Forced Creativity

"So are you going to write some poems or am I going to tear your balls off and hunt ostriches with them?"

— Muse, Oglaf

Creativity is something a lot of people admire. Being able to make unique and original stories, put on an engaging performance, or design something that appeals to people are all skills many people either wish they had, or try to hold onto if they have it. Not all creative works and skills come from a place of genuine creativity and passion, however. Some of them are done just to pay the bills, and others aren't projects the creator really wants to be doing at all. In fact, some of these projects are done due to an outside force pulling the strings. It may be a kidnapper demanding the creation of new content to suit their needs, a corrupt media mogul with a fine-print-laden contract, or even the physical representation of The Muse. Either way, they're the ones in control, and the creator is just their puppet.

When this happens, the situation is often Played for Drama or even Played for Horror. It's a loss of autonomy combined with extra effort spent on doing things the character in question doesn't care about, as well as an easy way to provide commentary on how creative endeavors should come from a place of passion, rather than as the result of exterior pressure. There's always going to be some threat in play if they don't perform their role, whether it's a beating, a long-term hostage situation, death, or legal trouble from breaking a contract. How realistic or extreme the threat is depends on how the story is being presented.

The art that comes out might be decent or even great, but it's usually worse than if they did it organically. Even if the work is good, though, the creator won't enjoy doing it and may come to despise the project altogether. Of course, the creator may still find ways to rebel or eventually become desensitized to the threats and free themselves.

Related to Kidnapped Scientist, which involves science and technology rather than creative endeavors. Contrast Muse Abuse, for when the art's subject is suffering. Also compare Too Upset to Create and Creative Sterility. Has some overlap with Boxed Crook, when the favor involves creative work.

No Real Life Examples, Please! While things like this happen in real life, most of these examples already fall under pre-existing trivia tropes like Executive Meddling and Contractual Obligation Project. Many fictional examples draw on the real-life experiences of the creator or act as a commentary on the media industry, but we don't want to gossip about how actual works got made against the creator's will.

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Examples:

Animation

• In the Czechoslovakian stop-motion short The Hand, a sculptor only wants to make pots for his flower. A giant hand appears and orders it to make a statue of a hand. The artist reluctantly agrees, but then the hand demands more and gets violent if he resists. Eventually, the hand makes the artist a literal puppet, forcing him to make hand statues until he dies of exhaustion.

Anime & Manga

• Harlock Saga: Overlapping with Kidnapped Scientist, Tadashi Daiba is forced by Albericht to forge a ring from the Rhein Gold. He chooses the design himself, though, and forges the face of the ring in the distinctive skull and crossbones pattern favored by Harlock. He's then shot as payment but survives.

Comic Books

• Batman: In one issue of the short-lived Joker title, the Joker captures a cartoonist who draws a comic strip called "Cashews" (an obvious Peanuts parody) and demands that he draw pictures of the Joker kicking and drowning the strip's main character. It turns out that the cartoonist hates having to draw the strip to satisfy his contract and is glad to comply.
• Transmetropolitan begins when the infamous journalist Spider Jerusalem is dragged out of retirement with a reminder that he still owes two books on his publishing contract. He plans to compile one anthology and write the second book about the upcoming presidential election, but this motive loses importance when he takes an interest in the political upheaval.

Films — Animation

• The Great Mouse Detective: Ratigan, archnemesis of Detective Basil of Baker Street, kidnaps Hiram Flaversham, a toymaker in London, to force him to create a clockwork mechanical automaton with an as-of-yet unknown purpose. When Flaversham loses his temper under threat of being fed to Ratigan's pet cat Felicia and then attempts to overload the machine, Ratigan turns the tables on him by threatening his daughter Olivia, forcing Hiram to continue work on it.

Films — Live-Action

• In Dadnapped, famous author Neal Morris and his daughter Melissa are kidnapped by an evil hotel manager named Merv and his two Minion with an F in Evil henchmen. While the henchmen are also passionate about writing and just want Neal to edit a story one of them wrote, Merv wants Neal to write a book that Merv'll make all the money off of.

Literature

• Archer's Goon opens with a thug arriving at Howard's father's door to demand "two thousand" (which quickly turns out to be two thousand words of prose) on behalf of someone called Archer. The odd thing is that Archer doesn't seem to care what the words say, he just wants Howard's father to write two thousand words.
• In the Foundation Series, has a particularly terrifying version of this. A telepath tricks a scholar into searching for someone, but then uses his abilities to stimulate the scholar's mind, driving him to be both obsessed with the search and particularly clever and creative about his research. This overstimulation wears on his mind and eventually kills him, but it gets him to the answer.
• In Stephen King's Misery, author Paul Sheldon is held captive by his "number one fan”, Annie Wilkes. When Annie discovers that Paul's latest book kills the protagonist who she adores, she forces Paul to write an all-new book just for her in which the character is brought back.
• Egil's Saga: When Egil falls into the hands of his enemy Eirik Bloodaxe, Arinbjorn, a follower of Eirik but also a friend of Egil, persuades Eirik to postpone executing Egil until the next morning, then advises Egil to use the night to compose a praise poem of twenty stanzas for Eirik. The next day, Egil recites his poem, aptly called "Head-Ransom", in front of Eirik, and it is partially because of the poem that Eirik lets Egil go alive. "Head-Ransom" is usually interpreted as a poem that sounds impressive to a layman (like Eirik), but which a poet would recognize as stylistically mediocre, implying that Egil was sabotaging his own poem in order to signal to the initiated that his praise of Eirik was insincere.
• The Second Shield is a short story by Robert Silverberg that appeared in the December 1995 issue of Playboy. An artist named Beckerman can create fantastic artworks just by dreaming while in bed. One item he dreamed up was the Shield of Achilles, which was sold to a Greek shipping magnate. However, all of Beckerman's artworks are transitory: some last only a few hours, up to a Dali-esque watch that lasted eleven years. The shield he'd sold to the Greek had dissolved after sixteen months, so the Greek sends a thug named Alvarez to squeeze another shield out of Beckerman.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "The Mind Robber", the Land of Fiction requires a creative mind powering it in order to produce fictional characters that it can bring into reality and thrive on. Well before the story's events, a writer from 1920s England was brought in to fulfill this duty against his will; the plot revolves around him trying to recruit the Doctor to take up his mantle.
• This is the plot of the Inside No. 9 episode "Simon Says"; Loony Fan Simon forces Spencer Maguire, the creator of the hit fantasy show The Ninth Circle, to write and produce a Postscript Season based on Simon's ideas that undoes most of the controversial original conclusion (the entire thing being an obvious reference to the contested finale of Game of Thrones).
• In the Kenan & Kel episode "Haven't Got Time for the Paint", Kel reveals himself to be quite a talented artist. After a wealthy man offers a lot of money for one of his paintings, Kenan decides he wants to cash in and forces Kel to make more paintings. This frustrates Kel, who would rather play and have fun. Ultimately, it turns out that the wealthy man who bought Kel's first painting mistook him for a different artist with a similar name, and the other paintings Kenan forced Kel to make don't sell at auction.
• The Sandman (2022), "Calliope": Exaggerated as an ironic punishment for an author who forced a captive Muse to inspire his creativity. Morpheus fills the author's mind with so many ideas that he's left a babbling wreck, desperately writing on the walls in his own blood in an attempt to record them all.
• This is a main subplot of the Cleaver arc in the The Sopranos, where Tim Daly's character J.T. Dolan is forced by Christopher to write a screenplay to escape his debt and further beatings.

Music

• Downplayed with Sara Bareilles's hit 2007 single "Love Song", a cheeky Take That! to the executives of her label. According to her, though she kept writing new music, they rejected every song and pressured her to write more radio-friendly music. "Love Song" was what came of it: a radio-friendly Anti-Love Song.
• The Ben Folds song "One Down" was written about Folds' own frustrations with a songwriting contract that forced him to turn over a specific number of songs down to the decimal point. Hence, this finished song is "one down" and the narrator (Folds) still has "three-point-six to go."
• The Korn song "Y'all Want a Single" was written and recorded in response to their record label asking for a new single for an upcoming album. The resulting single contained 65 uses of the word "fuck" alone, in addition to other expletives, and would require significant edits in order to get radio or television airplay.
  Y'all want a single, say "Fuck that!" — Fuck that, fuck that!

Tabletop Games

• In Changeling: The Lost, the Fae often kidnap humans to perform for them. Humans who survive the experience and escape may become "Wizened" changelings, a breed defined by incredible skill in one area and paranoid bitterness that their skills were taken advantage of. Wizened are also short or diminished in some inexplicable way, as if their height was stolen along with their creativity.
• In Magic: The Gathering's Kaladesh set, the winners of the inventors fair essentially become factory workers for Tezzeret, being forced to use their genius to figure out a design he can use for a planar gate. They are rescued by the Renegades, but he gets what he came for from Rashmi.

Video Games

• Hades: You can release the court musician Orpheus from his punishment, given to him by Hades as Orpheus lost the will to play music after his failed attempt to save his wife and muse Eurydice from the underworld. When Hades angrily commands Orpheus to play again, he refuses, as his heart is no longer in it. He'll end up playing a melancholy and mournful song about his failed rescue on his own, though.
• The Sims: One of the most popular money-making schemes for players willing to take advantage of the franchise's Video Game Cruelty Potential is to imprison several Sims inside a room with nothing but the basic necessities and an easel each. With little else to entertain them, they'll quickly become world-class artists whose paintings you can sell for a small fortune. Alternatively, a dead artist's work can be sold for a much larger fortune, so it's quite common for players to farm a few masterpieces from their best painters before killing them off!
  • There's a minor variant in the console spin-offs from the original game, where the player character can efficiently farm money by imprisoning their own mother in her house and forcing her to mass-produce garden gnomes on the woodworking bench.

Webcomics

• Oglaf: Played for Black Comedy when a poet's new Muse adopts an unusually violent interpretation of "inspiration strikes", leading to a desperately productive year.
  Muse: So are you going to write some poems or am I going to tear your balls off and hunt ostriches with them?

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: The modus operandi of SCP-4666 is to stalk a family that is isolated from a city or large town during Christmas and New Year's, making its presence more known as the days go by. On New Year's Day, SCP-4666 either delivers a crude Christmas/New Year's Gift made out of human remains or, more commonly, breaks in and kills the entire family gruesomely, only saving the youngest child (aged between 3-8) with the intent of kidnapping them and imprisoning them in its underground lair to force the child into making toys made out of the remains of human children solely for its own amusement and entertainment. Furthermore, the child is forced to keep creating with no pause and if tired or unable to create, SCP-4666 would have the child be dissected and killed to be used as additional material for the toys.
• One Creepypasta, The Robot Dance, posits this as the end result to a robot takeover, due to art and entertainment being the one aspect of humanity that intrigues our new overlords. All of humanity but the actors and creators are culled, and what are left are forced to constantly improvise new and creative routines or die, leading to bizarre never-ending art performances for the amusement of an unseen audience.

Web Videos

• Alantutorial: Alan usually had a passion for his tutorials, which helped to get him through rough times and connect to an audience. However, on two separate occasions, he was forced to do tutorials against his will. Not only did he literally and symbolically bleed each time, but he was locked in a room with nothing to do but make tutorials, in one case being beaten if he refused. The second time resulted in him eventually being abandoned in the locked room as it got progressively filthier and filthier until he finally broke out and stopped making tutorials entirely.
• Night Mind: In one of the Halloween Candybowl fan-content specials, there was a scene about two people forced to perform a sketch while being threatened into complying by an unseen third party.
• In Alex Bale's Sponge Bob Conspiracy, there's a subplot about Alex getting all of his video ideas from his "muse"... which is a carnivorous tentacle monster living in his basement and refusing to let him make non-SpongeBob-related content.

Western Animation

• Bob's Burgers: In "Art Crawl" Louise uses this to try to make money from the eponymous festival. First, she has Gene and Louise try their hand but their work, a robot at Stonehenge and a nude portrait of the family dentist respectively, don't meet her expectations. So she recruits the Pesto twins and a one-shot character named Devon Michin to turn out quick pieces to sell to adults at $20 a pop, treating them like orphan children from a Dickens novel. Naturally, her "cut" is all the money, which pays off when she is able to save her father from arrest by using the money to pay for art he vandalized. The last scene is her returning to her overworked trio and loudly demanding to see more art. The Pestos are still there, but Devon has wisely skedaddled.
• Cupcake & Dino: General Services: In the episode "Cupsy", Dino ends up stuck on a chandelier with blue paint on his face. The next day, people see it and assume it's an art piece, which the owner wants to keep. He'll agree to let him go, however, if Cupcake can make a more impressive piece of artwork. Cupcake's attempts aren't as impressive, though, which causes his popularity to plummet.
• The Owl House: In the episode "Sense and Insensitivity", King sells a book he co-wrote with Luz to a shifty publisher named Piniet, claiming it to be a solo work, and becomes a bestselling author overnight. When King's truly solo follow-up fails to meet expectations, Piniet overhears him admitting the truth, kidnaps Luz, and subjects them to the same hidden-in-the-fine-print fate that befell all his previous star authors: A shrinking magic box that will crush them into a tiny cube if they fail to provide a satisfactory sequel in time.
• In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Wacky Delly", Ralph Bighead (later Rachel Bighead) has just finished the last episode of The Fatheads and is hoping to quit making cartoons and do real art, but the studio points out that they are contractually obligated to produce a second show. Not wanting to go through with it, Ralph has Rocko and his friends produce a show pilot of their own, the titular Wacky Delly, and hopes it's so bad it will get them out of their contract. It becomes a big hit instead.
• Part Three of South Park's Imaginationland Trilogy sees Butters, a real person, forced into service to help the Good Characters defeat the Evil ones. Since he comes from the Real World, he has the power to imagine anyone or anything that could turn the tide. At first the leaders of the Good Characters are patient, but when the battle starts and Evil is winning, Aslan yells at Butters to bring Santa back. Eventually, Butters masters his imagination and saves the day, even existing himself, Imaginationland, and everyone real or imaginary back after a nuclear explosion.

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