What Writers Need to Understand About Stakes

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Jujutsu Kaisen is a Japanese manga created by the mangaka Gege Akutami, starting in 2018. Anime studio MAPPA picked up the manga for an anime adaptation, the first season of which released from 2020 to 2021. A movie, Jujutsu Kaisen 0, was then released in 2022, preceding a second season in 2023. The story takes place in a world where Jujutsu sorcerers are fighting constant battles against curses, spirits born from people's negative emotions. The narrative follows Yuji Itadori, a high school student who unknowingly stumbles upon the finger of Sukuna, a powerful ancient cursed spirit. A curse attacks the school. The sorcerer Megumi Fushiguro arrives to help, but the curse is tough and Yuji is forced to consume Sukuna's finger to gain cursed energy in order to save Megumi's life. Due to a one-in-a-million chance, Yuji becomes a vessel for the spirit of Sukuna. Sukuna eliminates the curse but threatens to go on a rampage before Yuji suppresses him. The strongest sorcerer of all, Satoru Gojo, shows up and stops any attempt from Sukuna to regain control for the time being. Yuji is then brought in by Jujutsu Society, the higher-ups of which want to execute him due to the danger posed by Sukuna. According to Megumi's wishes, Gojo convinces the higher-ups to grant Yuji a choice of dying immediately or dying after consuming all of Sukuna's fingers to unite his spirit together and wipe him out for good. Yuji chooses the second option and becomes a sorcerer in the meantime to find the twenty fingers and eliminate Sukuna. He teams up with Megumi and meets other sorcrerers such as but not limited to Nobara Kugisaki and Kento Nanami. In the background, a mysterious villain plots, and the mystery unravels across the course of the story.
Breaking Bad is... I don't need to explain Breaking Bad! It's one of the most notoriously great shows ever made, about Walter White running a drug business to make money while suffering from cancer, also featuring such characters like Jessie Pinkman, Hank Schrader, Mike Ehrmantraut, Gus Fring, Skyler White, and a bunch of others. I'm not saying anything else. This should be enough for RUclips. C'mon, throw me a bone here.

[@PosiWritesStories]

Videos I got the JJK and BB clips from:
ruclips.net/video/dORVV0xJbHQ/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/-8OqVWWsO9M/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/46l2HlRQHk8/видео.html

[@threadsofsaffron]

banger video !! insightful media analysis and workable advice,, almost reminds me a little bit of localscriptman (esp with the little doodles and stuff). love to see more of this from you :3

[@obi-twokenobi4861]

I am currently writing a story and I really needed this. I was uncertain of what to do with my character deaths because I felt that I either kill to many in some arcs or none in others. But I think that's just what works for the themes of each arc.
Some characters must die in the first and forth arc because those are more tragic because of themes such as "the responsability of power in a world at war", "the burden of being a role model to someone else" or "the uncertanty of death".
Meanwhile, the second and third arcs are more focused in "how to cope with the fear of loosing" or "how to regain the will to live".
If killed characters at the same pace in all the story, it would actually undermine the themes at some parts, because what kind of message am I sending if a character who is slowly gaining the will to live is killed in the name of stakes? Or how am I touching the themes of "sacrifice" or "loosing someone" if no one ever dies?

[@forenamesurname465]

Death (and the threat of death) is so overused in fiction to establish stakes because it's the easiest to understand and communicate. Even if you aren't following the story closely you intrinsically understand that a character dying ends their story and any part of them you care about and you understand how the story will lead to that outcome.
For some kinds of stories (and particularly short stories) that works well, but often it's only necessary because writers haven't put in enough work to make you care about the setting or more personal stakes related to a character instead. The shibuya arc is a good example of this - Gojo isn't dead at the end of it but the fact that he's sealed has huge implications for the setting which then cascade onwards into how the proceeding arcs play out.
Writers are also in a tough spot because having the biggest emotional impact from a death means making a lot of decisions which are likely to upset fans:
- Cutting short a character's arc or goals
- Removing a fan favourite character from the rest of the story
- Removing an early character with consistent story presence from the rest of the story
- Filling the void that character used to occupy with someone who is less enjoyable to watch/read
- Disrupting or completely negating any progress towards the main goal of the narrative
Doing all of this creates an emotional environment which some people really dislike in stories. If you do half the job and try to compromise then you don't get a middle balance, instead you either get plot armour or your readers just become bored and uninvested based on the expectation that anyone they get attached to will be killed for shock value.
The biggest factor in how effective a death is is actually what happens after the character dies. If they were a real character then they had a real effect on the world through their actions and their relationships to other characters. When they die the effects of their absence should be felt on those parts of the world either explicitly or implicitly and should be clearly communicated to the readers. You then reap the benefits of this whenever you dangle a similar potential consequence in front of your readers later on as a possible outcome.
But, when it comes to creating "stakes" all of the hard work has to come first. If you want your readers to be engaged the they need to understand before your climax even starts broadly what the possible outcomes are and what options the characters have to achieve them. Maybe that means your protagonist has just bet the house on a poker game and has to gamble everything on a weak hand. Maybe that means taking an interview to get into an elite school that will mean leaving your friends and parents behind. Or, maybe that means picking a fight that you have no chance of winning because if you don't then the village that you just spent the last two chapters exploring will be razed to the ground.
Conversely what it absolutely doesn't mean is "if this character dies then the world gets destroyed and the story ends" because outside of short stories it's not a plausible outcome and genre-savvy readers will know you can't commit to it. You need a plausible gradient of outcomes to benchmark stakes against.