You’ve created a world where loads of nameless extras and faceless NPCs get roasted to death each morning, where everything is terrible and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Surely that’ll be tense, right? Uh oh, your beta readers are still reporting boredom. That’s because while dark content can influence tension, the two are not synonyms. Listen as we discuss what the differences are, why authors often get them confused, and how you can actually use one to boost the other. 

Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So for this story, I’m gonna be talking about some really cool, dark, exciting things. Like there’s gonna be body parts and people burning to death… No one we care about, of course.

Chris: So does this story introduce new characters because it killed off all the old ones?

Oren: No, I just told you, it’s not gonna happen to anyone we care about.

Chris: Ohh, I see.

Oren: I’ve just gotta introduce a bunch of randos, and they’re all gonna die horribly. And that’ll be really exciting, right? That’s the same thing as tension.

Chris: Yeah, sure. Are we also gonna have our protagonists participate in a big tournament where they’re in a lake? And it’s full of slaves that are, like, drowning around them, but they’re just trying to win, and they don’t care about the slaves?

Oren: They wanna win. You know, winning the slave murder cup is important to them. [laughter] Don’t worry, we’ll say that there’s a thing they need that is in the cup, and there’s nothing else they could do to try to find another way to get it. It’s just not possible.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, there’s just slaves dying everywhere, but they can’t do anything about it anyway, so…

Oren: Yeah. So enough giving crap to Children of Blood and Bone, because I now wanna give crap to a different book that I’ve been reading. It’s Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, which is basically Suicide Squad, but in fantasy, is the premise. I did see some Redditors complaining that this book has Joss Whedon dialogue, which is just the perfect example of brain rot in literary discussion. Because now any book where the characters are irreverent and sarcastic is labeled as Joss Whedon dialogue.

Chris: That is giving Joss Whedon way too much credit, okay. He did not invent being witty and irreverent and self-aware.

Oren: Yeah, no. If characters make fun of the thing they’re doing, you have to pay Joss Whedon money. [Chris laughs] He invented that idea. No one else has ever done it. It’s just Joss Whedon. I just find that very funny.

But, an actual problem that this story has, with some minor spoilers, is it has a serious tension issue, which you wouldn’t expect from Abercrombie, because his stories are really dark and full of death and murder. So how could there be a tension problem? And it’s because of the thing I just mentioned, or that’s one reason. There are others. But for this podcast, the reason is that when we have these big fight scenes where there’s lots of blood and guts and death, it’s just happening to somebody else. It’s like we give them a bunch of disposable guards so the guards can all die badly. And I’m just sitting here being like, okay, when are we gonna get through the nameless guards to someone who actually matters? And it takes a while.

Chris: And again, there is also the inverse ninja effect.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Right? It’s just, when you escalate everything so soon, and again, it does feel like the guards were added just so that they can all get killed, but that also just makes people more meaningless, and pretty soon you have to add more and more fighters in all of your scenes. Because we know that having fifty people around doesn’t mean anything.

Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s another problem with this story is that after the first fight, the actual suicide squad, not just their nameless guards, is basically invincible, we’ve established, because they’re so powerful. So later on, there’s problems where it’s like, “Oh no, some bandits attacking us!” It’s like, yeah, I think your invincible squad of fantasy superheroes can probably handle it. So that’s its own issue, but it is weird. It felt like they were given these guards and then we had to contrive a way for them to be ambushed, to get rid of the guards.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: But I think you’re probably right. I think it’s the other way around. The guards were put there so we could have a bunch of nameless mooks who could die horribly.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, knowing Abercrombie. [laughs]

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I mean, I’m not familiar with this work, but I still remember in The Blade Itself, he has a whole POV from a torturer guy.

Oren: Yeah. Although, I’ll give him credit for this, at least in that POV, he was willing to have bad things happen to his POV characters.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: He wasn’t just inflicting it on nameless mooks. That torturer character has been himself horribly tortured, and is like all kinds of messed up from it in ways that you don’t normally see fantasy heroes get messed up.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: He doesn’t have, like, cool badass scars. He has ugly, seriously debilitating scars. You almost never see that. And I didn’t enjoy that book, but I did respect Abercrombie for being willing to do that.

Chris: I mean, if you go dark, then be dark.

Oren: Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel. If you want this level of darkness, you should be willing to inflict it on your main characters. Am I going to enjoy that? No. But I’d rather have that happen than just cooking a bunch of extras in the background. [laughing]

Chris: Yeah. You know, as opposed to Children of Blood and Bone, which is what I was talking about earlier with the tournament where the slaves are dying all around them.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: That was one of the books that inspired me to write by post on grimdark sauce,as I call it, where it’s weird because the scenery is extremely grimdark, but the story itself is not really dark, because nothing bad happens to the characters that you are actually following and actually care about.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That’s the one where when they need to escape, it feels like all of the soldiers attacking them just, like, pause so they can climb on the back of some giant cats and get away.

Oren: Yeah. And that one is weird too because it does things like assure both the characters and the reader that, like, her grandpa will be okay, don’t worry about it. Which is kind of at odds with how dark everything else is. And, spoilers for later, but it turns out that’s wrong. It turns out their grandpa is not okay. And also then the protagonist eventually does get captured and tortured, but – by this point we’re so late in the story that now this feels like a jarring change. Like the story is breaking its promise to me, but also she is remarkably unscathed from her bout of horrible torture. Like she has the standard cool fantasy hero scars from horrible torture. Not the, like, this person’s body will never be the same scars that the guy from The Blade Itself had.

Chris: Yeah, so in any case, let’s talk about the difference between darkness and tension.

Oren: Yeah. There is something of a connection. The connection’s not entirely made up. Because if your story is super light, it is harder to create tension because for something to be tense, you generally need to have something serious at stake. And that requires a certain level of dark content, right? Not necessarily a lot, but some.

Chris: I mean, I do think tension, particularly high tension, does make the story darker to some degree. And we can even call it one dark emotion or one dark aspect. But when we call stories dark, it can mean so many different things.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Tension by itself only goes so far in making a story dark. And also tension is just very specific. It’s a very specific emotion that’s that sense of uncertainty over whether or not something bad will happen, and so you gotta do something to keep it from happening. That’s what tension is for. It’s a very motivating emotion, and because of that it only goes so far in being dark. Whereas a lot of times when you get the really dark stuff, it can even kill tension because it tends to get really hopeless and gloomy.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Like no matter what we do, the whole world is gonna end. It’s like, okay, that’s very dark. It’s not actually tense though, because we know the world is gonna end, and so we kind of have to come to terms with that.

Oren: Yeah. It’s like, you’ve a hundred percent established the world’s gonna end, so, all right. Uh, that sucks, but I’m not on the edge of my seat about it anymore, right?

Chris: Yeah. Also, that’s the thing about having tragedy, and again, we’ve talked before about writers – what they actually want as their story continues is to make it escalate and have it more exciting and tense, but instead they just make it darker by having bad stuff happen. 

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: But having bad stuff happen does not necessarily raise tension, especially if – well, I mean, it’s already happened, so we’re not worried about it happening, right? So if you randomly kill off a character and then make readers really upset about it, that might not actually raise tension. That might just be sad.

Oren: Right? And there are different ways this can go. If you kill off a character who is in certain respects, at least, similar to the surviving characters, that can raise tension, because you have actually shown that you are willing to follow through on the threats to characters. Is that a good thing to do? Eh, depends. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not. It depends on how load-bearing that character was.

Chris: And also like what type of experience you really wanna create. Let’s say you kill a character in a way that specifically shows that you are willing to violate plot shields.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Nobody has a plot shield.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And I think that’s what is most likely to raise tension. As opposed to if you kill the character that’s three weeks away from retirement? [laughs] That’s not gonna raise tension, because you’re just showing that you are actually following plot conventions in who dies. And so that’s not gonna make any of the characters who seem to have plot shields feel at risk. But generally, unless you are doing a really dark story, and that’s the kind of experience that you’re creating for people – it’s, like, horror, it’s really dark fantasy, that kind of thing – I generally find that it’s not good tension, right?

Oren: Hmm.

Chris: The average person who’s reading a nice old adventure story and wants some excitement doesn’t often want to genuinely worry about their favorite character dying. I think when I’ve seen that, that can actually be sometimes a little too intense for people. And so usually even with plot shields, people can buy into the story scenario and the idea that, “Oh no, people could get hurt” without that extra meta-knowledge of like, no, this author might really do it. And adding in, let’s say you want them to believe that this character can really die, I do think that it gets very intense if you add that second meta element on top of it where you think it actually could happen.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And is a little bit more stressful. So, again, if you have a dark-loving audience, then anything goes at that point. But for kind of the average exciting story, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that.

Oren: Yeah, and of course there’s also, you have to consider the cost of losing that character to begin with. Because if it’s going to accomplish this goal of making it seem like other characters could die, then that character needs to be effectively a main character on their own. Like,  it doesn’t work to bring in an extra and tell us about their backstory really quickly. Or introduce a small child, and be like, “Aren’t they cute? Look at their big child eeeyes…” [Chris laughs] Look, that doesn’t work. So if you are actually going to accomplish this, you need a character that was doing something similar to the other characters, which means it is going to cost you for them to die, right?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: Because theoretically, people enjoyed reading about them. If not, you have a different problem.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people will get upset. And some people, that will be their favorite character, and they’ll rage quit. And I mean, again, that’s why we recommend killing off characters like protagonists so rarely.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Basically only in very special circumstances, or again, if you’re just going with grimdark, if that’s what your story is sold based on, and you want your stories to be really unpredictable, and anybody could die, and that is the experience that you are selling to your audience, and they know what they’re signing up for, then sure, there’s a niche taste. Everybody likes something different. But in general, that’s why we do it so rarely. And again, so I kind of hinted at the beginning, there are some TV shows that end up reducing tension because they kill off so many characters that nobody wants to get attached to characters anymore.

Oren: Yeah. If you’re like, “It’s not safe, you can’t grow attached to anybody, you know, you’ll have to cry.” It’s like, all right, well, I guess I won’t then. [both laugh] Especially once you’ve killed so many characters, there’s nobody left. It’s like, all right, well, all the characters we started with are gone. I’m not starting over from day one here. I don’t got that kind of time. [laughing]

Chris: But yeah, when it comes to bad things happening – again, we talked about showing readers that you’re not gonna follow plot shields, which again, would be a niche thing to do, not a thing that everybody should be doing.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: The other situation is if you have something bad happen that then creates a new problem. It’s basically starting a new child arc of some kind that can raise tension. So rocks fall, destroy the town, and now we have to find someplace for everybody to take shelter. Okay, we’ve created a new task, avoiding further disaster. But the disaster that just happened that made everybody sad, that does not create tension.

Oren: Yeah. Because what it is, tension is largely the fear that something is going to get worse. And once you establish a baseline of badness, it’s like, all right, well, that’s the baseline.

Chris: It’s very forward looking. It’s always about what happens in the future, not what happened in the past.

Oren: Right.

Chris: What happened in the past can be useful for establishing what could happen in the future. If we see a pattern of killings, then we would be worried that it would happen again. So that can be useful, but it’s always forward looking.

Oren: And this is why long extended descriptions of your fantasy city are likely to be boring, regardless of whether it’s a shining beacon of light or super grim and gritty with murdered people around every corner, because that’s just the status quo. That’s just how things are right now. You’ve set that baseline. Now it’s up to you to show me the possibility that things might get worse.

Chris: Yeah. I think another thing that you can do – again, if your story is real dark and intense – then another place where they can be complementary is if you do show a horrible thing happening to somebody, and you’ve got, like, body horror, or what have you. And then you threaten the same thing for another character. Seeing how bad that is viscerally, I do think, again, does make those stakes feel more impactful. So that could potentially raise tension.

So if you show a serial killer in gruesome detail doing their thing, and then the serial killer starts stalking another character, those gruesome details could make a difference. Because when it comes to stakes, it’s not just objectively how bad it is. There’s also an emotional element, and if you illustrate it in more detail and make it feel more real, the stakes do become more impactful. And you can also have characters imagine what could happen as another way of getting more details.

Oren: Yeah. And that brings to mind the presentation of whatever it is. Because that matters a lot. If you have things that could potentially be really bad, but you summarize them or you don’t give them the gravitas they deserve, well, even though objectively that would be really bad, it doesn’t feel like it’s a real thing.

Fourth Wing has this problem. In Fourth Wing, the protagonist’s life is technically in constant danger because of the murder school that she’s in, and all the murder that happens there. But it’s also summarized, right? Like almost all of it happens in summary, and all the solutions are kind of off-screen. There are only one or two instances where she really feels like she’s in danger. Even though technically she’s in danger the whole time.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think I found that book a little more tense than you did. Partly probably because I liked Violet, the main character, better.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: I know that you just didn’t feel any attachment to her. So yeah, there were things that were summarized a little too much, but I generally found that book to be still pretty tense. 

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Because it did have a number of deadly challenges and high-stakes moments. But yeah, there were definitely some things that I would’ve liked to have seen more on-screen with her proactively troubleshooting instead of having it skim by.

Oren: And that of course does bring another instance, because we’re talking about how much we do or don’t like the main character. That makes a big difference too. You need to have some attachment to a main character for there to be tension over what happens to them. And in dark stories, this can sometimes backfire because a lot of authors are like, “I’m gonna be dark and edgy. I’m gonna have my main character be a dick.” Like, all right. Well, now I don’t care what happens to them. [both laugh]

You know, like, I might even want something bad to happen to them. Because they’re such a jerk, I wanna see them get some karmic justice. And if that’s your intention, that maybe – I’m not gonna say that couldn’t work. I’m just saying I have seen a lot of authors who have arrived at that situation accidentally. They clearly did not mean for this to happen. They want me to be worried that their jerk-ass puppy kicking protagonist is gonna get eaten. And it’s like, no, eat ’em. Definitely eat ’em. I’m mad at him from two chapters ago. Please eat him. You know? [laughing]

Chris: Yeah. I mean, readers and audience in general are probably more sensitive than you think to character misbehavior. Anytime one character is hard on another character, readers can react pretty strongly to that, even if it’s something that is meant to be relatively harmless, like ignoring somebody, or running away when they ask for help.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: As opposed to like these grimdark heroes who might just be, like, killing people. Alright, so in Fallout there’s this Ghoul character who has too much candy.

Oren: Yeah yeah.

Chris: But he also has a very charismatic white guy actor. And so people like him anyway. And the breaking point for me with his character was when he just shoots and kills a young man, maybe like a teenager or something.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And the kid was attacking him first, but only after being severely provoked. So our like cowboy Ghoul character comes in and was like, “Hey, by the way, I just murdered your brother, ha ha.” [laughs] And this is just a teenager who – again, the Ghoul is super capable. So he is more than able to just defend himself without killing somebody who’s upset that, you know, his brother got murdered. But that’s the kind of behavior that I would expect to see all the time for a lot of protagonists in really dark works. And yeah, after that point it would be hard to feel tension. I certainly was hoping something bad would happen to the Ghoul.

Oren: Yeah, I wanted the Ghoul to die. And that’s the thing, is that I’m sure when some people hear that, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, well why would you want the Ghoul to be nice? He’s not a nice guy.” It’s like, yeah, I mean, sure, if he’s that big of an asshole, that’s fine. He can be a villain. I’m just not gonna be happy if the story ends by making him seem like the new main character, which is what happens in the first season of Fallout. Now Lucy is kind of tagging along with him.

Chris: Mm-hmm. If a character gets bad karma, but they also get their comeuppance, that helps to balance the karma, and it also does take off the edge when it comes to reader resentment, right? So if we say, see the Ghoul do something bad like that, then something bad happens to him as a result of his decision, that mollifies the audience, and actually can make him more likable. But the Ghoul just keeps getting candy. And there is some – he did have a tangle with Lucy where she got the better of him because he sold her to, like, a meat shop or something. [laughing] There was one instance in which he got some level of comeuppance, but most of the time he just doesn’t. And that’s part of the issue.

Oren: The thing about the Ghoul that I found most funny is that he’s basically invincible. Like, except for that one time when Lucy is able to get the drop on him somehow, but in pretty much every other scene, he’s invincible. But the idea of just robbing these people who have all the medicine he needs, apparently that never occurred to him. Like, he was willing to almost die from this lack of medicine, because I guess we’re just supposed to assume that robbing these guys would’ve been impossible. But we see him take out like a whole squad of Brotherhood soldiers in power armor, so I know he could do it. Don’t pretend he couldn’t do it, show!

Chris: Yeah. I did not like seeing him take out that squad at the climax. That was, I was so mad about that.

Oren: It’s too much. He’s too good. That’s just some bullshit is what that is.

Chris: Yeah. But anyway, if you wanna have an edgy character that maybe readers are not gonna like, that can negatively impact the tension. So that’s something else to think about is that that emotional investment in the characters is kind of required so that we want them to succeed, and we don’t want bad things to happen to them. [laughing]

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Another thing to think about is, again, we’ve occasionally talked about the difference between conflict and calamity. So basically, when you have a conflict, you’re showing a character struggling to kind of solve a problem against something that opposes them. And we call that something the antagonist, and sometimes the villain. And again, there could be more than one antagonist. The point is that at least one character is struggling. But the key about the struggle is that if that character is, like, standing there passively, or is tied up, or otherwise it doesn’t feel like they can do anything, it’s not really a struggle anymore. They are not struggling. 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And we have seen some stories where it seems like the writer is trying to write a conflict, but just doesn’t get the kind of character agency part of that. And so what happens is often, in this case, lots of bad or supposedly tense things happen really fast, and it doesn’t feel like the character has the ability to respond. And they might not be tied up. It might just be, again, there’s a little bit of over-summary, but like things happen fast. We don’t get the feeling that this is an interaction the character is having where they can intervene, and they can change the outcome.

Oren: Yeah, it feels like a cut scene is playing in the video game. [Chris laughs] And like you can have tension in scenes where the character is not doing anything. It just tends to be kind of specific and specialized, and it’s usually based on the possibility that they could. I think Chris has mentioned the possibility of a scene where the main character is, like, sitting on the couch playing video games, and a serial killer is sneaking up behind them. They aren’t technically doing anything, but there’s a sense of tension because we’re like, “Oh no, they could get stabbed! Or maybe they’ll notice the serial killer.” But if they’re sitting on the couch, and then just like a bunch of aliens rampage through the town, and they’re just sitting there and being like, “Well, I guess I’ll either die or I won’t, because maybe the aliens will kill me.” I don’t think that’s very tense. I just – not for very long, all right. Maybe for a short amount of time.

Chris: Right. So what happens when it keeps going, and the character doesn’t intervene for whatever reason, is that the antagonist actually starts to look like a wimp. Because at that point, all should be lost if the protagonist is not intervening. So let’s say we have this serial killer sneaking up behind the character on the couch while they’re playing a video game.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And they’re not doing anything. But we know they can. But let’s say the serial killer just keeps hanging out, and for some reason still has not killed our protagonist, has not done anything. They’ve been playing their video game for this entire scene, but for some reason the serial killer still hasn’t killed them yet. After a while, it’s just like, “You’re not actually gonna kill them, are you, serial killer?”

Oren:  Yeah. No, you’re just hanging out. You’re just watching ’em play.

Chris: They’re still fine. So you must not have it in you to kill them. [laughing] That’s a weird example. But like this happens in – I think the book Fire Upon the Deep is where I saw tons of these. Of stuff just happening, and there’s one scene when they’re on some sort of space station with some, I don’t know, hills or outdoor landscapes, and it’s all collapsing, and they’re trying to get to their ship while the landscape crumbles around them. But this keeps going, and we keep describing landscape crumbling, but the protagonists aren’t really doing anything special. I mean, I guess they’re running, and they’re not dead yet. So I guess it’s meaningless that the landscape is collapsing, right?

Oren: Yeah, NBD. [laughing]

Chris: Because if they’re not doing anything effective to ensure their survival, and whatever’s threatening them still hasn’t killed them yet, then the threat must not be a big deal. That’s basically how it works. But if you see these scenes, again, where lots of bad things happen in quick succession, and there are no protagonist actions, that’s just gonna kill the tension. It’s just gonna feel like none of it matters and get boring, even if it’s supposed to be exciting, even if it’s specifically written to feel threatening and exciting. That’s why you need that conflict where the character comes in and intervenes. What you want is like the serial killer is chasing after the character, and the character crawls away, barely…

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And they managed to make it in the closet just in time and shut the door. But now the serial killer’s got an axe, and they’re breaking down the door. And then the protagonist just finds something else to just barely scrape by. That’s what’s tense, right? Because we can see that the protagonist is just barely managing to take actions that avoid them being killed, and therefore, the antagonist also, what they’re doing matters. Because the protagonist has to respond in order to stay alive.

Oren: And this is why I always have to laugh at this weird agency discourse that rears its head every once in a while. Because almost guaranteed, someone will point to a horror story and be like, “Well, surely you can’t say that agency is required, because these characters were disempowered. And that was still fun.” It’s like, yes. Or yeah, maybe not fun is the right word, but you know, still a good story. But being disempowered doesn’t mean there’s no agency, it just means things suck. [laughing]

Chris: Yeah. Generally, when the character is very reactive, that feels disempowering, even if they have agency. So in this case, they’re attacked by the serial killer, and now they’re reacting to try to keep this serial killer from killing them, as opposed to that turn that usually happens towards the end of a horror movie where they’re like, “Now I gotta bring the fight to the serial killer.” And the final girl grabs a weapon and decides she’s gonna be badass now. That’s the change from reactive to proactive, and it does feel very empowering.

By the way, I do get this question a lot when I talk about agency, they’re like, “Well, what if I want my character to be disempowered?” It’s like, “Well, then you make them reactive.” 

Oren: All right. Well, now that we’ve firmly established what those terms mean, I’m sure everyone will always use them the same way we do forever, and we won’t have any problems.

Chris: [laughing] I’m sure we’ve put an end to agency discourse forever.

Oren: Yeah, it’s done now.

Chris: It’s done.

Oren: And, so, appropriately, we will now call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.