MANLY TEARS: Why Your Crying Proves it's Great

Two episodes of screentime is still enough to make you cry for her.

When it comes to storytelling, one of the most important questions to ask is, "Why do I care about this?" Yes, it's a major issue that can make a bad story tug at your heartstrings or a great story put you to sleep: pathos. For those of you who might not be in the know, pathos is a term coined in Greek plays as an appeal to the audience's emotions. In some ways, I think it could be the single most important aspect to telling a good story.

"You're strong, Berserker..." And cue the tears.

Pathos comes in many forms. When an antagonist is so vile you want to see them fail, for example. Or when a romance makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to use the tear jerker scene as the thing I'm examining here. Why? It's the easiest one to examine. Anything can make a person laugh, or make them angry, but if you you want the audience to cry out of empathy for a character it takes an extreme amount of talent. To give an example, I can only recount off the top of my head a handful of times I've been, out of my control, moved to tears by something I've watched (no matter how many times I see it). Still, all the things that can pull tears out of me whether I want them to or not? I love them.

Say what you will about AGE, it certainly knew how to bring out the feels.

The point is that crying is a hard task to do in this day and age, especially as a man. Many people say that crying is a sign of weakness. Me? It's a sign of goodness and an ability to be empathetic. Crying shows that you give a damn about something. I honestly wish I could see more anime that could really make me cry, but therein lies a fundamental issue: it's easy to talk about an emotional scene, it's hard to make them. What's touching to one person might not even cause a blip on the radar for someone else, after all. This is why I think it takes a true master of the craft to make something that makes people all over cry.

"Friends..."

However, if we were to closely examine the feelings we have in tear jerkers, we rarely shed any tears for a series we don't like. Like I said earlier, crying requires empathy and where there's no enjoyment there will be no empathy. You can't feel a sense of sadness if some character you know nothing about dies, since they'll just be a red shirt to you. You can't feel content if two annoying characters get married, since you'd rather not see them at all. You can't seriously cry if you don't know or care about characters, and that is a difficult process. Getting to really know a character takes either a long time (example: I didn't really "get" Emiya Shirou until halfway through Unlimited Blade Works) or a staff skilled enough to bring them to life (example: even with a small amount of screentime, Gai Daigoji - Martian Successor Nadesico - became a fan favorite because the writers, animators, and voice actor really knew how to make him memorable).

Baseball is unpredictable, our everyday lives may be a series of miracles, Yukko is an idiot but you can't hate that about her and so on and so forth.

I suppose that to sum it up I should say that the ability to draw tears is a result rather than a cause. A great story will be able to make you cry out of your love of the characters. A bad story will never be able to make you cry because you simply don't care. I could've easily listed a lot of examples on scenes that tried to make me cry and failed miserably, but I don't want to spray acid at the moment. This was just a retrospective about why if you can be brought to tears by something, it proves that you love it.

Dear friends, always.