: I think the ability to relay emotional weight is proportional to your ability to make your reader forget themselves. I played Dawn of War (a Warhammer game) and had a blast but I never shed

@Merenda569

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I think the ability to relay emotional weight is proportional to your ability to make your reader forget themselves. I played Dawn of War (a Warhammer game) and had a blast but I never shed any tears for any of those characters despite the horrible situation they were all in. On the other hand, "The Cold Equations" (a short story) wasn't particularly gruesome or violent and I would even say it was a compassionate story. However, while reading it, I forgot myself, focused on the characters, developed a little relationship to them, and then was naturally sad when something much less horrible than planetary destruction happened. Warhammer, on the other hand, spends no time developing character relationships and not much on making the player lose themselves.

A side note that applies to many genres: I think a lot of the grimdark stuff is difficult to become invested in because, for most of us, the setting of that type of art is very different from everyday life. This discrepancy between reality and the setting is a wedge between the reader and the characters and it takes authorial skill to gloss over this. I've never met any orks, eldar, or tau, nor have I been in space, shot lasers, etc, so there's not much for me to relate to in Warhammer. On the other hand, "The Cold Equations" takes place in a similarly distant future but the aforementioned discrepancy is minimized and the focus is upon the interactions of a man and a woman, both fairly ordinary, whom we can all relate to. Therefore, I'm able to look past the futuristic setting, forget myself, and start to care about the characters.

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