"A king once offered a reward for anyone who could invent a new pleasure. The author suggests that the person who invented a truly new form of torture or horror would actually deserve more praise from writers of entertainment.

The goal of this essay is to explore why some kinds of suffering feel satisfying or moving when shown in stories, while others simply repel us. Plain, unfiltered misery is never enjoyable to watch. We do feel strong sympathy for suffering, but that sympathy is just raw pain—similar to what we’d feel ourselves, only milder. It doesn’t produce the warm, melting sorrow we call pity. These are two different emotions with very different physical signs: Raw sympathetic pain makes us tense up, shudder, and grimace.

True pity relaxes the face, softens the features, and brings tears.

When we step on a disgusting bug, we may flinch in shared discomfort, but it’s nothing like the tender sadness we feel for Odysseus’s old dog, who recognized his master after twenty years, wagged his tail, and died. 

Extreme physical agony, by itself, doesn’t make good tragedy. Watching someone scream from a toothache or undergo surgery would not be moving—it would just be horrible. 

For suffering to become pleasing or produce real pity, it needs something else mixed in: love, admiration, or beauty of character. We need to care about the person and respect them.        Their pain and danger then make their virtues more touching. Tears come more from tenderness than from sorrow alone. Tenderness can make us cry even in moments of joy.        In fact, any distress that brings tears almost always contains some hidden pleasure. 

Pure suffering without any redeeming quality simply hurts."

Anna Latitia Barbauld.