The Physics of Great Storytelling

Day 2 of Inkhaven: 30 Days of Posts

Spoilers ahead for Hunter X Hunter, A Wise Man's Fear

The most satisfying moments in fiction feel like watching dominoes fall. The author sets them up carefully, one by one, over hundreds of pages. Then they let go, and everything that happens next follows from the logic of what came before.

Of course there are elements of narrative that help enormously with enjoying a story, and so in practice what often is most effective is going back and forth between parts which are constructed to have high narrative coherence, in which the story goes in directions that the author simply wants it to go. Things happen according to the author's will. The main character just happens to bump into the princess in the castle corridor, or gets given the tool they need at just the right moment.

We can think of these sections of a story as low entropy moments where elements are carefully introduced before being mixed together. When this happens, entropy increases: conflict emerges, things are hard to predict, and events cascade into each other, purely via the logic of the universe and characters that have been established.

One of my favourite examples of this is the Palace Invasion Arc in Hunter X Hunter. The mangaka, Yoshihiro Togashi, establishes nen as a magic system based on abilities carefully constructed using contracts and limitations to create more powerful effects, and tailored to fit one's individual needs and personality. Then he introduces a cast of heroes and villains who each have their own motivation to join a rapidly brewing inter-species war for control of the planet. The antagonists take the form primarily of human-ant hybrids called Chimera Ants, in particular three royal guards who are firmly beyond the ability of any character in the story to defeat.

He then places this complex cast, all with very different capabilities, motivations and psychologies, into the same battleground with a single victory condition: the elimination of the ant king. What follows is an incredible series of events in which everything turns on tiny decisions, each one downstream of the specific constraints and psychology of whoever is making it. This makes everything that happens feel earned.

What's more, no punches are pulled for the sake of serving the narrative or the idea that our main characters are "good". The way they end up killing the ant king is by using a dirty nuclear bomb that an old man has to sacrifice his life to get into the right position. By deceiving him and isolating him, humanity shows its absolute ruthlessness. It is so refreshing to experience a story in which the characters exploit the full action space available to them to bring about an outcome.

As a different example, in A Wise Man's Fear, Kvothe ends up in a fight against a group of bandits while desperately outmatched. During the fighting he is absolutely ruthless in using the most vicious form of his sympathy magic, killing each bandit by linking them to a wax homunculus he creates. This is a really creative use of the magic that takes advantage of every tool he has access to, and leads to a completely one sided massacre. It works because it's the natural consequence of the character being desperate enough and not being tied to a particular narrative outcome or the need to do things heroically. Unfortunately, Rothfuss can't sustain this. The rest of the book feels like it charts a very clear path where things happen to Kvothe because the author needed those things to happen to him. By comparison, his time at the university feels much more alive because he gets to make real choices.

Togashi sustains it, and takes the principle even further at the level of character. Towards the end of Hunter X Hunter, Killua chooses to end his journey with Gon. They never have an explicit conversation about why, but the reasons are communicated during the Palace Invasion.

During this time Gon faces a royal guard named Neferpitou, who is healing a sickly, blind young girl named Komugi on the king's orders. Part of Gon's character is his naive tendency to make friends and to be extremely loyal to them in typical shounen fashion. However, he often completely disregards people outside of his circle, for example choosing to chat in a friendly way to the Phantom Troupe despite knowing they killed all of his friend Kurapika's clansmen. Because they had never personally harmed him, he was willing to engage with them on the basis of his specific history with them.

This leads to him demanding that Neferpitou abandon the healing of Komugi to heal his friend Kite instead, essentially dooming her for the sake of someone he cares about. Killua witnesses this darkness revealed by Gon, and is essentially invisible to him in the process as he pursues his revenge. Later on, after saving Gon's life, Killua quietly chooses to end their journey together, without directly stating why. This quiet character work, done without ever being explicitly stated out loud, is immensely gratifying, if quietly devastating, because we as the audience are left to consider the reasons behind Killua's choice.

Killua's departure is the character-level version of the principle of letting the world do the work. Togashi doesn't arrange a dramatic confrontation because the story doesn't need one. Killua is who he is, he's seen what he's seen, and he makes the choice that follows from that. The best fiction earns its emotional weight not by constructing the perfect moment, but by building a world complete enough that the author themselves are surprised by what happens.