> Emotions are universal. they simply lack a term with the exact nuance

You are mistaking culture for language here. That's mistake number one.

Mistake number two is assuming that a language is merely a purely biological response you can easily map to. Emotions as we conceptualise them, exist in a sociocultural context.

You say emotions are universal but, are they? Have you ever experienced what an edo period Samurai was going through after failing his lord? Ever experienced the feeling of passing your rite of passage in an amazonian tribe. No. You can surely interpret those situations through your own lens and experience feelings about your interpretation but that doesn't mean you are feeling what they are feeling. You could have your own interpretation of what falling from a high altitude feels like. It doesn't mean that is going to match the emotion of someone who has actually jumped.

Mistake three is assuming that your own cultural context (which you have ignored) has the same emotional interpretation of a situation as any other context. A situation that in a cultural context might elicit feelings of belonging, in another might elicit feelings of entrapment, anxiety or lack of freedom.

The very idea that everyone experiences the same emotions is itself a cultural byproduct of a culture that often sees itself as the mirror of the world rather than as an additional perspective of it.

I am only going to address the last point, because I believe is a summary of your whole critique.

> The very idea that everyone experiences the same emotions is itself a cultural byproduct of a culture that often sees itself as the mirror of the world

I was raised by people from different regions, who spoke a common language. When I was a child, we moved to another region that spoke a different language. By that time I had already became bilingual and multicultural.

Then, I learned English. Yeah, not my first language, nor my second.

Eventually, I married a foreigner from a completely different culture to mine. We moved to a third country, then a fourth. We currently live in what is arguably the most cosmopolitan city in the world, with over 50% of foreign-born residents. And no, I have never lived in the US, although I've had coworkers there.

Does this help clarify how much I conflate language and culture, or how much my thinking is "a cultural byproduct of a culture that often sees itself as the mirror of the world "?. Or is it possible that my thinking is shaped precisely by the variety of languages, cultures and nations I've been exposed to?

To be fair with you, I have only mapped English Films as of now. I havent had much finding enough Indian film scripts (and am interested in Japanese / Korean films over time), but i do know that the way stories are told - there is a big difference between the way stories are told in europe vs how they are told in Hollywood (even they are both in english).

Not pitching, but giving some context here : The first product we built is an audience analytics platform. We use near eye headsets while audiences are watching films during test screenings, to collect occulometric and biometric data to map engagement.

Emotions are a messy thing to map and rely on. For eg, there was a film that we were testing, and three of the 50 audience members had a totally off-beat engagement signal compared to the rest of the audiences - and this was a scene in the park. So after the film was done, I had flagged the moderator to ask those three audience members what happened in the scene. So he casually brought up what parks meant to them. And one of them said, it was a weekend routine to spend time in the park with his mother whom he lost recently - so the minute he saw that park shot, thats all he could think of, and had nothing to do with the film.

So if you really base a narrative structure on emotions, we will have to baseline every single person on earth for all of their experiences, and wade through that - and it would be impossible to produce a mass media outcome.

Stories hinge on emotion (absolutely) but beyond that it is also a journey, where the audience participates, pays attention, and engages - we see this with occulometric and biometric data. And to truly engage, audiences must understand the words being spoken - i could watch a portuguese film without subtitles and as much as i could guess maybe 10% of the narrative, i wouldnt have a clue whats going on - let alone participate in it.

Our system currently cannot accomodate for languages other than english (we are doing some tests with German, French, Spanish and Hindi - but i wouldnt rank the confidence levels on those to be high enough yet). Beta, at best.

Thank you for asking that very crucial question. I appreciate it.