Influence of Character’s Visual Style on Reader’s Empathy on Sad Emotional Story (Case Study: Webtoon “Bingkai Titik”)
Keywords:
visual style, emotional story, empathy, webtoon, illustrationAbstract
Empathy plays an important role in story – reading experience, where it could help the reader to connect and understand the characters better. Today, storytelling could be found across media; webtoon is one of them. The increasing demand for using visual style to convey stories triggers the curiosity of, whether the variation of visual style affects empathic response in a sad emotional story. A between–participant experiment that involves 63 Indonesian webtoon/comics readers between the age of 16 – 29 was conducted. The stimuli are webtoons that have different visual styles (simplified, combination, and realistic) with the same story, background, color, and layout. The participants read the stimulus (given randomly) while being recorded in an online meeting, then fill out a questionnaire to measure the empathic and visual familiarity response. The results show that visual familiarity does predict empathy but showed that there’s no significant difference in the empathic response between visual styles, although the combination style got the highest empathic response among the others. On the contrary, realistic style significantly produces higher visual familiarity. These findings confirm the hypothesis that using combination style in a sad emotional story is expected to produce a higher empathic response.
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References
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