Cry With Onions

𝑳𝑨𝒀𝑬𝑹𝑺

When the emotion in a scene is so tacked on that the audience needs onions to make them even come close to crying. Amateur writers, rushed writing, or a simply trashy moment in the story are all possible culprits behind this UnTrash. Cry With Onions is the sad cousin of Laugh With Feathers, an UnTrash in which a joke is so unfunny that the audience would seemingly need to be tickled with feathers to laugh at it. Story flaws that trigger Cry With Onions have the tenancy to dampen the mood and make it hard to feel bad for whoever is involved. The SOB, for one, is challenging to shed a tear for when they get their comeuppance. Their ill-mannered behavior can be a major turn-off for the audience, and their suffering is more a moment of victory than heartbreak. Anybody else who is Too Bad To Be Likable won't be convincing the ones watching them to show sympathy. This UnTrash cannot apply if the drama is fully between the characters themselves. If the audience isn't meant to be moved, Cry With Onions will not apply.

When trying to convince the audience to cry and failing to do exactly that, a low-grade writer has many cheap choices to pick from. One is to so heavily bombard the audience with tear-jerk factors that whatever respect they have for the writer goes out the window. Such factors include music dripping with authentic emotion, everybody bawling their eyes out of their skulls, rain pouring from the sky, and at least one person dying. Books have no music, so to substitute, they can go on and on about how sad and unhappy everyone is. It isn't necessary for all of these tricks to be deployed at once to make for a melodramatic scene. Spamming The Action with any of these methods is enough to squeeze a gagging reaction out of the audience.