To Chibi or Not Chibi
I discovered chibis during the pandemic. I did not like them. Airene and I were producing our webcomic, The Night Wolves, and she – as I first saw it – wanted to suddenly swap out our really beautifully drawn characters for a bunch of Pillsbury doughboys.
If, like me, you’ve never heard of chibis before, they are the exaggerated, cutesy, two-dimensional version of a character. As an example, here’s what the protagonists of The Apothecary Diaries look like normally:
And here’s what they look like in chibi mode:
Chibi-mode is a tonal shift into caricature to indicate extreme emotion. But why, at the moment when you’ve worked so damn hard as a writer to get people to feel an extreme emotion, would you suddenly back away from actually letting them feel it fully?
With their cuteness, chibis are supposed to endear you to the character, but it seemed to me very much like cheating the viewer / reader of an emotional payoff. And chibis are sometimes used when production budgets are low, which adds to the feeling of being cheated.
In writing, there’s no equivalent to chibi-mode, but we do see a lot of “fade to black” around extreme emotions. Instead of actually showing the scene in its entirety, the writer chooses certain indirect options, e.g.:
Close the curtain just before the payoff: The shocker line has been said. But rather than sitting with that shocker line, the chapter ends, and the next one picks up a few minutes later or somewhere else. Especially true for sex scenes.
Character goes into psychic fugue: The character doesn’t have any memory of the extreme moment, but comes back to themselves later and tries to figure out what they felt. Maybe the character actually faints.
Narrate from a less extreme POV: We’ve been hearing the story from Character A’s POV, but as they approach experiencing the extreme emotion, we switch to Character B’s POV.
These are just some ways in which people avoid writing the difficult scenes. I’m sure there are others. I’m certain I’ve done others. Sometimes it’s a matter of taste. This person, for instance, really doesn’t want you to write sex scenes. They aren’t just convinced that literature should be purified of ‘pornography’, but also that nobody wants to read sex scenes. (FWIW, if nobody wanted to read sex scenes, we wouldn’t have an entire site dedicated to the scenes we were cheated out of).
As a reader, I want writers to take me there, wherever there is. I’m not afraid. For those who want to get better at writing emotion, I recommend either this article on using narrative intimacy to convey emotions, or the book The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass. They’re a great way to write about people’s emotions besides saying that they’re incandescent with rage, growling, seething and hissing, feeling ice going down their spine and heat rushing to their face and a whole lot else besides.
But let’s get back to chibis, and how they started to grow on me. In a visual medium, you don’t get narrative intimacy. You don’t get to be “in one person’s head” unless you have a sea of thought-bubbles. And Airene and I made the decision early on that we wouldn’t have any thought-bubbles in our webcomic. We wanted it to feel filmic, not comic. Just as the writer strives to make a story have pace, the artist strives to make pictures have motion. Thought-bubbles were too static, introspective.
So how else could we share the internal state of a character visually?
What chibis actually do is trust the reader to fill in the emotional gaps themselves. The artist is saying, “Nothing I do is going to make this picture convey the full depth of feeling. Don’t let realism be the barrier; use your imagination instead.” It’s actually a great reminder that the text you’re reading isn’t the story; the story is being created in the reader’s mind. One of my writing teachers said that the written novel is just the blueprint for the reader’s imagination. It shifted my perspective, and allowed me to trust the reader more (although not as much as I should. I promise I’m trying, Caroline).
Both writing and art are imperfect mediums to convey the fullness of human experience; the reader / viewer must participate. Most words, and chibis, are shorthand for when we want to express an emotion people should know about. For instance, here’s a common one in manga and anime – the soul leaving the body (a perfect chibi for the end of the work week):
Well, maybe the point is moot because I can’t draw. No chibis for me. I’m stuck doing the hard work of narrative intimacy. Oh well. Another writing teacher said, “No tears for the writer? No tears for the reader.” If you, as a writer, haven’t fully inhabited the emotion you’re writing, felt it in your own body, the reader isn’t going to be able to do it either.
And maybe the simple truth is that writers fade to black / drop the curtain when we’re afraid to feel.