As a U.S. citizen, I feel compelled to acknowledge that this past week has been a helluva ride. Both the political landscape and the unchecked spread of COVID in my state (as many others) and across the country have contributed to perhaps the most stressful period of my life.

My primary method of coping has been watching streaming video. There has been the occasional dip into Doctor Who, with my regular reviews or catching up on the last series with the Ladies of WhoFest, but for the most part, I’ve been streaming dramas from Korea, China, or (occasionally) Japan. Not only do these stories distract me from the dumpster fire of the world around me, but they stimulate my mind in new ways.

One thing that has fascinated me so much about them is that these stories from Asian cultures have very different storytelling conventions than the ones I’m used to. As a fiction writer myself, I’ve learned that the art of making a story satisfying to the reader (or viewer) hinges on delivering on implicit promises. Those promises vary from genre to genre.

For example, in romance, it is expected that every story will have an HEA—Happily Ever After—and if it doesn’t, it’s not romance. If you present a story as romance but fail to resolve the protagonists’ storyline with them getting together and building a sweet life together, your audience will riot because it goes against the accepted genre norms. Even in other genres, we’ve come to expect that Good will triumph over Evil and even if not everything is peachy at the end, things are headed in a more positive direction than at the beginning of the story.

At least, that’s how it works in Western storytelling.

I’ve found that in Asian dramas, an HEA is much less common. Or perhaps is is more accurate to say that the qualities of an ending that make it an HEA are very different. Maybe your romantic leads never get together—one dies horribly, or circumstances keep them apart for the rest of their lives—but they have an easy, happy relationship in their next lives.

Maybe, instead, all but one of the major characters die for the Cause, but that last character standing continues fighting bravely (perhaps even for decades) against terrible odds, keeping the flame of hope alive. The “good guys” don’t always win. Sometimes the best they can do is try to make things better for future generations.

Honestly, I don’t expect a broader Western audience to warm to Eastern styles of storytelling any time soon, but that doesn’t keep me from wanting to try. The ingrained expectations of a Western audience for how a story should end—there’s always an HEA, heroes always win in the end, bad guys get their comeuppance—can make it harder to cope with reality. The world doesn’t run on a script (as anyone following the 2020 season can attest—that, or the writer’s room is really, really drunk); we shouldn’t expect things to miraculously turn out okay in the end.

That’s where I think we can really learn something from Asian storytelling. If we produced more stories with a message that individual desires are all well and good, but the collective good of society is more important (as one of my favorite local politicians was known to say, “We all do better when we all do better”), maybe it would be harder for fascism to take hold.

If we focused more on how we can each work for the greater good, not necessarily for our own benefit, but for the benefit of future generations (not “What’s in it for me?” but “How will this make the world a better place?”), maybe we’d already be well on our way to countering climate change.

If we emphasized that hardship is a part of life, and that meaningful changes never come easily (“Maybe everything’s awful now, but we’re going to keep fighting anyway”), maybe the global pandemic would be nearly under control.

You may think I’m attributing too much power to stories, but that’s how a society perpetuates its values; the stories we tell each other spread the shifting societal attitudes that drive change. That’s why I think it’s time for storytellers in Western traditions to shift our focus. If we emphasize more complex realities, maybe society can learn to find a way forward even when things don’t go the way we’d hoped in the end.