Stop Raising The Stakes

In defense of stories that are not about saving the world

There are way too many books, movies, and other media where it turns out that it’s not just about defeating the bad guy— no, the whole city/country/world/universe/multiverse is at stake!

I think that too many writers are reading bad, or at least oversimplified, writing advice. The writing advice says “you have to be constantly raising the stakes of the conflict—more and more has to be lost if the heroes lose. That way, the readers are emotionally invested and feel a lot of suspense.” But I think in reality putting the whole world at stake decreases suspense, decreases emotional investment, and severely limits the number of stories you can tell.

Suspense is kind of overrated.¹ There are many stories that work perfectly well with no suspense at all. Sometimes you want to read “man pines after his crush, totally oblivious to the fact that she’s also pining after him” or “is the spooky thing real? Yes! It’s real!” or “bad guy is doing an evil thing so the good guys take them down.” You do not want suspense about whether the love interests are going to get together. If they don’t get together at the end you will throw the book down in disgust.

But if your story is the sort of story that needs suspense, putting the world at stake kills the suspense, because we know you’re not going to fucking do it. No one is going to end their story with the world being totally destroyed and billions of people dying. Even Avengers: Infinity War got retconned.

On the other hand, if the stake is something like “the heroes desperately need money and if they return The Littlest And Most Adorable Robot to the bad guys who want to mistreat it then they will get money”… well, then there’s suspense. The heroes might not get their money. You might tell a dark story where the heroes screw over The Littlest And Most Adorable Robot for their own needs. They might get a third option at the last minute… or they might not.

One of the most suspenseful climaxes I’ve read recently is in the book Mo Dao Zu Shi. [Mild spoilers for the rest of this paragraph, but I’ll be vague.] In a certain sense, the climax has very low stakes: the villain has already been defeated, and the primary thing at stake is whether they’ll manage to escape to Japan. But the climax is gripping, because the whole “escape to Japan” situation is an excuse to get all the major characters in a room for the world’s worst group therapy session. And by this point you care a lot about all the characters, you want them to be happy, you want them to resolve their differences, and you know by this point that MXTX will not pull her punches. There’s a serious risk that any of the characters will fundamentally never be okay again.

That brings us to emotional investment. Unless handled carefully, save the world plots kill the reader’s emotional investment, because of scope insensitivity.

There’s a reason that I said city/country/world/universe/multiverse up there. Recent research suggests that the multiverse may contain as many as several cities, but from our perspective, a city and a multiverse are both just A Hell Of A Lot Of People. People pay about the same amount of money to save 2,000 birds or 200,000 birds, because both of those just seem like A Big Number. People tend to give more money to help a single identified victim than to help anonymous, statistical victims.² These biases are bad news for effective charity but useful to take advantage of in your writing.

It’s not just that readers don’t scale up their caring with the number of victims. In general, readers care more about The Littlest And Most Adorable Robot than they do about the entire world. It’s easy for writers to put a very big number and then expect that the readers are now invested, but if you want your readers to care, you have to do the work to make the world be something they care about. Maybe you want to explicitly depict some Little And Adorable Robots that exist in the world.

“The world” can be a fine motivation to get your character to do things: in Lord of the Rings, Frodo brought the Ring to Mordor to save the world. But ultimately, in the climax, the thing the reader cares about is not Middle-Earth as a whole; the reader cares about the specific person Frodo Baggins and whether he will endure to make it to Mount Doom. “Will Middle-Earth be saved?” is not the thing that keeps us up to 3 am reading. The thing that keeps us up to 3am is “is Frodo going to make it?” It’s a weird and terrible quirk of human psychology, but this is how people work.

But it’s not just that. Middle-Earth is not a vague setting full of, you know, places, and people, and here’s a very large number, that gets you invested, right? Stakes!

Tolkien—a master at worldbuilding—has established, with specific details, specific locations that we care about. Fellowship of the Ring is slow-paced at first, because Tolkien was wise enough to know that he needed to get us to care about the Shire and fear that Sauron’s shadow would fall on it. Frodo and Sam are talking about the Shire as they climb up Mount Doom, and that’s not an accident.

Finally, the emphasis on the world being at stake limits the stories you can tell. I think the dangers are most obvious in comic books, where everything is Final Crisis On Infinite Multiverses (The World Will Never Be The Same!). Of course, if there is a Final Crisis On Infinite Multiverses, the heroes are busy. You can’t tell a small, quiet, character-driven story where Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne talk with each other about their experiences having both lost their parents, or Tim Drake tries to balance school with fighting crime, or two members of the Batfamily miscommunicate very badly about whether they are on a date.³ If there is a Final Crisis On Infinite Multiverses, then obviously Tim Drake’s math test is not important and all dates are canceled. This is a problem, because as far as I can tell from Tumblr, Archive of Our Own, TikTok, and everywhere else that fandom occurs, there is nothing people want more than Tim Drake taking math classes and badly miscommunicating about whether he is on a date.

It’s not just about the characters, either. Consider such classics as “Batman has a baby dropped on him and has to fight crime while holding a baby”:

You can’t tell this story if Batman has to save the world! If the world is in danger, Batman is just going to drop the baby off at some random daycare and say “sorry! Darkseid is attacking, your problem now!” In order for Batman to have to fight crime while holding a baby, it has to be not stupid for him to continue to have the baby.

No matter how badly they go wrong, the vast majority of situations will not result in any cities, planets, or multiverses being under threat. Most people don’t ever have to prevent a nuclear bomb from being dropped on a city. Most people who work in law enforcement or anti-terrorism don’t ever have to prevent a nuclear bomb from being dropped on a city! Therefore, most stories you can possibly tell do not involve existential risks to cities, planets, or multiverses. The mania for saving the world has led to a massive undersupply of other perfectly good plotlines in the science fiction, fantasy, and action genres, such as “there is a thing in a heavily guarded place and we have to steal it,” “someone got murdered and we need to figure out who did it,” “we are currently in a place which is bad and we need to be in a different place which is better,” and “someone has misplaced Matt Damon again and now we have to find and rescue him.”

I’m not saying that save-the-world stories are bad. Sometimes it’s exactly what a story calls for. But you don’t raise the stakes of a conflict by attaching a bigger number to it.

1. Maybe I will write a post about this later if people are interested.

2. I looked into this a bit and it replicates. I’m shocked too.

3. I refuse to get involved in shipping wars.