it's beyond my control

[incandescens]

Why do we enjoy reading about protagonists in pain? I'm reading up about the gothic novel, and one aspect of it that frequently occurs seems to be that the protagonist is weaker than the antagonist, and that he must suffer at the antagonist's hands. Well, technically speaking. Metaphorically speaking. The antagonist can be another person, or an universal force, or the dark side of the protagonist's nature, or whatever.

So why do we -- and I include myself in this -- pick up the book and start reading about someone else suffering? What is it that makes us voyeuristically read the details of pain, emotional or physical or spiritual? What is it, in turn, that clogs the arteries of fanfiction.net with angst and death? Why does shonen ai require suffering? What is it about us?

Is it because we feel that pain is somehow a truer emotion than joy? Or because we can imagine a closer connection through pain than we can through joy? Or are we cynical enough to think that the image of a dark world is truer than a bright one? I'm making vast generalisations here, I know.

Yes, I am over-generalising. I have read and enjoyed and smiled at a good share of things which contain joy. I like my heroes to win. Eventually. I just wish I could explain why for some of the matters above.

Well, for one thing, I'm sure it'd help my writing . . .

---

221B

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears--
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

-- Vincent Starrett

Comments

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

At a guess, it's partly that we seek catharsis from our own day to day suffering. Seeing someone else get poisoned by a rival and spend most of a book in near-sensory deprivation (to take an example from one of Elizabeth Moon's Familias Regnant novels) sort of throws our bad day at the office into perspective, doesn't it?

And part of it might also be that, as Kate Bush put it, "Without the pain there'd be no learning / Without the hurting we'd never change." It seems that by the dramatic conventions in most of the stuff we read, improvement only comes about as a part of overcoming difficulty, hardship, and suffering--becoming a stronger person as a result of what we go through. Just as muscle tissue goes stronger by being damaged and regrowing, characters become stronger by going through pain. Perhaps there's a sense that, if someone has it too easy, we lose the ability to empathize with them.

Or perhaps I'm just babbling. :)

[incandescens]

That last, about needing to see the protagonist suffer if we are to believe in his improvement, makes a lot of sense. We all complain about heroes "having it too easy" or being too perfect, when we consider it to be the case, so yes, one could argue that a certain amount of pain is required by the reader if they are to believe in the achievement later...

[zamiel.livejournal.com]

Well, for me, its easy:

I'm a sadist.

See how easy that makes it?

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

Check your Campbell. Go back to _Gilgamesh_. Look at Sheridan in Babylon 5.

The hero must journey through hell before returning to the light.