Potato is yum

So I read and watch a crap ton of stories in the form of anime, webcomics, books, and much more. I actually have an entire ranking for all of the media I consume based on my opinions which I am currently trying to make more readable for a future post. Anyway, I noticed a bunch of interesting patterns with my preferences while going through the thousands of pieces of media I enjoy. For the next week I’ll go through the five biggest annoyances I have with many stories.

Today will be the use of “That Person” to create some kind of fabricated mystery around an unintroduced character. I often see in many mid level webcomics that I rate from 0-7 that the phrase, “I’ll need to find that person.” is a commonly seen phrase in many contexts. The most common context being that of the typical regressor that wants to find “that person” to exploit something and hit that regressor itch that a non regressor story can’t hit. On paper, this makes total sense and story wise it makes sense however the mystery is completely fabricated when using obscure language to obfuscate the meaning of a phrase.

Almost every time in a regression or time hopping story I’ve almost never seen a good usage of this phrase. This phrase could just be replaced by something that describes what they are actually trying to figure out or could be replaced with some actual suspense instead of this fake suspense. I think a lot of these mid level stories are being severely kneecapped by this need to create suspense at every possible moment. When I read an action story I care about much more than this kind of fabricated suspense. In fact, suspense created by stakes, danger, or internal conflict resonate much deeper with a reader than using some kind of shortcut to make people question who this random ass character we’ve never seen before is.

The reason why it doesn’t make sense is because we often have no prior knowledge of this supposed person and really have no guess to base it on. This surprise actually becomes effective and becomes a device that can create suspense or surprise when the author uses the phrase “that person” to perfectly describe something and then either show it’s someone else or, even better, show it is exactly what the reader is expecting.

I was recently reading My Passive Skills Are Invincible translated by Qiscans and found a fairly effective use of the phrase “That Person” where the person was perfectly described before the introduction of the character with clear stakes and importance of the character described by the main character. Once the character is introduced, their appearance in the webcomic and their demeanor almost nearly perfectly matches what is described by the main character and the missing pieces are what adds to the suspense to make me as the reader want to read the next chapter for the character introduction. I know enough to invest interest in the character but not enough to know who they are.

This usage of “That Person” is probably just a relic of lazy character introduction. However, proper character introductions are extremely important to a story even if the character is a ally or enemy to the protagonist.