What Makes a Story Stay With You? A Periodic Table of Emotional Storytelling
Someone on Reddit asked what people wanted from Final Fantasy XVII.
My answer was basically this: I want the story to destroy me.
I do not care very much whether Square Enix spends $300 million on it. I do not care whether the combat is real-time, turn-based, some Final Fantasy VII Remake-style hybrid, or something nobody has tried before. It could have photorealistic actors and forty-minute cutscenes. It could have cute pixel art and little characters who bounce in place when they talk.
Give me the best story you can possibly make.
Make me love the people in it. Make me believe in their futures. Then, if the story has earned the right, break something I cannot put back together. Better yet, give me an ending I am still arguing with myself about ten years later.
That Reddit reply led me to a question I had never thought to ask scientifically:
Has anyone actually studied what makes a story a gut punch?
There is no academic field called Gut-Punch Studies. There is no peer-reviewed equation that predicts how many tears Final Fantasy X will extract per minute. The relevant research is scattered across narrative psychology, media psychology, emotion science, memory research, empirical aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and game studies.
Once those literatures are put next to one another, though, they begin to describe the same territory from different directions.
Narrative researchers study why we become mentally absorbed into fictional worlds. Media psychologists study identification with characters, suspense, appreciation, and meaningful entertainment. Emotion researchers study mixed feelings, poignancy, tears, chills, and the peculiar state we call being moved. Memory researchers study why emotional events are consolidated so strongly and why surprise can force old memories to be updated. Bereavement researchers study the “if only” simulations that keep loss mentally active. Game scholars study what happens when the audience is no longer merely watching the story but pressing the buttons that make it happen.
This article is an attempt to connect those findings into a reusable model.
I am calling it a periodic table of emotional storytelling. The name is intentionally playful. The underlying research is real; the table itself is my synthesis. “Future investment,” “retroactive devastation,” and the formulas later in the article are not established clinical constructs. They are labels for recurring storytelling operations that appear to fit several established psychological mechanisms.
The goal is not to reduce art to a recipe. It is to become more precise about what stories are doing when they hurt us, move us, and refuse to leave.
Two conditions that make everything else stronger
Before getting to the emotional elements themselves, two well-studied processes behave almost like carrier waves. They do not specify which emotion a story will produce. They determine how completely the audience enters the experience.
Transportation
Transportation is the experience of becoming mentally absorbed into a narrative world. Melanie Green describes it as a combination of cognition, emotion, attention, and mental imagery focused on the story. A transported reader or viewer is no longer allocating much attention to the chair, the room, or the passage of time. The fictional situation has become the main thing the mind is simulating. Green’s overview of transportation theory traces the concept back to the influential Green and Brock work of 2000.
This gives emotional storytelling an obvious advantage. A fictional death can remain an abstract plot fact, or it can occur inside a world the audience has spent hours mentally inhabiting.
Identification
Identification is related but different. Jonathan Cohen argued that identification with a media character should be distinguished from merely liking, admiring, or feeling sympathy for that character. Identification involves temporarily adopting a character’s perspective, goals, feelings, and understanding of events. Cohen’s 2001 paper remains a foundational treatment of the concept.
Transportation puts me inside the world. Identification puts me, temporarily and imperfectly, behind someone else’s eyes.
A story can use either without the other at maximum strength. I can be absorbed by a world while maintaining distance from its protagonist. I can identify intensely with a character in a fairly minimal setting. When both are high, the rest of the table has more leverage.
The investment family: give the audience something to lose
The first family contains Attachment and Future Investment.
Attachment
Attachment is the accumulated emotional value of a person, relationship, place, community, object, ideal, or even routine inside a story.
Writers usually earn attachment in small denominations. A party member who tells one joke is not the same psychological object as a party member who has fought beside me for sixty hours, commented on dozens of towns, argued with the protagonist, gotten embarrassed during a festival scene, and developed a combat rhythm I can recognize with my eyes closed.
This is one reason long games have unusual emotional potential. Time gives the story room to make a character’s presence ordinary. Ordinary presence is valuable because loss is partly the discovery that a familiar pattern will no longer recur.
Future Investment
Future Investment is the audience’s mental simulation of what has not happened yet.
A character announces that she wants to open a bakery after the war. Two people finally admit that they might have a life together. A father promises to attend a graduation. The party keeps joking about where they will go when the world-saving business is finished.
The story has now created emotional value in events that do not exist.
That matters because people do not only think about reality. We constantly simulate alternatives and possible futures. When loss closes those futures, the audience can mourn an entire branch of possibility along with the thing that was actually lost.
This is one of the ideas I would elevate most strongly from the whole model. A writer does not need to show twenty years of a character’s future in order to destroy it. The audience can build those twenty years on the writer’s behalf.
The tension family: make me want something before you decide whether I get it
The next family contains Hope, Dread, Suspense, and Helplessness.
Hope
Hope establishes a desirable future that still feels reachable.
Hope is not filler between tragic scenes. It creates emotional surface area. A relentlessly miserable story can make the audience numb because there is little positive possibility left to threaten. A warm story can become devastating because it teaches the audience what happiness would look like before placing that happiness in jeopardy.
Dread
Dread is the negative mirror: an unwanted future becomes increasingly plausible.
Dread is especially useful when the audience can see the shape of an approaching catastrophe before the characters can. The feeling does not require a sudden twist. It can last for hours.
Suspense
Suspense is sustained concern about a consequential outcome.
One of the more interesting findings in suspense research is that uncertainty and suspense are not the same thing. A 2018 experimental paper by Pablo Delatorre and colleagues found evidence that uncertainty affected readers’ responses but could be modeled separately from suspense itself. The study belongs to a larger literature on the old “paradox of suspense”: people can feel suspense while revisiting stories whose endings they already know.
That helps explain why foreknowledge does not automatically kill a gut punch. Sometimes knowing what is coming makes the approach worse.
Helplessness
Helplessness gives the audience information, concern, or desire without the power to change the outcome.
The character walks toward the door. The audience knows what is behind it. The character does not. In a novel or film, helplessness is built into the medium; we can shout at the screen, but the screen does not negotiate.
Games complicate this. They usually teach us that pressing buttons changes things. A story can therefore intensify helplessness by first establishing agency and then withdrawing it at exactly the point where the player most wants control.
The rupture family: change the world and refuse to restore it
The rupture family contains Loss, Irreversibility, Prediction Error, and Recontextualization.
Loss
Loss removes something that has acquired emotional value.
Death is one form of loss, but it is only one. A relationship can end. A home can become uninhabitable. A character can survive while losing an identity, memory, ability, vocation, belief, or future. Two people can remain alive and still lose the version of their relationship that mattered.
This is why “kill a beloved character” is too crude to be a theory of emotional storytelling. Death is a plot event. Loss is the psychological operation.
Irreversibility
Irreversibility establishes that the old state cannot be restored.
A kidnapping can be terrifying because restoration remains possible. A breakup can be agonizing while reconciliation remains imaginable. The emotional category changes when the story closes the door.
Irreversibility converts threat into grief.
That door does not always have to be death. Time can make something irreversible. Memory can. A moral choice can. A ruined trust can. A victory can.
Prediction Error
Prediction Error occurs when reality violates the model the audience has been using to anticipate what happens next.
This is the closest thing on the table to conventional surprise, and it has unusually concrete neuroscience behind it. Alyssa Sinclair and colleagues used familiar narrative videos in a human functional-MRI experiment and interrupted expected endings to generate mnemonic prediction errors. The surprising interruptions disrupted sustained hippocampal representations, and the degree of disruption predicted subsequent memory updating. The 2021 PNAS paper describes prediction error as creating conditions that favor memory modification rather than simple preservation.
That does not prove that a plot twist will make a novel immortal. It does give us a plausible cognitive reason that violations of expectation can force a mental model to reopen.
Recontextualization
Recontextualization changes the meaning of information the audience already possesses.
A cheap twist says, “You guessed wrong.”
A powerful recontextualization makes an earlier conversation, gesture, object, line of dialogue, or entire relationship mean something different.
The story detonates backward.
This is why the reveal in Arrival, the ending of The Sixth Sense, Jurassic Bark in Futurama, and episode 10 of Violet Evergarden can provoke immediate mental replay. The new information is not confined to the present scene. It reaches backward and edits the emotional interpretation of remembered scenes.
Prediction error can trigger the reopening. Recontextualization supplies the new meaning.
The relationship family: use love as an amplifier
This family contains Separation, Sacrifice, Recognition, and Communal Intensification.
Separation
Separation breaks an emotionally valuable bond.
The characters may die, move apart, forget each other, enter different worlds, choose incompatible paths, or simply reach the end of a period in which they could remain together.
Separation often hurts precisely because the relationship itself remains valuable. Nobody needs to become a villain for a goodbye to be devastating.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice occurs when someone voluntarily accepts a serious cost for a person, group, principle, or future they value more.
Sacrifice can combine grief with admiration, gratitude, horror, guilt, or moral disagreement. It is rarely just “loss plus heroism.” Its power comes from the value comparison embedded in the choice: the character tells us what mattered most by what they were willing to surrender.
Recognition
Recognition is the moment when someone is finally seen, understood, forgiven, believed, remembered, or acknowledged.
Recognition becomes especially destructive when it arrives too late.
Two people spend the entire story misunderstanding one another. One finally understands. There are now thirty seconds left.
The pain comes partly from timing. The desired emotional state is achieved at exactly the moment its practical consequences become impossible.
Communal Intensification
Communal Intensification is my plain-English label for a mechanism closely related to the researched emotion kama muta.
Janis Zickfeld and a large international team studied experiences often described as being moved, touched, warmed, or moved to tears across 19 countries and 15 languages. Their 3,542 participants showed a recurring pattern associated with sudden intensification of communal sharing: warmth in the chest, moist eyes or tears, chills, a lump in the throat, buoyancy, and feelings of devotion or connection. The 2019 paper treats kama muta as a distinct positive social-relational emotion.
This helps explain a trick fiction uses constantly: the most devastating beat in a death scene may be an act of tenderness.
Someone fixes another person’s collar. A parent finishes a familiar bedtime phrase. A friend makes the same stupid joke they have made for forty hours. A dying character uses their remaining energy to comfort the person who is about to lose them.
Love does not dilute the grief. It gives the grief something larger to measure itself against.
The collision family: let incompatible feelings coexist
This family contains Poignancy, Bittersweetness, Relief, and Being Moved.
Poignancy
Poignancy is the mixed emotional state produced when something valuable is experienced under the awareness that it is ending.
Hal Ersner-Hershfield, Joseph Mikels, Sarah Sullivan, and Laura Carstensen tested this directly. Participants who imagined visiting a meaningful place for the final time experienced more mixed positive and negative emotion than participants imagining the same place without the ending cue. Related work with graduating students supported the same relationship between approaching endings and mixed emotion. Their 2008 paper is aptly titled “Poignancy: Mixed Emotional Experience in the Face of Meaningful Endings.”
That gives writers one of the simplest emotional transformations available:
Take an ordinary event and make it the last time.
The last breakfast. The last walk home. The last victory pose. The last time a character says another character’s name.
Bittersweetness
Bittersweetness allows gain and loss to remain psychologically active at the same time.
A victory can be real while its cost is also real. A farewell can be beautiful because the relationship was worth having. A character can make the right decision and still destroy something precious.
Winfried Menninghaus and colleagues’ Distancing-Embracing model is valuable here. Their account of negative emotion in art emphasizes that negative emotions can intensify attention, involvement, memorability, and meaning-making under the psychological distance provided by art. The model also gives a major role to combinations of positive and negative emotion.
A story does not always need to convert sorrow into happiness to give the audience satisfaction. Sometimes the positive and negative states can remain intact together.
Relief
Relief releases accumulated tension after threatened loss, danger, or uncertainty.
Relief can produce tears by itself, especially after a long period of dread. It also creates contrast. A writer can use relief honestly, then introduce a second realization that changes what the relief means.
Being Moved
Being Moved is broader than communal intensification. It is the familiar state in which something feels emotionally significant enough to produce tears, chills, warmth, tenderness, or a strange combination of arousal and calm.
Kazuma Mori and Makoto Iwanaga studied the physiology of being moved during music listening. In their experiments, pleasant tears were associated with phasic physiological calming against a background of tonic arousal. Their 2021 paper helps explain why being moved can feel like tension and release happening in the same body.
The aftershock family: keep the computation running after the credits
The aftershock family contains Counterfactual Thinking, Unresolvedness, Meaning, and Memory Salience.
These are the elements I care about most when I say I want a story to stay with me.
Counterfactual Thinking
Counterfactual Thinking generates alternative versions of what happened: if only she had arrived five minutes earlier; if only he had told the truth; if only they had taken the other road.
This is not merely a writer’s intuition about regret. Counterfactual thinking is a large research area, including work on real bereavement. A 2026 study of 343 bereaved adults found that self-referent upward counterfactuals about undoing a death were common and were associated with higher grief. Eisma and colleagues’ study fits earlier longitudinal work linking upward counterfactuals after loss with distress.
Fiction can exploit the same machinery without pretending fictional grief is identical to bereavement.
Irreversibility tells the mind that the event is finished.
Counterfactual thinking keeps generating versions in which it is not.
That is a nasty combination.
Unresolvedness
Unresolvedness leaves some activated interpretive, relational, moral, or emotional problem without a final resting state.
This element needs a caveat because the famous “Zeigarnik effect” has been oversold for decades. A 2025 meta-analysis by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier found no reliable general memory advantage for interrupted over completed tasks, although the tendency to resume interrupted tasks was more robust. Their review is a useful corrective to pop-psychology versions of unfinishedness.
A newer result is still intriguing. Joan Danielle Ongchoco, Kimberly Wong, and Brian Scholl reported four experiments in which people remembered probe positions more precisely when a visual path stopped just before its endpoint rather than completing. The 2026 study calls this a visual Zeigarnik effect.
Neither result proves that ambiguous endings are automatically memorable. “Leave it unresolved” is not a scientific recipe. The narrower claim is safer: unfinishedness and unresolved goals can receive privileged processing under some conditions, and narrative interpretation gives the mind many ways to keep a question active after plot events stop arriving.
Meaning
Meaning connects the fictional event to a question larger than the event itself.
Mary Beth Oliver and Anne Bartsch distinguished simple enjoyment from appreciation in media experience. Their studies identified serious, poignant, moving, and thought-provoking gratifications and linked them with perceptions that a work had a longer-lasting effect. The 2010 paper gives empirical shape to something viewers already know intuitively: a work can be deeply valued without being “fun.”
Oliver and Arthur Raney extended this distinction with research on eudaimonic entertainment: media sought not only for pleasure but for insight, truth-seeking, reflection on life’s purpose, and human meaningfulness. Their 2011 study is particularly close to the kind of story I am asking for from Final Fantasy XVII.
A sad event asks me to feel something about the character.
A meaningful event gives me something to think about after I have stopped thinking about the character as a fictional object.
Memory Salience
Memory Salience is the tendency for emotionally arousing material to receive preferential long-term retention.
James McGaugh’s work on emotion and memory is foundational here. His 2004 Annual Review of Neuroscience article summarizes converging animal and human evidence that the amygdala modulates consolidation of memories for emotionally arousing experiences. Emotional arousal does not make every detail perfectly accurate; emotion can enhance some forms of memory while impairing others. The narrower point is that emotionally significant events receive different consolidation treatment from trivial ones.
A story that produces unusually strong emotional arousal is therefore not merely “feeling memorable” in a poetic sense. Some of the same biological systems that help real emotional experiences persist are active when people process emotional media.
Two elements that become especially important in morally difficult stories and games
The periodic table needs two more elements: Moral Collision and Agency or Participation.
Moral Collision
Moral Collision occurs when two values the audience accepts produce incompatible demands.
Save the person you love, or protect millions of strangers.
Tell the truth, or keep a promise.
Show mercy, or satisfy justice.
Prevent suffering, or respect someone’s autonomy.
The best moral collisions do not disappear when the protagonist chooses. Choice closes the plot branch. It may leave the audience’s evaluation open indefinitely.
This is a powerful route to unresolvedness because the writer does not need a confusing ending. The facts can be perfectly clear. The conflict survives inside the audience’s value system.
Agency or Participation
Agency or Participation is the player’s sense that their actions, choices, or embodied inputs are implicated in what happens.
Game studies gives us evidence that this matters. Jacqueline Burgess and Christian Jones analyzed the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy and found strong relationships among character attachment, agency, choice, and players’ expectations that their decisions would matter to the ending. Their study is a reminder that emotional investment in games includes investment in what the player believes they have done.
Karoline Anderson’s qualitative study of The Last of Us examined moral distress, character realism, and the uncomfortable position of players who must participate in a fixed narrative without being allowed to change its central moral decisions. The 2022 paper is especially relevant to emotionally difficult games.
And Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons shows what only games can do at full strength. The control scheme assigns each brother to a different side of the controller. The relationship is learned partly as a motor habit. Academic close reading has explicitly examined how Brothers creates feeling through gameplay, not merely through cutscenes. May, Bizzocchi, Antle, and Choo discuss that design here.
A novel can describe an absence. A film can show an empty chair. A game can teach your thumb that someone is there and later make your thumb discover that they are gone.
That deserves its own category.
The periodic table in one place
Here is the complete working table, with the names written out rather than reduced to symbols.
| Family | Element | Storytelling job |
|---|---|---|
| Carrier conditions | Transportation | Pull attention, imagery, thought, and emotion into the fictional world. |
| Carrier conditions | Identification | Let the audience temporarily adopt a character’s perspective, goals, or feelings. |
| Investment | Attachment | Make a person, relationship, place, ideal, or routine emotionally valuable. |
| Investment | Future Investment | Make the audience imagine desirable events that have not happened yet. |
| Tension | Hope | Establish a wanted future that still feels reachable. |
| Tension | Dread | Establish an unwanted future that feels increasingly plausible. |
| Tension | Suspense | Sustain concern about a consequential outcome. |
| Tension | Helplessness | Give the audience concern or knowledge without sufficient power to intervene. |
| Rupture | Loss | Remove something the audience values. |
| Rupture | Irreversibility | Establish that the former state cannot be restored. |
| Rupture | Prediction Error | Violate the audience’s active model of what will happen next. |
| Rupture | Recontextualization | Change the meaning of earlier scenes or memories. |
| Relationship | Separation | Break an emotionally valuable connection. |
| Relationship | Sacrifice | Have someone voluntarily accept a serious cost for something valued more. |
| Relationship | Recognition | Let someone finally be seen, understood, believed, forgiven, or remembered. |
| Relationship | Communal Intensification | Intensify closeness, devotion, tenderness, reunion, or love. |
| Emotional collision | Poignancy | Mix positive feeling with awareness of a meaningful ending. |
| Emotional collision | Bittersweetness | Let genuine gain and genuine loss coexist. |
| Emotional collision | Relief | Release accumulated threat or tension. |
| Emotional collision | Being Moved | Produce a high-significance emotional state often associated with tears, chills, tenderness, or awe. |
| Aftershock | Counterfactual Thinking | Generate “if only” alternatives to what actually happened. |
| Aftershock | Unresolvedness | Leave an interpretive, relational, emotional, or moral problem active after events stop. |
| Aftershock | Meaning | Connect the fictional event to broader questions about life, identity, morality, love, death, or purpose. |
| Aftershock | Memory Salience | Give the experience emotional arousal that favors durable retention. |
| Moral conflict | Moral Collision | Force two defensible values into incompatible demands. |
| Interactive storytelling | Agency or Participation | Make the player feel implicated through action, choice, habit, or control. |
The categories are not mutually exclusive, and several of the elements overlap psychologically. That is fine. The table is useful if it helps us diagnose why scenes with similar plots can feel completely different.
Emotional molecules
A character death is not an element. It is a delivery mechanism that can combine several elements.
Consider the difference between these two constructions.
A character appears, performs a heroic act, and dies. The story has Loss and perhaps Sacrifice.
Another character has been with us for forty hours. We know what she wants after the war. She has recently repaired a broken relationship. For the first time she believes she might actually get the life she wants. Then she dies, permanently, because of a decision that could almost have gone another way.
That scene contains Attachment + Future Investment + Hope + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking.
The death is the same category of event. The psychological structure is not remotely the same.
Several recurring combinations are useful enough to name.
| Compound | Full formula | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| The Stolen Future | Attachment + Future Investment + Hope + Loss + Irreversibility | “They were finally going to be okay.” |
| Too Late | Attachment + Recognition + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking | They finally understand each other when understanding can no longer repair the damage. |
| The Heroic Sacrifice | Attachment + Sacrifice + Communal Intensification + Loss + Meaning | Grief and admiration occupy the same scene. |
| The Beautiful Goodbye | Attachment + Separation + Poignancy + Communal Intensification + Irreversibility | Love makes the ending more beautiful and more painful at once. |
| Dreadful Inevitability | Dread + Suspense + Helplessness + Irreversibility | The audience knows where this is going and cannot stop it. |
| Retroactive Devastation | Attachment + Prediction Error + Recontextualization + Loss | A revelation turns earlier scenes into emotional landmines. |
| Bittersweet Victory | Hope + Bittersweetness + Loss + Meaning | The heroes genuinely win and the audience genuinely mourns. |
| The Empty Future | Future Investment + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking | The audience mourns events that never got a chance to exist. |
| Mercy After Ruin | Loss + Irreversibility + Recognition + Communal Intensification | Something that cannot be repaired is followed by understanding or forgiveness. |
| The Haunting Ending | Poignancy + Meaning + Counterfactual Thinking + Unresolvedness | The plot ends; interpretation keeps running. |
None of these guarantees quality. A writer can assemble every item in the table and still produce emotional sludge. Attachment has to be earned. Sacrifice has to fit the character. Moral collision has to arise from actual values rather than a contrived dilemma. Recontextualization has to be supported by what came before.
The table describes leverage. It does not provide taste.
A small experiment: code famous gut punches
I wanted to know whether these elements would recur if I stopped speaking abstractly and coded famous emotional scenes across different media.
There was a bookkeeping error in my first pass: I kept calling this a set of 30 scenes. When I went back and counted the rows, there were 33. The table below uses the corrected set and the corrected frequencies.
This is still not a scientific sample. I selected famous scenes precisely because people often describe them as emotionally powerful or lingering, and the coding is my interpretation. The exercise can generate hypotheses; it cannot establish population-level laws of storytelling.
Massive spoiler warning
The next table spoils major events or endings from games, anime, films, television, and literature.
| Work / scene | Elements doing most of the work |
|---|---|
| Final Fantasy VII — Aerith | Attachment + Future Investment + Hope + Loss + Irreversibility + Prediction Error + Counterfactual Thinking + Meaning |
| Final Fantasy X — Tidus and Yuna’s farewell | Attachment + Future Investment + Separation + Irreversibility + Poignancy + Bittersweetness + Recognition + Meaning |
| Metal Gear Solid 3 — The Boss | Attachment + Sacrifice + Loss + Irreversibility + Moral Collision + Agency or Participation + Recognition + Meaning |
| The Last of Us — hospital and final lie | Attachment + Future Investment + Hope + Moral Collision + Agency or Participation + Recontextualization + Unresolvedness + Meaning |
| The Walking Dead — Lee and Clementine | Attachment + Future Investment + Separation + Loss + Irreversibility + Communal Intensification + Agency or Participation + Meaning |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 — Arthur’s ending | Attachment + Future Investment + Loss + Irreversibility + Sacrifice + Poignancy + Recognition + Meaning |
| Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons — the swim | Attachment + Loss + Irreversibility + Agency or Participation + Recontextualization + Communal Intensification + Meaning |
| NieR: Automata — Ending E | Attachment + Sacrifice + Communal Intensification + Hope + Bittersweetness + Agency or Participation + Meaning |
| To the Moon — revelation and ending | Attachment + Future Investment + Recontextualization + Counterfactual Thinking + Poignancy + Bittersweetness + Recognition + Meaning |
| Persona 3 — the final rest | Attachment + Future Investment + Hope + Loss + Irreversibility + Poignancy + Recontextualization + Meaning |
| Grave of the Fireflies — Setsuko | Attachment + Dread + Helplessness + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking + Poignancy + Meaning |
| Cowboy Bebop — finale | Attachment + Hope + Loss + Irreversibility + Poignancy + Unresolvedness + Meaning |
| Clannad After Story — Ushio | Attachment + Future Investment + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking + Helplessness + Meaning |
| Violet Evergarden episode 10 — the letters | Attachment + Future Investment + Prediction Error + Recontextualization + Loss + Irreversibility + Communal Intensification + Poignancy + Meaning |
| Fullmetal Alchemist — Hughes’s funeral | Attachment + Future Investment + Loss + Irreversibility + Communal Intensification + Poignancy + Meaning |
| Up — opening montage | Attachment + Future Investment + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking + Poignancy + Meaning |
| Arrival — temporal revelation | Future Investment + Prediction Error + Recontextualization + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking + Bittersweetness + Moral Collision + Meaning |
| Coco — “Remember Me” | Attachment + Recognition + Communal Intensification + Loss + Poignancy + Meaning |
| Schindler’s List — final breakdown | Attachment + Counterfactual Thinking + Recognition + Communal Intensification + Irreversibility + Meaning |
| Toy Story 3 — Andy’s goodbye | Attachment + Future Investment + Separation + Irreversibility + Poignancy + Communal Intensification + Meaning |
| Everything Everywhere All at Once — reconciliation | Attachment + Counterfactual Thinking + Bittersweetness + Recognition + Communal Intensification + Moral Collision + Meaning |
| Manchester by the Sea — inability to recover | Attachment + Loss + Irreversibility + Recognition + Unresolvedness + Meaning |
| The Sixth Sense — revelation | Attachment + Prediction Error + Recontextualization + Loss + Irreversibility + Recognition + Meaning |
| Futurama — “Jurassic Bark” | Attachment + Future Investment + Prediction Error + Recontextualization + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking + Meaning |
| Buffy the Vampire Slayer — “The Body” | Attachment + Loss + Irreversibility + Helplessness + Meaning |
| BoJack Horseman — “The View from Halfway Down” | Dread + Helplessness + Prediction Error + Irreversibility + Unresolvedness + Meaning |
| The Good Place — the final door | Attachment + Separation + Irreversibility + Poignancy + Bittersweetness + Communal Intensification + Meaning |
| Scrubs — Ben’s revelation | Attachment + Prediction Error + Recontextualization + Loss + Irreversibility + Meaning |
| Flowers for Algernon — final reports | Future Investment + Loss + Irreversibility + Recontextualization + Counterfactual Thinking + Unresolvedness + Meaning |
| Of Mice and Men — George and Lennie | Attachment + Dread + Sacrifice + Loss + Irreversibility + Moral Collision + Counterfactual Thinking + Meaning |
| Never Let Me Go — final acceptance | Attachment + Future Investment + Dread + Helplessness + Loss + Irreversibility + Poignancy + Unresolvedness + Meaning |
| Bridge to Terabithia — Leslie | Attachment + Future Investment + Prediction Error + Loss + Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking + Meaning |
| The Road — ending | Attachment + Future Investment + Separation + Loss + Irreversibility + Communal Intensification + Meaning |
The repeated ingredients are revealing.
| Element | Scenes in this 33-scene sample | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | 33 | 100% |
| Attachment | 30 | 91% |
| Irreversibility | 28 | 85% |
| Loss | 24 | 73% |
| Future Investment | 18 | 55% |
| Poignancy | 13 | 39% |
| Counterfactual Thinking | 12 | 36% |
| Communal Intensification | 11 | 33% |
| Recontextualization | 10 | 30% |
| Recognition | 9 | 27% |
| Prediction Error | 8 | 24% |
| Bittersweetness | 6 | 18% |
| Unresolvedness | 6 | 18% |
| Hope | 5 | 15% |
| Separation | 5 | 15% |
| Moral Collision | 5 | 15% |
| Agency or Participation | 5 | 15% |
| Helplessness | 5 | 15% |
| Sacrifice | 4 | 12% |
| Dread | 4 | 12% |
Transportation, Identification, Suspense, Relief, Being Moved, and Memory Salience are not included in this frequency table because I treated them as audience-state or carrier variables rather than trying to infer them reliably from plot summaries.
The percentages should not be mistaken for estimates of what “all great stories” contain. The sample was deliberately selected for emotional impact. What the counts can do is expose recurring combinations worth examining.
Surprise is not the master ingredient
Prediction Error appears in only eight of the thirty-three examples.
That surprised me because conventional discussion of “gut punches” often gravitates toward twists. Surprise is potent. The memory-updating literature gives us a mechanism for why it can be potent. It simply does not appear necessary.
Grave of the Fireflies can hurt while telegraphing catastrophe. The Good Place can make a carefully prepared farewell devastating. Final Fantasy X can let dread and inevitability accumulate. Of Mice and Men does not need to hide the kind of world it inhabits.
There is even experimental evidence that knowing an ending does not automatically reduce enjoyment. Jonathan Leavitt and Nicholas Christenfeld’s much-discussed 2011 experiments found that participants often preferred spoiled versions of short stories. The primary paper should not be generalized into “spoilers are always good,” but it is enough to kill the simple theory that surprise is the source of narrative pleasure.
A devastating event can be one you never saw coming.
It can also be one you have spent an hour begging the story not to complete.
The base molecule: Attachment + Loss + Irreversibility
In this sample, Attachment + Loss + Irreversibility appears in 21 of 33 scenes.
That is the closest thing the exercise produced to a common backbone.
First the story establishes value.
Then it removes the valued thing.
Then it establishes that restoration is no longer available.
Remove Irreversibility and the emotional problem often remains a problem of danger, rescue, pursuit, repair, or uncertainty. Add Irreversibility and the mind has to begin adapting to a world in which the old state is gone.
The formula does not require death. A destroyed relationship, forgotten identity, irreversible decision, or permanent departure can create the same structural shift.
The Stolen Future shows up everywhere
Attachment + Future Investment + Loss + Irreversibility appears in 12 of the 33 scenes.
This may be the most useful pattern in the whole exercise.
The audience loses more than the character or relationship that existed on screen. It loses an imagined branch of future events.
Up is almost a laboratory demonstration. Carl and Ellie do not merely exist as a couple. The montage teaches us to imagine plans, deferred adventures, domestic rituals, aging, and the life they expect to keep having. When the future collapses, the audience can mentally represent the missing branch.
Bridge to Terabithia works differently but hits the same machinery. The emotional loss includes all of the ordinary future experiences that two young friends simply assumed were still available.
In Final Fantasy VII, the effect can extend across an enormous role-playing game. The player has learned Aerith as a party member, a voice, a mechanical presence, a relationship, and a bundle of possibilities. The loss deletes future scenes the player had not consciously enumerated until they became impossible.
A useful writing principle falls out of this: before taking something away, give the audience enough material to imagine keeping it.
The writer does not have to render the lost future. The audience will render it for free.
Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking is emotional sandpaper
Irreversibility + Counterfactual Thinking appears in 10 of the 33 scenes.
The two elements pull in opposite directions.
Irreversibility says the event is settled.
Counterfactual Thinking keeps producing a better version anyway.
Schindler’s List makes this mechanism explicit in the final breakdown: more could have been done, another person might have been saved, an object could have been converted into another life. Of Mice and Men traps mercy, horror, necessity, and “what else could have happened?” in the same mental space. Arrival asks the audience to consider whether foreknowledge of grief should change the decision to embrace the love that precedes it.
The story ends. Alternative versions continue to be generated.
Retroactive devastation: Prediction Error + Recontextualization
Prediction Error and Recontextualization appear together in five scenes in this coding: Violet Evergarden episode 10, Arrival, The Sixth Sense, Jurassic Bark, and Scrubs.
The count is modest. The effect is distinctive.
A normal sad scene concentrates its emotional information in the present.
Recontextualization changes stored scenes.
The letter means something else now. The earlier conversation means something else. The behavior you thought was odd becomes legible. The comedy becomes grief. The thing you dismissed becomes the center of the episode.
The audience’s own memory becomes part of the storytelling surface.
The connection to prediction-error research is especially suggestive here. Sinclair and colleagues did not study movie twists; they studied memory updating. But a twist that violates expectation and supplies a new explanatory model asks the audience to do exactly that kind of work: reopen what was represented, then store it differently.
Love + ending: Attachment + Communal Intensification + Poignancy
Attachment + Communal Intensification + Poignancy appears in five examples, including Violet Evergarden, Fullmetal Alchemist, Toy Story 3, and The Good Place.
The small count understates how broadly the ingredients operate because several other scenes contain two of the three.
The combination has unusually good experimental neighbors. Poignancy research shows that making a positive experience a “last time” increases mixed emotion. Kama muta research shows that sudden intensification of communal closeness reliably produces the bodily family of warmth, tears, chills, and being moved.
Put those together and you get one of fiction’s oldest weapons:
Let people love each other at the moment they have to part.
The sadness does not work despite the love. It scales with it.
The hit and the haunt are different jobs
This is the distinction that finally made the whole project click for me.
A story can produce an enormous immediate emotional reaction and then mostly leave my mind. Another story can make me sit quietly through the credits without crying and continue bothering me for fifteen years.
Those are different achievements.
I would describe the first as the hit and the second as the haunt.
The hit
The hit is dominated by Investment + Rupture + Irreversibility.
Investment comes from Attachment, Future Investment, and Hope. Rupture comes from Loss, Separation, Sacrifice, Prediction Error, or some combination. Irreversibility prevents easy restoration.
A rough conceptual formula is:
Immediate gut punch ≈ emotional investment × magnitude of rupture × irreversibility
This is not a quantitative scientific equation. It is a compact statement of the structural pattern.
The haunt
The haunt is dominated by Counterfactual Thinking + Recontextualization + Meaning + Unresolvedness.
Counterfactual Thinking generates other worlds.
Recontextualization sends the audience back through remembered scenes.
Meaning connects the fictional event to questions the audience carries into real life.
Unresolvedness prevents interpretation from reaching a stable final answer.
A story can score high on one side and low on the other. A shock death may produce a huge hit with little haunt. A morally difficult ending may produce a moderate immediate reaction and years of argument.
This also explains why “make the audience cry” is too narrow a creative target. Tears measure one kind of output. Persistence is another.
Plot closure and meaning closure should be separated
One of my favorite forms of ending closes the causal story completely and leaves the emotional interpretation unstable.
The villain is defeated. The journey is over. The mystery is solved. There is no sequel hook. We know who lived and who died.
The audience still cannot answer a simpler question:
Was that a happy ending?
Or:
Did the protagonist do the right thing?
Or:
Was the sacrifice worth it?
Or:
If the character could choose again, should they make the same choice?
This is where Moral Collision and Meaning become valuable. The writer does not need to hide basic facts to create ambiguity. Clear facts can support incompatible moral interpretations.
Arrival is a beautiful example. Once its structure becomes clear, the central question is not “what happened?” The question is what one should do with love when grief is known in advance.
The Last of Us ends with an even more combustible arrangement. The immediate plot is settled. The moral and relational consequences are not.
A story can therefore provide satisfying plot closure without providing emotional closure. I would actively prefer that to an ending that explains its own moral until nothing remains for the audience to do.
Negative emotion works better when it has positive emotion to collide with
A game that wants to devastate me should probably make me happy first.
That sounds obvious until you look at how often “serious” stories equate depth with relentless bleakness. If every relationship is broken, every town is gray, every authority figure is corrupt, and every scene communicates despair, the audience eventually learns the emotional range of the work. There is less contrast left to exploit.
Menninghaus and colleagues’ Distancing-Embracing model is useful precisely because it treats negative emotion as a resource that art can integrate with aesthetic pleasure, mixed feeling, and meaning-making. The negative emotion does not have to be neutralized. It can be embraced within the larger experience.
For a long JRPG, that suggests a humane creative strategy.
Let the party be funny.
Let towns feel safe sometimes.
Give the characters stupid preferences, embarrassing stories, private rituals, favorite foods, grudges that are not world-historical, and moments when the mission can wait five minutes.
Let the player become comfortable.
Comfort is not the enemy of tragedy. Comfort is stored value.
The ending has disproportionate leverage
The famous peak-end rule says that retrospective evaluations of experiences are disproportionately influenced by moments of peak intensity and by the ending.
A 2022 meta-analysis by Balca Alaybek and colleagues synthesized 174 effect sizes and found strong support for peak and end effects in retrospective evaluation. The paper later received a 2023 corrigendum that revised some coefficients, but the broad result remained: peak and ending episodes carry substantial weight, while the overall average experience also matters greatly.
This needs restraint when applied to stories. A seventy-hour RPG is not equivalent to the tasks in the underlying peak-end literature. “Just make the ending amazing” is not supported by the science, and the meta-analysis itself found that the average experience mattered about as much as the peak-end composite.
The useful lesson is narrower.
An ending has unusual power to determine what the audience remembers the preceding experience as having meant.
A final revelation can turn comedy into tragedy. A final act of mercy can alter the emotional category of a brutal story. A quiet epilogue can reveal what the adventure cost. A single final image can choose which unresolved question the audience carries home.
Everything before the ending loads the material. The ending decides which part remains electrically active.
Games have a weapon other media barely possess
The element I most want Final Fantasy XVII to exploit is Agency or Participation.
Film can show me that someone is missing.
A game can make the missing person part of my learned control scheme.
Suppose two party members have a combination attack. I use it throughout the game until executing it becomes automatic. One of them disappears permanently.
Hours later, I open the command menu out of habit.
The ability is still listed.
It is gray.
No cutscene. No swelling orchestra. No speech telling me what grief means.
My own motor habit supplies the missing person.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons demonstrates the same principle at a deeper level. The controller itself represents the relationship between the brothers. Later gameplay can therefore make absence legible through the player’s hands.
Games can also implicate players morally. A game may offer a choice and make us responsible for it. It may deliberately refuse a choice after teaching us to expect one. It may force us to perform an action our values reject because the playable character has motives we do not control.
This is why interactive storytelling can produce a peculiar kind of moral distress. The player oscillates between “the character did this” and “I did this.” Good games can use that ambiguity instead of pretending the player and protagonist are always the same person.
I would love to see a mainline Final Fantasy treat mechanics as emotional memory rather than keeping the “story” in cutscenes and the “game” in combat.
Three working hypotheses I would take into a writer’s room
After all of this, three ideas seem worth testing in actual storytelling.
Destroy possibility, not merely bodies
Emotional devastation should scale with the amount of psychologically real possibility an event makes permanently unreachable.
A death matters because of the person who dies. It can matter even more because of the dinners, reconciliations, arguments, children, journeys, apologies, jokes, and ordinary Tuesdays that the audience had begun to expect.
This is why Future Investment deserves a place near the center of the model.
Keep positive emotion alive inside the negative emotion
Bittersweet endings can be stronger than uniformly bleak ones because the positive and negative feelings answer different questions.
I can be glad the relationship happened and devastated that it ended.
I can believe the protagonist made the right choice and hate what the choice cost.
I can call an ending beautiful and tragic without those judgments canceling one another.
Poignancy research, kama muta research, and the Distancing-Embracing model all give empirical support to pieces of this idea.
Let the story finish before the audience finishes
A haunting story does not need an incomplete plot. It needs some remaining work for the audience.
Counterfactual Thinking supplies alternate possibilities. Recontextualization supplies memories that need rereading. Meaning attaches the story to real questions. Moral Collision leaves values in conflict. Unresolvedness prevents a final emotional compression into a single verdict.
The story can end on Tuesday.
The audience can still be processing it in October.
So what do I actually want from Final Fantasy XVII?
I want Square Enix to choose emotional and thematic ambition before production spectacle.
The graphics can be astonishing. I will happily take astonishing graphics. The combat can be a technical marvel. I will happily take that too. None of those things substitute for making me care.
Spend the first half of the game accumulating Attachment.
Let me know these people well enough that I can predict who complains about waking up early. Give them relationships that change gradually instead of only during designated character-development scenes. Give them futures they speak about casually, as if tomorrow is guaranteed. Let the party be joyful enough that the eventual loss of joy has a measurable shape.
Use the length of a JRPG instead of treating it as a pacing problem to survive. Fifty hours of companionship can make a tiny gesture carry more emotional mass than the most expensive cutscene in the game.
When the story finally breaks something, make the change matter mechanically as well as narratively. Change party composition, abilities, locations, NPC routines, ambient dialogue, musical arrangements, or the player’s own habits. Let the world remember what happened.
Do not confuse emotional devastation with a body count. A character can survive and still lose the future I wanted for them. Two people can love each other and still be unable to remain together. A victory can solve the external crisis and permanently damage something intimate. Someone can make a morally defensible choice that I will argue with forever.
And trust me enough not to explain the ending until nothing is left alive inside it.
I would love an ending where the causal facts are clear and the emotional verdict is not. Let one player call it hopeful, another tragic, another unforgivable, and another merciful. Make sure all four can point to actual scenes in the text.
If Square Enix can do that with a $300 million photorealistic production, wonderful.
If it can do it with thirty-dollar pixel art and turn-based battles, wonderful.
Rendering budget is not emotional leverage.
A sprite moving one tile toward another sprite can wreck a person if the previous forty hours taught them what that tile means.
That was the point hiding inside my Reddit answer. I do not specifically want Final Fantasy XVII to be darker, sadder, more cinematic, more mature, more shocking, or more tragic.
I want it to earn enough psychological reality that losing part of its fictional world feels, briefly, like losing a possible world of my own.
Then I want it to leave one small piece of that world running in my head after the game is over.
Make me mourn something that never existed.
Sources and further reading
- Green, Melanie C. “Transportation into Narrative Worlds.” Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes (2021). Springer
- Cohen, Jonathan. “Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences With Media Characters.” Mass Communication and Society 4(3), 2001. DOI
- Menninghaus, Winfried, Valentin Wagner, Julian Hanich, Eugen Wassiliwizky, Thomas Jacobsen, and Stefan Koelsch. “The Distancing-Embracing Model of the Enjoyment of Negative Emotions in Art Reception.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40, 2017. PubMed
- Zickfeld, Janis H., et al. “Kama Muta: Conceptualizing and Measuring the Experience Often Labelled Being Moved Across 19 Nations and 15 Languages.” Emotion 19(3), 2019. PubMed
- Mori, Kazuma, and Makoto Iwanaga. “Being Emotionally Moved Is Associated With Phasic Physiological Calming During Tonic Physiological Arousal From Pleasant Tears.” International Journal of Psychophysiology 159, 2021. PubMed
- Ersner-Hershfield, Hal, Joseph A. Mikels, Sarah J. Sullivan, and Laura L. Carstensen. “Poignancy: Mixed Emotional Experience in the Face of Meaningful Endings.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94(1), 2008. PDF
- Oliver, Mary Beth, and Anne Bartsch. “Appreciation as Audience Response: Exploring Entertainment Gratifications Beyond Hedonism.” Human Communication Research 36(1), 2010. Wiley
- Oliver, Mary Beth, and Arthur A. Raney. “Entertainment as Pleasurable and Meaningful: Identifying Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motivations for Entertainment Consumption.” Journal of Communication 61(5), 2011. Oxford Academic
- Sinclair, Alyssa H., Grace M. Manalili, Iva K. Brunec, R. Alison Adcock, and Morgan D. Barense. “Prediction Errors Disrupt Hippocampal Representations and Update Episodic Memories.” PNAS 118(51), 2021. PubMed
- McGaugh, James L. “The Amygdala Modulates the Consolidation of Memories of Emotionally Arousing Experiences.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27, 2004. PubMed
- Eisma, Maarten C., Jonne F. van der Laan, Nynke de Boer, Marije Doornbos, Claudia Brouwer, and Kai Epstude. “Undoing Death: Counterfactual Thinking and Emotional Adaptation to Bereavement.” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 92, 2026. DOI
- Ghibellini, Romain, and Beat Meier. “Interruption, Recall and Resumption: A Meta-Analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina Effects.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, 2025. Nature
- Ongchoco, Joan Danielle K., Kimberly W. Wong, and Brian J. Scholl. “The Spontaneous Prioritization of ‘Unfinishedness’ in Perception: A Visual Zeigarnik Effect.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 155(3), 2026. PubMed
- Leavitt, Jonathan D., and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld. “Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories.” Psychological Science 22(9), 2011. PubMed
- Delatorre, Pablo, Carlos León, Alberto Salguero, Manuel Palomo-Duarte, and Pablo Gervás. “Confronting a Paradox: A New Perspective of the Impact of Uncertainty in Suspense.” Frontiers in Psychology 9, 2018. Frontiers
- Alaybek, Balca, Reeshad S. Dalal, Shea Fyffe, et al. “All’s Well That Ends (and Peaks) Well? A Meta-Analysis of the Peak-End Rule and Duration Neglect.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 170, 2022. ScienceDirect and 2023 corrigendum
- Anderson, Karoline A. “Moral Distress in The Last of Us: Moral Agency, Character Realism, and Navigating Fixed Gaming Narratives.” Computers in Human Behavior Reports 5, 2022. ScienceDirect
- Burgess, Jacqueline, and Christian M. Jones. “Is It Too Much to Ask That We’re Allowed to Win the Game? Character Attachment and Agency in the Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 37(3), 2019. SAGE
- May, Aaron, Jim Bizzocchi, Alissa N. Antle, and Amber Choo. “Fraternal Feelings: How Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Affects Players Through Gameplay.” IEEE Games Media Entertainment, 2014/2015. DOI