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The amount of sympathy that death, cruelty or suffering is expected to evoke from the audience is often inversely proportional to the magnitude of its effects. Far more important is the degree to which the audience knows the character(s) affected. Part of this is that the major deaths occur on stage or on camera, in detail and taking long enough to be dramatic. Truth in Television, alas. Has even been reproduced in a lab, where increasing the number of a criminal's victims causes people to recommend a lower sentence. Examples of A Million Is a Statistic include:

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  • A Million Is a Statistic
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  • The amount of sympathy that death, cruelty or suffering is expected to evoke from the audience is often inversely proportional to the magnitude of its effects. Far more important is the degree to which the audience knows the character(s) affected. Part of this is that the major deaths occur on stage or on camera, in detail and taking long enough to be dramatic. Truth in Television, alas. Has even been reproduced in a lab, where increasing the number of a criminal's victims causes people to recommend a lower sentence. Examples of A Million Is a Statistic include:
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  • The amount of sympathy that death, cruelty or suffering is expected to evoke from the audience is often inversely proportional to the magnitude of its effects. Far more important is the degree to which the audience knows the character(s) affected. In other words, when some sort of Tragedy befalls a character such as The Hero (or even the Big Bad), the audience is expected to sympathize with him or perhaps even cry for him. However, the Redshirt Army can be sacrificed with reckless abandon, and no one will so much as bat an eyelash. The death of a single plot-important character is a tragic and often pivotal point; the deaths of thousands of faceless Mooks, even if by torture, are simply background noise, so to speak. As long as the victims are sufficiently faceless, even a Final Solution can be considered not worth making any fuzz about. Part of this is that the major deaths occur on stage or on camera, in detail and taking long enough to be dramatic. Psychologically, proximity is more important than magnitude. Often ties into Offstage Villainy, since the larger atrocities can't be displayed onscreen in full magnitude. Writers who want to avert this effect must deploy such tricks as the Empathy Doll Shot, The Dead Have Names, or personalizing some victims, to suggest the faces of the faceless victims. Since Men Are the Expendable Gender, this sort of A Death in the Limelight is more often female or Children Are Innocent (especially orphans) or, if male, injured. Strong reactions by main characters can also help. The concept of this is related to the theoretical Dunbar's Number, which says at some point, it is simply impossible for a person to truly care about so many people. This is further explored and explained in Cracked.com's article "What is the monkeysphere?" Compare Sorting Algorithm of Evil, which operates along the same principle. Contrast Protagonist-Centered Morality, which has morality centered not on character exposure but relation to the protagonist. May be related to the Law of Conservation of Detail as well. See also Local Angle for when this mingles with Creator Provincialism in the headlines. Also, see But for Me It Was Tuesday when the villain ignores the countless deaths he commits. Also, see Industrialized Evil, where the mind numbing scale of an atrocity is part of the horror (or not). Can be subverted by listing the names instead of numbers. Truth in Television, alas. Has even been reproduced in a lab, where increasing the number of a criminal's victims causes people to recommend a lower sentence. Examples of A Million Is a Statistic include:
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