The funniest way that media is sometimes criticized is for “being emotionally manipulative.” Anyone raising this criticism probably means to say that those works in question are too “transparently manipulative;” because being manipulative is the entire point of communication. If we didn’t need a result from someone, there’d be no reason to make a sound.
We learned to speak when we realized that people could better address our needs if we were more specifically clear about what those needs are. Some people are so good at meeting their basic needs that they use the extra time they’ve afforded themselves between being satisfied on finding reasons not to be. One reason not to be satisfied is that someone else isn’t satisfied when you wish that they were—when you want to share in satisfaction with them, and cannot for whatever reason.