O ódio que você semeia: uma análise da construção argumentativa das emoções em discursos de ódio a partir do webtoon sul-coreano Dark Heaven

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze, from the perspective of argumentation and emotion studies, how hate proliferates through argumentative interaction between characters in a South Korean fictional narrative: Dark Heaven. The work is a webtoon set in the imaginary European country of Van Tescosa, where the rise of a white supremacist group exposes an institutionalized culture of violence and exclusion against immigrants and queer people. In order to unveil the interactive and emotional layers of the hate speech uttered by the characters, we draw on the Dialogical Model of Argumentation (Plantin, 2008; 2025), centered on argumentative roles (Proponent, Opponent, Third party) and on the argumentative question under debate, as well as on Plantin’s theory of emotional arguments (1998; 2011), which enables the discursive reconstruction of affects based on linguistic and semiotic cues. Our theoretical framework on emotions relies mainly on the contributions of Plantin (1998; 2011), Aristotle (2005), Micheli (2010) and Lima (2023; 2024; 2025), while the discussion of hate speech engages with the notions of conspiracism/conspiracy thinking (Lima, 2023; Angenot, 2008) and the imaginary of tradition (Charaudeau, 2015), used in certain contexts to justify hate discourse. The understanding of the webtoon as a discursive, digital and multimodal genre is grounded in authors such as Bakhtin (2011), Pegoraro (2024) and Ramos (2009). Methodologically, the corpus consists of two specific excerpts, named “WAF” and “Matka”. The main analytical categories mobilized are argumentative roles, argumentative question, topoi, emotion frames and experiencer, articulated in an analytical framework we call the Topical System of Emotions in Interaction, an attempt to combine the core categories of both of Plantin’s theoretical-methodological models. Due to the strong multimodality of webtoons, we developed a color-coded legend to map resources of emotional reconstruction and intensification in the excerpts, incorporating semiotic elements such as framing, speech balloons, facial expressions, onomatopoeia and others into the analysis. The results indicate that hate operates as a discursive effect produced by argumentative strategies and by the mobilization of emotions such as fear and indignation. Furthermore, the findings show that hate is sustained by argumentative-emotional cycles. In the analyzed excerpts, discourses that construct foreigners and homosexuals as a collective threat activate fear and a sense of loss of tradition, thereby “justifying” preventive violence. The fear mobilized by the Proponent is transferred to and amplified within the audience, which may shift from spectator to potential agent of violence. In this way, the study demonstrates that hate speech not only expresses emotions but strategically produces and distributes them, and that argumentative interaction creates affective continuities that keep hate in circulation. Motivated by the possible relations between argumentation and emotions, this research seeks to foreground the pathemic dimension of discourse and argumentation, thus contributing to argumentation studies. By discussing these relations through a fictional text, the dissertation also aims to promote the webtoon genre, still little known and researched in Brazilian academia, and to challenge the apparent impossibility of addressing real social problems in linguistic studies through fiction