For those of us who enjoy the drama genre, having our emotional states manipulated by authors is something we are very much accustomed to. They build up character relationships, circumstances, and situations that can cause hardship on those that we’ve become so attached to, and thus we empathize with them. That is the essential draw of drama, and a cast of well-written, diverse characters makes for the best kinds of dramatic shows whether they be teens going through the up and downs of love and friendship or watch a politician manipulate his way through the congressional ladder. It’s also the main (if not the only) appeal of soap operas. However, some writers who are not quite up to the task of creating a truly emotional and inspiring work will resort to out right manipulation, or writing certain scenes in a way that will cause the audience to be affected, but only on the surface. This tactic can result in a few different reactions from the audience, typically leaving them with a hollow feeling later on when they reflect on the work in question. This can come in many forms, such as forcing an unnecessary romantic subplot for a male and female lead or adding cheap jump-scares into weak horror films simply to get a short momentary rise out of its audience. While the tolerance for this kind of writing varies across people, those with a lower tolerance have begun to throw around the term melodrama without a good understanding of what it really looks like.

To be manipulative in your writing is not always a bad thing. Genre deconstructions use this tactic by baiting the audience into believing that they are something they are not in order to destroy their expectations later on. This is done to make a point about tropes or the media, typically as a meta criticism about anime or the audience. Technically, any show or movie leading up to a twist is being scrupulous about the details they give to the audience in order to wow them later on when the plot requires it, including Perfect Blue and Shinsekai Yori. There are a multitude of stories that rely on the audience’s desire to believe what they are being told, especially through a character that is telling it to them but is not necessarily trustworthy, including the likes of Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita novel, Robinette Broadhead from Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, and Maebara Keiichi from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. One can even argue that all fictional writing is manipulative on some level, since a story would be boring if certain details weren’t being kept from the audience to be revealed at a later time. When a writer or director goes so far into manipulation that the illusion is broken and the audience can feel the man behind the curtain, the dramatic structure begins to fall apart.

But let’s back up a minute. Manipulative writing is normal, common place even, but measured on scales of subtlety and cleaverness in terms of how it’s implemented. Surprise, horror, and shock are what an audience desires in a dramatic piece, but when the author is so blatant and clumsy with how they create those situations, the audience instead feels cheated and lied to rather than moved or sympathetic. When anime fans tend to feel this in shows that chiefly rely on dramatic tension and situations between characters they have a tendency to scream, “Melodrama!” whether or not the writer is actually doing well by the audience and, by extension, their show. Let’s first concretely define melodrama:

mel·o·dra·ma[1] ˈmeləˌdrämə/ noun 1. a dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization. 2. (in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries) a romantic dramatic composition with music interspersed

So, according to its definition, melodrama is a manipulative tactic that not only has the narrow-minded desire to invoke emotion in the audience, but goes so far as to hurt its own narrative or lore in order to create that feeling and situation. This tells the audience a few things; It tells them that the writer doesn’t respect what they’ve created and would go far enough to fracture their story and characters just to get an emotional rise, and that they are not skilled enough to deliver a truly moving scene to their audience without needing to resort to these kinds of tactics. Not only does this betray the audience that became immersed in what the writer has brought to life, but it thrusts the writer into the spotlight which is typically the last place a creator wants to be in regards to their art.

This article will contain spoilers from here on out. I will post pictures of the shows before discussing how they are or aren’t melodramatic or manipulative. You’ve been warned.

Even still, since a lot of these knee-jerk name-callings are based on personal tastes and each viewer’s ability to deal with and enjoy drama in all forms, there has been a large discrimination primarily towards the SoL (e.g. Slice of Life) and romantic genres of anime in terms of their dramatic writing and contents. It’s also important to note that it’s fairly rare for an entire series or even an entire film to be “melodramatic” (although it certainly does occur) and normally individuals scenes will feel forced to an audience, and many can feel the need to call the entirety of the piece melodramatic due to that aspect tainting the rest.

In the anime adaptation of Clannad, there is an arc involving a girl named Fuuko that wants very much to invite the students from her school to her sister’s wedding. She hand-carves little wooden starfish and hands them out to people as invitations, and our main characters decide to help her distribute them and attend the wedding. While doing this, a few strange situational details lead to Tomoya and Nagisa learning that Fuuko is actually in a coma. The anime doesn’t really explain how a projection/her spirit/etc. can physically touch others, manipulate objects, or talk to anyone or really how it’s possible in the first place as the anime is farther removed from supernatural incidents than the visual novel and typically plays out as a normal high school SoL harem. For many, this broke their immersion in the show since the writing didn’t really prepare them for a situation like this in any way, and the following darker and dramatic arc for Kotomi that has similar plot holes only hurt the show’s opinion for some. However, the show has a large following despite these issues, normally due to the viewer’s love for the characters and their stories despite the inconsistent narrative situations they may be put in.

In my review of Your Lie in April, I am guilty of using the term “melodramatic” to refer to a frequent habit of Kaori saying lines of dialogue that are strange and needlessly dramatic in order to seem deep or strike a chord with the protagonist, and thus the audience. That being said, the show does a good job in building up dramatic situations and never goes into the territory of actually breaking the world it’s set up. No one in the show breaks character and the distaste that some may have for this show stems from other aspects that they feel were handled poorly (comedic scenes, foreshadowing, etc.) While the show may be overly dramatic at times, mostly in aspects of dialogue, it would be disingenuous to call it an example of “melodrama.”

Grave of the Fireflies is a beloved classic from the studio that has a tendency to spit out masterpiece after masterpiece, Studio Ghibli. It follows the life of two siblings trying to live in a World War II stricken Japan by as many means as they can find, with the death of the main character being presented in the very first scene, so all the audience can do is watch as the inevitable happens. While Bennett the Sage’s review[2] does a much more in-depth analysis (and criticism) than I will go into (or necessarily agree with,) there is a weird line that the film treads in terms of melodrama. The themes, subject, and the way the story is adapted from a man’s autobiography are intentionally dramatic. I felt emotionally drawn in throughout the duration of the film and enjoyed it for the most part. The above shot, which is one of the last ones in the film, is the most blatant break of the 4th wall throughout the film’s duration, and immediately brought me out to of the story it was telling. This serious, condescending look felt incredibly out of place, but the research Bennett had done put its inclusion into perspective, which had the unfortunate side effect of hurting other aspects that previously didn’t bother me so much. You can argue the Death of Author and all that, but that doesn’t change the fact that the film was created with the director’s intention to make the modern Japanese audience feel guilty, although Seita’s accusatory look gave me guilt as an American as well for completely different reasons than his intention. The movie itself is manipulative by nature and purpose, but all propagandist movies are. Your enjoyment and praise of the film all comes down to your ability to love it as a piece of art despite the original intentions of the creator, as I very much try to do.

Oh Glasslip. You had such potential, with your beautiful art, character designs, color palette, and promising SoL setup with a glass-making hook. If you want an example of disappointment and failure in storytelling, character development, and dramatic writing, look no further. The characters by and large all fit neatly (though not explicitly) into tropes of the genre and the story warps them and forces them to do or say things that make little sense for the sake of drama that rarely goes anywhere. The show is borderline schizophrenic, introducing character aspects over halfway through its run time to make them more “interesting,” harping on a romantic pentagon that goes nowhere, and ending with the last two episodes being great and introducing a possible plotline that will never develop because there will never be a second season. The line in my banner and the related line in the above screenshot are two of many examples. One of the episodes deals primarily with Yukinari, spurned by the main character Toko, moping and largely being upset for being friendzoned. With no prompting, Toko’s sister bikes after him one day to spout, “Please stay attractive!” Yukinari’s step sister in the above screenshot (who has romantic feelings for him,) angrily accuses Toko of “making him unattractive,” for not liking him back. This, of course, goes nowhere. The show also had the gall to introduce the possibility of Kakeru, the boy Toko prefers, having DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) half way through the show’s run, but fails to explain it or even label it at all. These are just a few examples of the melodramatic flop that is Glasslip and of the previous examples in this article, adheres to all of the criteria for the word absolutely.

In any kind of entertainment, there is going to be a certain breadth the audience has to give to the author and how they write the story. Because all forms of fiction and storytelling require keeping information from an audience, there is always going to be some forms of manipulation and lying on the part of the storyteller and/or narrator, and it’s a perfectly valid and often unavoidable aspect of fictive writing. While everyone has their own tolerance for the many aspects of anime and other media in regards to tropes, plot, etc. drama is always a tricky one to deal with due to the often serious tone it needs to take and the veiled truth that comes with it. Over doing drama is fairly easy to spot, but people far too easily tend to think melodrama = overly dramatic when one is actually a more extreme example of the other. Any methods used by the author to create drama are valid and positive as long as they work to help their narrative, but become distracting and detrimental when they break their illusion and we as the audience are starkly reminded that the world they had invited us into is not real, and that is one of the worst things a writer can do to their audience.

Banner from here.

Sources:

[1] – Definition of Melodrama – Dictionary.com

[2] – Grave of the Fireflies – Anime Abandon

Thanks again to ntaig for helping me edit this article!