex than the Zita example: 

  • We see what we might call courage, determination, hope…
  • But, in Inside Out terms, there is an element of anger and sadness (at racism, poverty, war, which appear as breaches of freedom or justice).
  • And maybe there is even a kind of joy (he feels liberated, he has something to move towards).

Anger and joy are both active, 'moving toward'-type emotions. The reasons for moving toward are very different! But both emotions energise you.

And what we're seeing here is a kind of mix of the two: anger at injustice, joy at having found a path to fight it. 

So we can see that different emotions make events take on different meanings.

But emotions aren't just about past events, they are about the future: because emotions also tell us what characters want.

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