skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-02-screenplay-dialogue/symptoms-emotion.md

# Emotion complaints

Part of the symptom router. Open this file when the complaint is about emotion. Each complaint below is followed by the cards that repair it, best first; `LOOKUP.md` says which file holds each card.

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### "The emotional scene doesn't land"

1. The situation has not paid for it. Strip every emotional word and see whether it survives
   `emo.earn_the_situation` · `emo.sentimentality`
2. Stop naming the feeling
   `emo.telling_the_emotion` · `emo.physical_register`
3. Understate at the peak — the audience supplies the intensity
   `emo.understate_at_peak` · `emo.specific_detail`
4. Turn away at the moment of impact
   `emo.withhold_reaction`
5. Site a genuinely funny sequence immediately before the loss, same people, same room, thirty seconds to two minutes of gap. An audience that has just laughed is unarmoured, and the joke must not be about the coming loss
   `emo.laugh_then_grief` · `comedy.comedy_in_tragedy`

### "It's emotional but nothing moves"

1. Treat the feeling as a value and turn it
   `emo.emotional_turn` · `scene.value_turn`
2. Let the reaction arrive late, somewhere ordinary
   `emo.delayed_reaction` · `emo.emotion_against_type`
3. Carry it on a task, an object, or a gap
   `emo.emotion_through_task` · `emo.object_carrier` · `emo.emotion_in_the_gap`
4. Give the response to a witness instead of the central character
   `emo.someone_else_feels_it`

### "It's relentless and I've stopped feeling it"

1. The named failure. Do not soften the peaks — flatten what surrounds them
   `emo.emotional_monotone` · `emo.contrast_sets_level`

### "Writing grief, love, shame, anger, hope"

`emo.grief` · `emo.grief_that_resolves` · `emo.love_without_declaration` · `emo.shame` · `emo.cold_anger` · `emo.relief` · `emo.hope` · `emo.nostalgia`

**Fear and its neighbours:** inside the frightened mind, where attention narrows and syntax goes `emo.fear_from_inside` · dread, which has no object yet and converts irreversibly to fear the moment the thing has a face `emo.dread_vs_fear` · the recoil — physical once and briefly, moral for a whole work `emo.disgust`

**The positive ones, which are harder:** joy, which needs a clock, a witness or logistics or it writes white `emo.joy` · pride, which the proud character must never claim `emo.pride` · anticipation, which is a schedule rather than a wish `emo.anticipation` · awe, written as the failure of a category rather than as size `emo.awe`

**The ones a character will not admit to:** envy, which is arithmetic and needs proximity — nobody envies a king `emo.envy` · loneliness, which is unspent behaviour rather than solitude `emo.loneliness` · guilt against shame, which produce opposite conduct: guilt walks toward the injured party and shame walks away `emo.guilt_vs_shame`

**Anger has two settings:** the eruption that spends itself, loses vocabulary, and costs something that cannot be taken back `emo.hot_rage` · against the cold one above

**And when feeling is unavailable:** numbness, written by subtraction rather than description, and good for about one scene before the reader leaves `emo.numbness`

**The one people reach for love to describe and miss:** tenderness — attention paid to something *because* it is fragile and will not last. Love is directed at a person and wants something back; this is directed at a condition and wants nothing, which is why it reads as condescension between equals in a live fight, and why it disarms satire and noir on contact `emo.tenderness`

### "The emotion feels like a trick"

1. The named failure: material that carries automatic weight, used rather than examined
   `emo.manipulated_beat`
2. And the related one: asking for feeling about someone the audience has not met
   `emo.unearned_attachment` · `open.unearned_stakes`
3. The deferred payoff is the honest version — plant it unguarded and pay it late
   `emo.deferred_payoff`

### "The scene works with the music and dies without it"

1. The diagnostic is mechanical and reliable: play the cut with the sound off. If nothing happens, the scene is not written. That is the named failure, and the repair is never a different track
   `emo.score_does_the_work` · `emo.earn_the_situation`
2. What music can legitimately do instead is disagree with the scene — a second reading the dialogue never states
   `sub.score_counterpoint`
3. Specify the music's attitude, never the track, and start the cue on a line rather than on a cut

### "The happy part is the boring part"

1. Joy is the absence of want, so it needs one of three things: a clock the audience can feel, a witness who is outside it, or logistics — who cooked, who is late, who is on the bad chair
   `emo.joy`
2. If it has become a run of pleasant images over music, that is the named failure, and its real cost is the loss of the loss: a montage is a receipt for joy, so there is nothing to be deprived of later
   `emo.joy_as_montage` · `scene.montage_value_turn`
3. The cheaper and more structured version of the same register is the wait before a good thing — a date the audience can name and a preparation to watch
   `emo.anticipation`

### "The actor says the scene is unplayable"

1. They are right, and the cause is that you wrote a state rather than an action. Name the transitive verb for each beat — *to reassure, to trap, to get forgiven* — and write the line as an attempt at it
   `emo.leave_it_for_the_performer` · `beat.tactic_beat`
2. Delete every parenthetical and adverb in the scene and read it again. Whatever stops working was never in the scene
   `emo.emotion_written_as_direction` · `sub.no_parentheticals`
3. Leave one gap you do not fill. Hand the scene to two actors and check both readings are defensible; if only one is possible, you have written an instruction
   `sub.actors_room`
4. If the performer is a child, the same rule becomes a hard ceiling rather than a preference: a child can deliver an action and an intention on a shooting day and cannot deliver a state, so the line must contain something to *do*. It constrains the line and not the scene — the scene may carry any weight you like, provided the child in it has a task
   `emo.child_performer_emotion` · `char.age_specific_logic`

### "The narrator says he is fine and I need the reader to know he is not"

1. This is the effect only prose can deliver — the reader holds the character's account and the truth at once, and the gap between them is the feeling
   `emo.page_only_interiority`
2. The instrument is the unreliable interior, run close
   `pov.close_third` · `pov.free_indirect_style` · `sub.narrator_self_deception`
3. But it must be signposted by evidence the narration itself reports. An interior that is merely wrong reads as a writer who has lost track of the character
   `sub.buried_subtext`

### "The cringe scene has become unwatchable"

1. Vicarious embarrassment is a physiological response, so this is a physical limit rather than a matter of taste, and the audience leaves
   `emo.cringe_without_exit`
2. The repair is cheap: give the scene a door the audience can see, an ally who knows, or a cut
   `emo.humiliation_comedy` · `comedy.when_to_stop`
3. Pick one setting per scene — oblivious, which is repeatable and sympathetic, or aware, which is excruciating and spendable about once an episode
   `emo.humiliation_comedy` · `comedy.cringe`

### "The threat is over and the last act has nothing in it"

1. The material after the danger is neither fear nor relief but the mismatch between what happened and a world with no procedure for it — and the survivor's problem is administrative, not psychological. Write the form, the insurance call, the people being normal at them
   `emo.horror_aftermath`
2. The ending shape it belongs to, and the tension-side use of the same principle
   `end.horror_coda` · `tens.aftermath_not_act`
3. If the contract was the ride, put the residue in one shot rather than one act

### "The season has a plot and no feeling"

1. Write the season's emotional question as a sentence with a person in it — *can she be in the same room as her mother* — not as a theme, then assign each episode a distinct register
   `emo.series_arc`
2. The standard defect is a flat middle of four episodes in the same key. Reserve at least one per season for the opposite register: a comedy season needs its grief episode, a bleak one needs its wedding
   `emo.emotional_monotone` · `tens.release_valve`
3. At episode scale, name the one emotion the unit is about and find the scene where it turns; put the trough about two-thirds in and give the last beat to the emotion rather than to the cliffhanger
   `emo.episode_emotional_shape` · `tens.trough_placement`
4. A format that resets by contract maintains a baseline on purpose, and an arc imposed on it breaks what the audience came for
   `char.protected_static_role`

### "The brand film is true and nobody cares"

1. One emotion per film, named on the brief in a single word, and taken from the category's own friction — the thing the product's users actually put up with
   `emo.brand_emotion`
2. The test that decides whether it is the client's film: if the emotion survives with the logo removed and a competitor's added, the brand is sponsoring the feeling rather than causing it
   `theme.implicit_ad_claim` · `end.brand_film_close`
3. And if the brief is a borrowed occasion — a season, a bereavement, a returning soldier — that is the named failure, and the residue of suspicion attaches to the brand
   `emo.borrowed_feeling`

### "Writing feeling for very young children"

1. The adult rule inverts. The deliverable is the child's ability to name the state, so the feeling is stated plainly, in the first person, by the character: name it, normalise it, give a usable action
   `emo.kids_emotion` · `emo.telling_the_emotion`
2. The child feels it and the adult does not fix it in one line, and the difficulty belongs to the child's scale — a lost toy, not a parent's job
   `theme.preschool_claim`
3. Subtext still exists, but it must be readable at that age, and the resolution has to be one they can carry out of the room
   `sub.kid_readable_subtext` · `end.child_carry_ending`
4. From about eight the adult rules resume and named feelings read as condescension. For the register itself, and for what is funny at that age
   `voice.kids_register` · `comedy.kids_comedy`

### "The interview subject cried and the film feels cheap"

1. The audience can see interview pressure with surprising accuracy, and the moment they do, every factual claim in the film is downgraded with it
   `emo.extracted_emotion`
2. The working sequence is attachment first, hard material second — name, room, job, one ordinary competence — because a stranger's tears are information and a person's tears are an event
   `emo.testimony_emotion` · `emo.unearned_attachment`
3. Do not cut in on the tears; cut away. And leave the question and the pause in rather than covering them with B-roll
   `emo.withhold_reaction` · `sub.documentary_subject`
4. Show the person doing something other than suffering, or the film has reduced them to their worst week
   `info.withholding_from_the_subject`

### "The grief scene is written for people who do not behave like that"

1. The experience of an emotion varies little; the rules about *displaying* it vary enormously and depend on who is in the room. Decide who is present before deciding what the character shows
   `emo.cultural_display_register`
2. In high-context settings the emotional information is not in the face at all — it is in a deviation from ritual, and the audience reads the deviation
   `sub.high_context_indirection`
3. Composure only reads as effort once the audience has seen the rule operating on somebody else
   `char.inside_outside_culture`

### "The brief says reassure and everything I write sounds like a brochure"

Because comfort and reassurance are different jobs and you have been handed the second one. A frightened adult is not scanning for kindness; they are scanning for evidence that a system is still running and someone is inside it.

1. The rule that does all the work: every sentence of reassurance carries a number, a name or a next action. Three checkable things — what is known, what is not known yet, what happens next with a time on it — and no promise about the outcome
   `emo.adult_reassurance`
2. State your own uncertainty first. An admitted unknown buys credibility; a discovered one destroys it. And give them one thing to do, because a specific action is what returns a sense of control
   `voice.authority_by_specificity`
3. What you are writing instead is almost certainly `emo.false_reassurance` — a guarantee about an outcome you do not control. It appears to work, because the listener goes quiet, and the quiet is compliance. The repair is mechanical: swap the guarantee about the outcome for a commitment you can actually keep, which is nearly always about presence or about a next step
4. It stays legitimate as characterisation. A character who says *she's going to be fine* is telling you what they cannot tolerate hearing, and that is the only honest use of it
5. Note the ceiling: reassurance lowers dread. Do not run it inside a piece whose job is for the audience to be afraid
   `anta.bounded_threat`

### "I have to say the unbearable thing and stay in the room"

1. The shape is fixed and it is short: a sentence of warning one beat before, the fact in one plain sentence with no subordinate clause and no euphemism, then silence. The pause is the technique
   `emo.bad_news_delivery`
2. The reliable tell of a faked version is a deliverer who keeps talking. Comprehension collapses at the fact, so everything after it is received as tone, and an audience knows this from their own lives
3. Never write the recipient's reaction as a stage direction
   `emo.emotion_written_as_direction` · `emo.leave_it_for_the_performer`
4. And check whose scene it is. If the real subject is the deliverer's discomfort and the news is a stage for it, audiences read that inside a line and resent it
5. If the piece is the real thing rather than a drama of it — a notification script, a safety message, a line somebody will have to say — the register is the previous complaint
   `emo.adult_reassurance`

### "He already knows what I've come to tell him"

The inversion of the complaint above, and the two are mistaken for each other constantly. There the news is new and the craft is the warning shot and the pause; here the information is already in the room, so the scene cannot run on it at all.

1. It runs on who says it, what saying it costs them, and the fact that it can no longer be unsaid
   `scene.confirmation_scene`
2. Write the recipient's line before the speaker's. They should be ahead, and the scene is far better when the recipient supplies a detail the speaker did not have
3. Give the speaker a cost. They are not delivering information, they are ending an arrangement that was protecting them too
4. End on an action that was impossible five minutes earlier — a call made, a door left open, a name used — because the turn is not knowledge, it is that the pretence is now unavailable. A scene of this kind that ends on a reaction has not turned
   `scene.early_exit`
5. The failure mode is the recipient saying "I know" and the scene stopping. "I know" is the first line, not the last
6. And check who is actually ahead. If the information is new to the *audience* rather than only to the character, this shape throws away a reveal you had
   `emo.bad_news_delivery` · `info.dramatic_irony`

### "I want the reader to feel less alone and it keeps turning into advice"

Three cards, and they are a sequence rather than alternatives: the piece, the account inside it, and the one line people copy out of it.

1. Start here, because it is the whole craft: show someone already feeling it, never instruct the audience to. *It's okay to be angry at someone who died* is a poster; a character who is angry at someone who died, whom the piece neither punishes nor corrects, is permission — and it must not resolve, because resolution is a claim that the feeling was a problem
   `emo.permission_piece`
2. The first-person form of the same offer: an account given for its resemblance rather than its lesson, with enough ordinary detail to be recognised and no attempt to repair anything
   `emo.this_happened_too`
3. And the line itself — one sentence describing the behaviour rather than the emotion, precise enough that a reader could honestly say *no, not me*. A sentence nobody could disagree with is a horoscope
   `emo.naming_the_feeling`
4. Do not coin a word for the feeling. A compound noun hands the reader a label instead of a mirror and converts recognition into a gimmick
5. Two traps. The commission may actually be reassurance or instruction, which both want a resolution and a next step, and a piece attempting two of the three does none. And inside drama, naming a feeling ends the scene it is in — a character who can articulate what they feel has finished changing, so give the line to the wrong person or place it after the turn
   `sub.subtext_announced`

### "They want something for the anniversary and it's all adjectives"

1. You are in a register with its own rules: writing addressed to a group about itself on a marked occasion, whose business is values rather than information and whose mode is praise
   `emo.commemorative_register`
2. Check the occasion is not contested and the group is in fact one group, because praise addressed to a divided room reads as a ruling
3. The named failure to watch for in your own draft is `emo.we_that_excludes` — belonging manufactured by naming, or clearly implying, who does not belong, so that the group is constituted by its outside rather than by anything it did. The repair is research rather than tone; softening the line leaves the structure where it was
   `theme.propaganda` · `theme.applied_only_to_others`
4. If what the family actually wants is a person remembered rather than a value celebrated, that is a different job with a different shape
   `dial.the_eulogy` · `voice.eulogy_register`

### "The copy works and I don't like what it's doing"

1. Then look for the middle step: persuasion that installs a deficiency in the audience so the product can relieve it — a problem they did not have until the copy proposed it
   `emo.manufactured_inadequacy`
2. The alternative is not softness, it is a different claim shape: assert a competence the product serves rather than a lack it fills
   `anta.problem_as_enemy` · `theme.implicit_ad_claim`
3. Its neighbour, when the material rather than the audience is being worked on
   `emo.manipulated_beat`

### "She was wrecked last week and this week she has to be fine"

1. That is a real mechanism with a name, and it is what lets a returning lead be genuinely moved by this week's case and still open next week at the same baseline without the restoration reading as amnesia
   `emo.procedural_reset`
2. It is illegitimate the moment the show's promise is accumulation. In a serial a reset is the single commonest audience complaint and no amount of craft lands it; in a limited series every feeling is meant to be carried to the end
3. And it is not the cure for a season with a plot and no feeling — that is a separate complaint, and the shape it needs is per-episode
   `emo.episode_emotional_shape`

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