Stakes in Fiction

Uh, so, for a lot of this week I’ve been in something like a Pit of Despair. The whole, ‘it’s another year, I’ve done nothing with my life, I have nothing to look forward to,’ thing. Y’know. All that. 

Anyway, I just finished Star Wars: Dark Rendezvous, which was alarmingly good? Not sure what’s next. Still watching Jentry Chau, and the 10th episode is basically a season finale, but there are three more episodes? Getting confused on the last few episodes of Interior Chinatown, too. 

I am trying to finish up Dragon Age: Inquisition, before I get to trying out God of War.

Stakes in Fiction

So I recently read the book (novella?) The Sacred Ring. I thought it was bad. In my review I compared it to a cheap TV movie. The story is about some middle schoolers in modern Ireland going on a treasure hunt for the Ring of Saint Valentine, which is an artifact of some power–enough that when it was uncovered in the 1830’s, the Pope had it hidden in Ireland. The kids sort of stumble onto clues and decide to go after it, as it’s supposed to help with love, and Kynan, one of the kids, is dismayed at his parents’ upcoming divorce.

In my review I referred to this motivation as… [checks notes] ‘weaksauce.’

When we talk about ‘stakes’ in fiction, we mean, “Why do we care about what happens in the story?” Or, “What would happen if the protagonist(s) don’t succeed?” In epic fantasy, it often means that the villains take over or destroy the world. It’s a simple idea, but it works. Now obviously, not every story is going to have world-ending stakes, and that’s fine, especially because not every story is epic fantasy with a world-threatening villain. It’d be pretty darn weird if a romantic comedy had world-ending stakes, wouldn’t it?

On the one hand, a short little story about three kids on a treasure hunt doesn’t need stakes that are too heavy. Then again… the story sort of sets up heavy stakes. The prologue is the Pope in 1830’s hearing about the discovery of Saint Valentine’s tomb and relics, and declaring that the Sacred Ring is too powerful to be left in public. So he has the relics split up and the Ring hidden away with a priest he trusts in Ireland. Even before we know what this Ring does, we’re told it’s powerful and dangerous.

Except our heroes sort of stumble onto the treasure hunt by accident; someone pops up and tells them (in old Irish) about it, they decide to go for it because Kynan’s parents are divorcing, and… then they go do it. And yeah, divorcing parents suck, okay, but at the same time, we don’t know anything about these people other than that they’re his parents and are divorcing, and after showing us that an authority figure (the Pope two hundred years ago) thought it was dangerous to keep hidden, the idea that a kid’s going to dig it up to fix his home life seems pretty silly.

Also, it turns out that there’s a villain after the Ring. He wants it because his ancestor helped discover it, and he feels that it therefore belongs to him. Or something. I don’t know. What does he want to do with the Ring and its vaguely-defined love-related powers? Fudge if I know.

I couldn’t help but think that there are other children’s stories with similar premises that also worked a lot better. Off to the top of my head, Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, the first book in The Dark Is Rising series, is also about three kids, who are younger than Sacred Ring’s protagonists, trying to find a treasure. We’re not told in that one what will happen if the bad guys get the artifact, but given that it’s a clearly Arthurian artifact, and these people are willing to kidnap a child over it, we know it’s probably something bad. This example works so much better because we like the characters, and get to know them. They’re also clearly not planning to use the object of power for themselves.

The ‘Save the marriage’ thing might work, if we knew these characters, or we make the vaguely Christian vibes into serious ones and this is a matter of saving their souls or something; instead, it’s just kind of there.

It reminded me of the film Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to the 2010 live-action Alice in Wonderland, in which the action kicks off because… the Mad Hatter is sad. It’s important to be supportive of your depressed friends, sure, but Alice goes and almost breaks all of reality because the Hatter is sad about his missing family. We know it’ll work out in the end, and that a lot more will happen, but the characters don’t, meaning that Alice goes and nearly destroys the space-time continuum because her friend is upset.

Dumb!

Look, just because a story is aimed at a younger audience, that doesn’t mean you can’t have serious stakes. Hounds of the Morrigan is very much for kids, and yet if our heroes fail, then the Morrigan will wreck the world. The Dark is Rising has the threat of the Dark trying to dominate the world. But even if you don’t have those big stakes, or have something smaller, like a family’s status, it can work if you clearly define what those stakes are, and we care about the characters to whom it affects.

If that doesn’t happen, the audience will not care! I did not care! And if your audience does not care about the stakes… well, then you have a major problem! Readers or viewers or players who do not care about what happens when the protagonist fails are not going to walk away saying it is a good story.

Establish the stakes. Make us care about the characters affected by those stakes, make us care about the world in which the story is set, and make it clear how they’re all connected. And for fudge’s sake, don’t have the protagonists willingly messing around with powers beyond their understanding in order to make quick fixes in people’s personal lives.

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