Cry With Onions

𝑳𝑨𝒀𝑬𝑹𝑺

When the emotion in a scene is so tacked on that the audience needs onions to come close to crying. Amateur creators, 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 go on and on about how sad, miserable, and plain 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. Characters bellowing about their feelings shoves the Sledgehammer Message of "everybody is sad" down viewers' throats. Show, Don't Tell and even Suspension Of Disbelief are rudely ignored while all this is going on. The cast standing around and lamenting about how things aren't going well likens their emotions to hyperbole rather than those of real people.

UnRec
Every good story has its Low Points. It's an unfortunate truth that life doesn't always go the way we want it to. Reflecting this reality in fiction is a must to avoid the story from being one big happy fest. If a writer incorporates these negative emotions into their work improperly, it's jarring to the audience who realizes how wrong they were for anticipating better. The Main Cast is the entity critical to the Low Point, and as such, their feelings will be the storytelling modes of the scene. How their thoughts are told to the audience affects the quality of the corresponding Low Point. If Cry With Onions is the selected UnTrash for achieving this task, you can only expect attachment to the story and respect for your writing abilities to be lost. You aren't writing your adventure for a crowd of simpletons who must have the idea of the scene drilled into their skulls to understand what's going on. Pulling rain down onto the protagonists and blasting melodramatic music goes against everything a competent creator believes in. Show, Don't Tell is effective enough to get the point across. How the Main Cast reacts to the killjoy situation is ample conveyance of their displeasure. You can describe how they're crying, shaking, or stuttering in speak, but don't allow this alone to dominate the scene.