Loid and Yor Forger from SPY X FAMILY have an interesting dynamic. Their relationship is based off of multiple layers of deception. The first level is the lie they tell the world, that they’ve been married for over a year, even when they’ve only just met. The second layer is the lies they tell each other. Loid portrays himself to Yor as a widower, who needed someone to pose as his wife so that he can fulfill his late wife’s last wish and send his six-year-old daughter, Anya, to a very elite, very exclusive, and very traditional private school, while Yor claims that she needs a husband to avoid the recent crackdown the secret police have been making on unmarried women.
In truth, Loid is the spy known only as Twilight, who has been sent to infiltrate the high society of an enemy country, using a fake family of people he just kind of found (the higher-ups forced this plan on him) to get close to a certain politician, while Yor (aka the Thorn Princess) is an assassin who’s fighting style can easily be describes as ‘walking bloodbath.’ Furthermore, there’s a third level of deception is that Anya, the orphan that Twilight adopted (who is implied to actually be four), is secretly telepathic and can see through everything her parents try to hide from her and each other. Neither parent is aware of Anya’s abilities.
Loid and Yor are, of course, actually attracted to each other, and the interesting thing is that this attraction is rooted in the clandestine bullshit that their trying to hide from each other. Twilight seems to have a thing for strong and dangerous women, and he first noticed Yor when he realized that she had walked behind him without him noticing. Yor fell in love with Loid when he stated that he approved of people doing immoral things to help other people. Even Anya thinks having a spy and an assassin for parents is the coolest thing, and if they actually found out that she could read minds, Twilight and Yor would probably be in awe at how ridiculously useful her power would be than think she was a freak.
But I’m not here to gush about a series I found recently. I’m here to talk about a new concept I’ve stumbled across, and how it relates to professional, serialized work. That concept is narrative tension. To illustrate this concept, let us consider the above scenario, and how the audience reacts to it. Having set up the deception, and the consequences of the deception collapsing, the audience now expects the author to make the deception collapse. Anything else would be disappointing, like someone singing only a few lines of a song verse.
But if the collapse is handled poorly, that would also be disappointing, like the verse ending and the chorus suddenly being off key. Handling such a collapse, or any climax for that matter, requires set up, work done on the earlier parts of the story to give the climax weight and meaning. Furthermore, as professional, serialized work, the author is getting a steady paycheck from the story, meaning that he has every financial incentive to draw the story out as long as possible, rather than falling back into the storms of uncertainty with a new series.
But the longer the story is drawn out, the harder it is to keep the story together, and to make sure that the climax actually follows from the earlier parts of the story. Also, once the climax happens, that plot thread is over. Like a string stretched tight suddenly snapping, there’s no way to go back to how things were before, and the story is fundamentally changed. In the case of the Forger’s finding out about each other, a huge part of their dynamic is that they don’t know about each other. The stories that can be told about them before and after their deception being revealed are completely different kinds.
The House Apart 