#story stakes
You don’t have to “raise the stakes” by perpetually making every villain supposedly Bigger and Badder and Stronger than the one before, you can raise the stakes just by steadily giving your hero more to potentially lose.
If your hero is a loner fighting a bad guy in order to stay alive or to protect innocents, those are good starting stakes! If your hero is fighting a villain of roughly the same caliber five years later, but now they have a spouse and a home and fire-forged friends who are ALSO involved and thus at risk from the conflict–then you have HIGHER STAKES.
Like, they don’t have to be objectively higher–the villain could be trying to kill a hundred people in both cases–but if we go from “one character and 99 strangers” to “a dozen characters who love each other and 88 people they more or less know,” those are NARRATIVELY higher stakes.
(Please also note that you do NOT have to keep up a certain consistent rate of loss in order to keep suspense. In fact, any formulaic rate of loss risks cutting off audience investment, because if they know someone is going to die every finale they’re not going to get attached.
But also, you can keep up a LOT of audience suspense without actual loss as long as you can make loss feel narratively plausible–look at the MP100 and Gravity Falls fandoms around their respective finales, for instance! People were freaking out because they loved these characters and could imagine narratively fitting endings where someone died, even though–looking at the medium–a main character is unlikely to die in something like a Disney cartoon.)
