INFLUENCE OF CHARACTER’S VISUAL STYLE ON READER’S EMPATHY ON SAD EMOTIONAL STORY (CASE STUDY: WEBTOON “BINGKAI TITIK”)

• Main Author: LOVIA BUDIANTO, JESSICA
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Subjects: Menggambar dan gambar
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/66318
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

In visual style, there’s a range between realistic to simplification, also another range of abstractions between them, and each of the points that spread across the range has its own advantage and disadvantages. With the high need of visual style in this day and age, curiosity about whether visual style affects human empathy for characters emerges. To answer that curiosity, then a certain media and narration that could induce empathy are needed to conduct research. Thus, this research uses webtoon as a media and emotional story that focuses on the sad situation as the narration. Webtoon has been growing rapidly in Indonesia recently as an entertainment medium; and an emotional sad story is considered to be able to trigger a higher reader’s involvement with characters, rather than a happy or neutral story. This study aims to see how three variations of character visual style (simplification, combination, and realistic) in a webtoon with a sad emotional story impacts empathy, and which has higher visual familiarity. This study uses a quantitative approach, with between – participant experiment method that uses three visual styles as stimuli exposure and a developed questionnaire as the instrument. The case study that is being used in this research is “Bingkai Titik” by Gabriel PT Dedi (combination style). The rest of the stimuli (simplification and realistic) are designed without changing the story, layout, colors, and other components. This experiment involved 63 participants from age 16 – 29 who has minimal 1 year experience of reading comics/webtoon, and have moderately – high empathy score. This experiment found that there is a significant correlation between visual familiarity and empathy. There is no significant difference between stimuli on empathy variable. Realistic visual style produces the highest visual familiarity, and there are significant differences between the stimuli. It is suspected that there’are other variables that could effect the empathic response notsignificant result. Those variables are different personal past – experience, inconsistency usage of eyes across the variables (eyes are only used in realistic style), not enough episodes for the readers to connect emotionally with the characters, etc. This research is expected to contribute as a reference for design consideration in media (specifically using realistic style to optimlize familiarity) or future studies in the field of visual style.