A lot of authors will underestimate the intelligence of their audience and will drive home important points through dialogue instead of actions... but wow, it turns out that humans are really great at making connections and recognizing the unsaid! In fact, it seems that overtly stating things can even diminish their effect!
What exactly entails "showing" as opposed to "telling"? In reality, it's more than just actions versus words. Central to this adage is respect for the autonomy of your audience. Readers tend to become more engaged when allowed to arrive at conclusions on their own. That's one of the things I found charming about shows like Serial Experiments Lain and Revolutionary Girl Utena: both of these shows feature naturally complex social and societal relationships in esoteric and symbolic ways, and the process of decoding such dense imagery increases our satisfaction when we uncover what is actually being said. Topics like patriarchy, technological dependency, and emergent social consciousness are difficult to grasp, and allowing us to draw our own conclusions based on interpreting the information we see from these shows is more effective than lecturing about the authors' own worldviews. That said, Lain and Utena both fall near the "extreme" pole of the spectrum: many works of fiction are able to tell easily-understandable stories and still leave a lot unspoken for the readers to absorb organically.
A simple example:
Sentence 1: "Sally threw the unused movie tickets in the dumpster."
Sentence 2: "Sally was stood up by her date."
Both of these sentences tell the same story, but Sentence 1 forces the reader's mind to arrive at the conclusion in Sentence 2 by way of context clues and inference.
A term I think is more accurate when describing these situations is "subtle storytelling." Subtle authors will give us exactly what we need in order to understand what's happening between the lines in a scene and nothing more. To be clear, things that are not "between the lines", such as descriptions of events and necessary communication between actors, should mostly be made explicit. We don't want the audience to constantly be guessing about what's happening in the plot (unless that's one of the draws of the story, like in Lain). In the end, it's up to the author's discretion as to what should be made clear and what should be hidden. In general, I think that thematic content, emotional states, and characterization are things that benefit greatly from subtle presentation.
The examples from Utena and Lain focus on the conveyance of intellectual perspectives, but there are definitely other uses for subtle storytelling. Stories in the horror genre often will employ subtle techniques to increase suspense and fear. The scariest things are those we can't understand or visualize. That is why great horror writers never lay all of their cards on the table. Instead, they leave hints and let our minds go wild: the most talented horror author in the world can never produce a scarier creature than what I am imagining in my mind when I am given weak descriptions of Yog-Sothoth in Lovecraftian horror tales.
The use of subtlety in horror is something I want to return to later, but the practice I wanted to focus on today is the use of subtle hints when trying to elicit emotional responses from readers. Many Japanese visual novels will use explicit emotional scenes or heavyhanded dialgoue in order to draw reactions from the audience. To be fair, many of my favorite scenes in all of gaming employ these techniques well when used in climax (CLANNAD and Little Busters! come to mind and I love them both to death) but I'm interested in the examples that use other practices. All it takes is one special shot or line of dialogue to cue us on how a character is feeling. Letting us fill in the blanks can be extremely effective in allowing us to empathize with narrators or characters.
Here's a famous six-word sad story by Ernest Hemingway:
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
And here's an alternate retelling:
"The baby died in infancy and the shoes didn't have a use anymore."
I don't need to tell you which is more effective.
-------
For fun, here are some examples off the top of my head that use subtle storytelling to evoke emotional responses from the audience. These are pretty meaningless if you haven't seen them already because I'm pretty terrible at description but here goes anyway:
(Spoiler warnings for everything listed, read on if you don't care about any of these even though you should because they're great)
Muv-Luv Alternative: What's kinda interesting about this example is that there are really heavy-handed emotional scenes in the latter half of the game (and they actually are effective) but there are also a good number of more subtle parts as well. In particular:
- Chapter 7 of Muv-Luv Alternative might be my favorite section in all of gaming because of how rapidly and realistically Takeru develops throughout its course (I might write an essay about this chapter someday). No summary can do it justice, but to enumerate the key points: the premise of the game is that the main character, Takeru, a normal teenager in a romantic comedy harem scenario, wakes up one day to find himself in a post-apocalyptic version of his home world (characters included) where aliens have killed off most of the human population. His goal is to find a way back to his home universe, but it proves to be a difficult task: he's stuck in this foreign universe for years and is forced to adapt to the harsh military environment in order to survive. Eventually Takeru is given a ticket home but decides to stick around to help humanity in the war against the aliens. It's not until Takeru experiences a sequence of PTSD-inducing horrors before he calls it quits and runs away to his home universe. Once there, he tries to re-integrate into his past life but struggles because of the mental scarring he's received. On top of that, because of the way dimension-hopping works in the Muv-Luv canon, Takeru unwittingly carries information about his PTSD triggers back home with him, where they are allowed to manifest again before his very eyes. Because of his lingering doubts about his new-found "happiness", Takeru's existence serves as a "causality conductor" for all of the terrible things that happened in the Alternative universe (there's a good reason for this, I promise). As a consequence, Takeru's indecisiveness leads to the deaths of many of his loved ones in his home universe. Driven nearly mad by this turn of events, he begins to reject them altogether. This prompts one of the other main characters, Meiya, to beat some sense into our poor protagonist. "She's dead, Takeru! You must accept reality!" In this moment, Takeru's mind subconsciously flashes back to one of the horrors in the Alternative universe. This is a powerful realization for the audience: Takeru has accepted the war-stricken nightmare as "reality." Takeru fought so hard to come "back home", but in the process, is no longer able to recognize his cozy previous life as "home." All the happiness in his original universe is hollow and purely escapist from his point of view.
This is just a two-second flashback shot but it reveals so much about our main character without having to tell us with words (excepting "accept reality!").
- Yuuko's appearance in the "Carry on" speech makes me tear up every time I watch it. In the protagonist's easygoing home universe at the beginning of the game, we learn that the teachers Yuuko Kouzuki and Marimo Jinguuji are best friends in every sense of the expression. Naturally, given the nature of parallel universes in the Muv-Luv canon, we expect that relationship to occur in the Alternative universe as well. Marimo is still a teacher to our main characters, but our other expectations are betrayed when we learn about Yuuko's general demeanor as XO at the Yokohama UN Base. She explicitly denies giving a shit about individual human lives and instead prioritizes the success of her plans to defeat the alien invaders. Even when Marimo is eaten alive midway through the story, Yuuko tells Takeru something along the lines of "man the fuck up, she wasn't my friend, only a tool to be used to further my plans." It's not until one scene in the final act of the game that we see her true colors in this universe. During the CO's final speech, right as the main characters, humanity's last hope, launch into the atmosphere by shuttle, we see Yuuko in the background holding a portrait of the deceased Marimo, as she mutters, "look, Marimo, your children are going." This one shot reveals that Yuuko was deeply affected by the death of her friend, but had to put on a facade in order to ensure the future of the human race. She is allowed one moment of weakness in the entire story, but that is enough for us to piece together her true character.
- One of the things I was consistently impressed with in this game was how well it was able to balance focus between both the global and local struggles caused by the alien invasion. A very, very subtle thing that characterizes the human race in this alternate universe is their reaction to the destruction of the Sadogashima Hive in Chapter 9. The alien invasion began almost 40 years before the game starts and humans have not once been able to fight back against the menace. Once the Su'sano mega-weapon fires and completely wipes out one of the primary hives, the entirety of the naval and ground troops burst out into tears of screams and joy. This scene alone isn't too significant until you realize that these are the cheers of people who literally have never known success against their oppressors in their entire lives. It's a small detail, but one that resonates with you when you think about it.
Undertale: This game is absolutely masterful at breadcrumbing small bits of characterization for its characters. The attention to detail in this game is remarkable and is something I don't think gets enough credit.
- Asgore, in the final-ish battle, is always looking down because he doesn't want to see himself murder a small child. This one detail characterizes Asgore really well and captures the true nature of the monsters of the underworld: none of them really want to kill the player, but it is a task of necessity, since that is really their only path to freedom. This knowledge makes the final battle even harder on the heart and makes you feel like a piece of shit for wanting to escape in the first place.
- If you decide to kill Muffet, she drops 0 gold ---- we are conditioned early on to think that she's greedy as fuck for charging so much gold for her baked goods, but in reality she's broke and this is the only way she can afford to feed her babies. You were wrong about Muffet and you murdered her.
- I forget exactly what the monsters are called, but there are two lovers that fight you at some point in the middle of the game. When they are both alive, they will fight in unison, but killing one of them stops the other from attacking altogether, symbolizing his loss of desire to live with his partner dead.
Mind you, none of these details are outright-stated. They are all inferences to be made by simple embeddings in the game mechanics themselves. The emotional impact of these revelations would be dampened by a textual description.
CLANNAD ~After Story~ (the anime):
- This is probably the only anime adaptation of a visual novel I would recommend over the source material, even with (actually, because of) the liberties they took. My favorite scene in the game, where the protagonist, Tomoya, is finally is able to cope with the loss of his wife Nagisa after five years, is a 15 minute-long climax. It's an extended flashback sequence where he remembers how much Nagisa positively affected his life and how, ultimately, he shifts his perspective on their marriage and childbirth away from regret and towards fond remembrance. The scene, despite being very thorough with Tomoya's inner monologue, is emotional and cathartic, but the anime adaptation does it even better in only 15 seconds. When asked by his daughter what Nagisa was like, Tomoya simply opens his mouth to speak, pauses in recollection, and begins sobbing in happiness as he finally allows himself to remember the good times he had with his beloved wife (accompanied by a few still images of Nagisa over the years). That's it. We didn't need to hear Tomoya's thoughts or hear him give a monologue about how much he loved Nagisa in order to be punched in the gut by strong feelings --- all we needed was to see his face as he tried to remember her. (Well, not that his sobbing of "Nagisa" didn't help!)
(Spoilers end here)
TL;DR: Humans are generally really good at reading between the lines when it comes to thematic and emotional material in stories. Using explicit description often robs the reader of engagement when it is not needed. When it comes to emotional material I can reasonably infer, let me fill in the blanks myself!
