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Originally Posted by RadiantBeam
So, any suggestions on how to handle an emotional scene with a character who isn't usually an emotional mess without making it into Narm?
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Hmm, as Kuroi Hadou already suggested, the key thing is to not derail the character in the process.
AFAIK, the real producers of "Narm" and "Wangst" are when the character's reaction to the emotional stimulus are out of balance with the audience's expectations. For an in-universe example (that I just watched), in
Black Butler v.4 the Indian prince whines to Ciel about the way Mina left him and went off to England. Given Ciel's hellishly awful backstory, this struck
him as a big wad of Wangst and he basically told the prince to shut the heck up and stop whining about something so inconsequential.
So the question is...the character is normally unemotional. What is it about
this particular scene that would make them cross that line? Is it better for them to play it in an understated fashion? Or is there some established-in-story reason why this would affect them more deeply? Archer, for example, would be more motivated to reckless action by something bad happening to Ilya or Rin, whereas he might shrug off the same thing happening to Shirou or Saber.
So long as the character is "true to him/herself," then the only people who will likely find Narm are those who find the underlying emotion itself to be Narmful ("X is a Badass! Badasses never cry, even if they watch their children tortured to death in front of them and are force-fed sausages made from their lover's intestines!"). On the other hand, if the character needs to act in a certain emotional way for the scene to play out (such as if you need a big argument between lovers, but one of the lovers is not the kind of person who would participate in such a fight), then you might well run into Narm. It isn't likely to work well to make the characters bow to the scene. On the other hand, seeing a normally understated character have a strong emotional reaction can be a very affecting and powerful moment if the reasons for it led properly to that reaction.