On destruction.
“Earning your stakes” or “A tale of two Godzillas”
You’re reading I love words and you! If you enjoy the piece, please consider liking and sharing the post on the Substack site! Thank you for your time!
Every day, people are banging on my office door, trying to get me to share my thoughts on Godzilla movies. They claw and tear each other apart for a chance to hear me even begin to utter the phrase, “King Ghidorah.” They say, “Jade, please use your years of experience writing professionally to tell us why sometimes the destruction feels impactful in a Godzilla movie and sometimes it doesn’t—preferably in some kind of numbered list.” I’ve tried to hold out for as long as I could, but fine. Here’s what I think.
2023 saw the release of the Japanese-made Godzilla: Minus One. It’s a deeply human story about a Kamikaze pilot learning to live. The interiority of its characters is on full display at every stage as the film explores the value of not sending people off to die at war. When Godzilla shows up and knocks over buildings in post-war Japan, it’s horrifying. He’s destroying people. We feel the fact that he’s ruining lives with every step. The devastation reminds us of the original 1954 Godzilla's function as an allegory for nuclear annihilation. In Legendary Picture’s Godzilla vs Kong: The New Empire (2024), King Kong gets a robot arm and body slams an even bigger ape into the city of Rio de Janeiro.
A few letters ago, we discussed how weighty subject matter doesn't need a lot of writerly flourish. The inherent importance of death, war, and illness in a narrative can speak for itself, and the writer doesn’t need to constantly use clever writing to signal that the audience should feel sad. But that is only a given in nonfiction stories. This is not always the case in a fictional world, where we have to ensure that the audience believes we have earned the stakes of our story. “But how?” you ask, splintering the wood of my door and screaming at the top of your lungs.
It’s an interesting question, especially in stories that feature mass loss—disaster, war, rebellion, or any action story with collateral damage. Events should objectively be affecting, were they real, but often they illicit the same emotion as touching a paper towel. None.
Minus One and The New Empire had different aims—one wanted to be an anti-war story, and the other purely a summer blockbuster. But still, the difference highlights what helps an audience feel loss implied by the narrative.
“More! More! Tell us more!” You say, hand breaching into my office and fiddling around for the lock. Well, I’d love to discuss a dozen things to consider when ensuring that death has meaning in your stories, but I liked that door, so you’re only getting a few.
1.“Hey, don’t think about that.”
It’s easy for a story to brush aside complexity that we may otherwise assume in a comparable real-life scenario. Often, that’s the goal. The creators of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw don’t want you to care if the guy the Rock just punched in the head was a good member of his community. They want you to say, “Hell yeah, the Rock just punched that dude in the head. God, I wish cars were real, and that I could have sex with them.”
Godzilla vs Kong: The New Empire falls into the same camp, prioritizing the spectacle of Godzilla and King Kong hitting other monsters over anything else. This is not a moral failing of the film. It’s fine if a simple story wants only to show cool things. But it’s a trade-off. The filmmakers know it would be a downer to dwell on the lives crushed by Godzilla’s awesome spin kick, but simultaneously, the audience knows buildings are often full of people. If we are supposed only to feel the feeling of “Hell yeah,” then we must disconnect from reality to the extent that emotionally resonating with the film becomes challenging.
If cool vibes are all we want our readers to feel, then all good. But if we want more, then we often have to engage with the actual ramifications of the events taking place. Other stories, including Minus One, demand the opposite of The New Empire. They have you sit with devastation when it appears.
2. Consider that violence is scary, actually.
It’s possible to mix fantastical spectacle and the grimmer aspects of fictional violence. HBO’s House of the Dragon manages an interesting balance of this. The show is about a brewing civil war between dragon riders. As fantasy viewers, we’re here in part because dragons kick ass. Even if we’re disgusted by the war mongers in the story clamoring for glory and self-interest in an avoidable conflict, we become complicit, as a war between dragons is the show we signed up to watch. We can catch ourselves filled with anticipation as two combat-ready dragons finally charge at each other halfway through the second season. But the moment they clash, it’s horrific. The majestic dragons screech like fearful animals, clawing into each other, and the fire they spew turns men to ash. None of it is anything like what the characters imagined it to be. The series takes the fantasy element of dragons and reflects the horrors of violence, allowing, or rather forcing, viewers to question any excitement they may have felt for this conflict. Stakes and dread only intensify from this moment in the story onward.
3. Set the standard of emotional investment through your central characters.
There are a thousand things that go into making a compelling character. The advice then, “make your characters good,” is strictly not helpful. But it’s important to understand that if human life feels fickle in your story, it often stems from the audience not caring about your protagonists.
The central character sets the standard for how much emotion we can expect to invest in the characters in general. In Minus One, we immediately see the protagonist fake mechanical issues to avoid his Kamikaze mission in WWII. We see not only his desire for life against his country that expects him to die, but too his survivor’s guilt and grief returning home to Tokyo post bombing. We care about him making it to the end of the story, as we witness all he has lost and what he desperately tries to keep. Through the harrowing storytelling beats throughout the film, we are rewarded for caring about the character. This trust in the story then ripples out. As secondary, tertiary, and background character stories unfold, we can believe that they will be worth investing our emotions in.
And I do hate to say, but conversely, I can not confidently tell you the names, let alone the desires of the human characters in The New Empire, a film I rewatched the day I’m writing this.
4. Demonstrate the interiority of your background characters.
The dark superhero series Invincible features ample gore and spectacle. Bodies of civilians fly apart like tissue paper as superpowered people rampage through cities. If you were to find a clip out of context, it would be easy to mistake the show for being edgy for edgy’s sake. But like a lot of Robert Kirkman's stories, there is a reverence for life in the work that you wouldn’t immediately assume from the aesthetics.
The first scene of the TV adaptation opens on a conversation between two unnamed guards, discussing their lives. These are not plot-important characters, and they don’t come back in future episodes in any significant way. Still, we hear about how one of the guards is working on his difficult relationship with his stepson. The camera cuts closer and he wells up with pride, recounting how his now-son fought so hard to overcome his drug problems. We linger on the moment before some villains arrive and the Superhero story starts in earnest.
The beginning three minutes of this show, the first thing the storytellers want us to see, is this conversation. Yes, it sets up themes of fatherhood, which will be explored later in the story. But more importantly, the show signals to us that it understands the weight of its world's unnamed people. When we see acts of mass violence later, we understand that in this story, civilians aren’t just vague fictional space holders. We’re not supposed to pretend they don’t exist while superpowered characters do backflips into buildings; each person has fears, hopes, and triumphs, which is critical to the core themes of the work.
As an update, one of the people clawing at my door has gotten in. They are punching me in the head, saying,
“Thank you, Jade. With that last point, I now have an excuse to procrastinate writing the key parts of my story, because you said I should focus on background characters. I’m going to spend the next 7 hours deciding what bagels the random villagers in my story prefer.”
Notably, that’s not what I said. But since you’re here, I’ll emphasize that giving texture to our stories means we can better reflect our values in our work. When we challenge ourselves to interrogate what we are inclined to prioritize in the stories we tell, we can better define what life means to us. It can be tedious or even frustrating, but I think it’s worth doing every time. Now, if you would, get the hell out of my room.
Read/Listen to more words!
BUT JADE, JADE WHAT ABOUT SHIN GODZILLA?????
"god I wish cars are real..." had me actually Laughing out loud. Really great piece other than being hilarious too!