The 'Always Rising' Rule

Keeping the Tension High

Hirohiko Araki argues in his book Manga in Theory and Practice that, in fiction stories with an adventurous and emotional bent, the protagonist’s trajectory must always be rising.

📈 The Protagonist Always Grows

Even if your character starts the story in a “negative” point (weak, friendless, with a destroyed home), from the moment the plot kicks in, every action and obstacle faced must point toward growth and overcoming.

Readers project their expectations onto the protagonist and want to see them triumph over adversity. If the story falls into stagnation or regresses unnecessarily, the reader will drop the book and lose immersion.

⚠️ Failing patterns (What NOT to do)

Araki highlights two common narrative traps that break the rule of constant growth and destroy a story’s chance to captivate:

1. Hitting a wall and giving up

A disheartening cliché is when the hero, in the middle of the journey, decides to “give up” and return to their normal life (e.g., the superhero who abandons their cape), only to be forced back into action at the climax. Araki considers this a fatal negative curve. The reader doesn’t want to see the hero take a step back, because they know the character will have to return anyway, making that slice of the plot redundant and tedious.

2. Returning to “Zero” (The useless cycle)

If the hero is captured during the adventure and their only action is to manage to escape, returning to the exact point they were at before being imprisoned (the zero point of that arc), there was no narrative growth. Stories where “nothing changes” in the status quo or where everything is revealed to be “just a dream” are major frustrations for the reader’s emotional journey.

Note: If the initial premise begins with the character already in prison, and the story is about how they will escape to gain freedom, that is valid growth (they leave the negative state to seek the positive). The mistake is creating this loop in the middle of the plot without generating evolution or progress in the main goal.