This is the second part of our Manipulation focussed Quackcast, and we have a special guest: Gunwallace! This time we're talking about manipulating your audience to think or feel certain things that you want them to in order for your story to have a greater impact. Gunwallace was here to help us with the humour aspect because getting people to find things funny is a challenge all in itself!
It could be emotional beats, things like sadness at an event in the comic like the death of a character, betrayal, disappointment, joy, revenge, triumph, elation… If you can make the audience feel that along with the characters then the story events have way more meaning! Conversely, if you mishandle it then the event can be a little meaningless or even funny like the famous miscarriage scene in the Ctrl+Alt+Del (CAD) webcomic. But how do you manipulate people into having the feelings you want them to? I suppose the best way is having them identify with the characters, make their situation relatable, make the audience care about the characters and what they're experiencing, then these effects will have a greater impact.
Humour is another aspect of this, how do you convince people that something is supposed to be funny and that they should laugh? That's really too big of a subject, but briefly: you can set up a situation and then subvert expectations in a silly way, you can exaggerate things foolishly, have a character embarrass or humiliate themselves etc. There are a lot of ways to go about it. Humour is very easy to fail at though: generalised humour is best because you'll have the broadest appeal and the most chance to make the joke land with more people, but if you're too general the joke becomes generic and boring. Specific humour about a clever reference or focussed on a particular subculture or scene can be razor sharp and awesome, but if people don't get the references then it comes off as meaningless.
Lastly, if you have a character who's meant to be super smart, beautiful, a great fighter, charismatic, mysterious or something else, how do you manipulate the audience into believing that? One way is to have other characters simply describe them as that… which is the worst way to do it, at least in isolation. If other characters are announcing those traits you'll need to back it up with an example or it will come off as silly. Part of the trick then is to have a combination of characters reacting to them in a way that confirms those descriptions as well as a demonstration of it: Show a character is smart by having them quickly solve a difficult issue or come to a clever conclusion, rather than writing something like "they're the world's smartest person, they graduated from all major universities at 9 and they have 5 doctorates in neuroscience, experimental quantum physics, rocket science, genetics, and virology!", rather than giving the audience the impression that the character is smart it will make them think the writer is an idiot.
How do you manipulate the audience into having the impressions that you want? Have you ever tried to do that and failed?
The best off Gunwallace track this week was picked by Gunwallace himself, it's the theme to Joe Pop - Staring Oz and Banes! This one is funny, and was a lot of fun to do! Oz is so great on base!
Originally from 9th of March 2015
Topics and shownotes
Links
Manipulation part 1, Quackcast 784 - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/quackcast/episode-784-manipulation
Featured comic:
Another Random Sequential Experiment - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2026/apr/13/featured-comic-another-random-sequential-experiment/
Featured music:
Joe Pop - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Joe_Pop/ - by dave63, rated E.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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