How many young viewers can sit through Come and See (1985), a brutally honest film about war, without checking their phone? How many can read Blood Meridian without craving the relief of a sitcom laugh track? We have lost our tolerance for the bitter because the sweet is always available.

This is E960 storytelling. The violence is the "bitter leaf" of reality; the quips and the quippy character arcs are the steviol glycoside. The result is a product that is intellectually hollow but infinitely palatable. You can binge eight hours of nihilistic anti-heroes murdering their way through a city because the show has been molecularly engineered to remove the moral weight—the "caloric guilt"—of watching it. The long-term effect of this E960 masking is not physical diabetes; it is affective alexithymia —a clinical inability to feel appropriate emotional responses to real-world stimuli.

Because we have found the perfect stevia leaf for the soul. And it is killing our capacity for horror.

It is the saccharine soundtrack over a scene of torture. It is the witty one-liner following a decapitation. It is the "cute" animal sidekick in a show about cosmic horror. Just as Stevia makes battery acid taste like lemonade, modern production techniques make depravity feel like casual entertainment. Case Study: The Marvel Effect and the Sweetening of Atrocity Consider the blockbuster model of the last decade. In films like Avengers: Endgame or the John Wick series, the body count is genocidal. Villains are dispatched in increasingly creative, brutal ways. Yet, the audience walks out humming a theme song, craving a burger and a soda. Why? Because the depravity is masked by the sweetness of self-referential humor, bright CGI, and a rhythm borrowed from music videos.