Who could have thought that Liliana was actually sparing her audience from becoming addicted by making the story the most inconsequential ever and spoiling even the entertaining bits ahead of time? How noble of her.
She has literally said this.
She has said that things like characterization, continuity, lore and world-building are manipulative tools used to
force people to continue watching a show because it tickles human curiosity. Having character people relate to and want to root for is objectively villainous. Lily intentionally makes her works as low-stakes as uninteresting as possible so that people don't become 'addicted' to her work.
I think she was partially under the impression that making an engaging piece of work is inherently manipulative and her method of... not doing so proves that people want to read her comic for its own merits, not because they've been psychologically manipulated into doing so. Please ignore that people are only interested in characters and worldbuilding and lore if it's actually engaging and interesting to them. Just having a mystery
can entice an audience with that very premise (see:
LOST), but the narrative still has to be engaging to keep them. Just putting up bad cliffhangers or endless unsatisfying mysteries won't hold people because it's causing a chemical release that enforces psychological dependency (see:
LOST).
(L
OST is actually kind of an interesting point on this one. It started with crazy mysteries, and whether you were ultimately satisfied with the show depended on why you kept watching it. If you wanted answers to those mysteries, you were going to be disappointed and frustrated. However, if you were more interested in how the characters
interacted with those mysteries, then it was intriguing to the end.)
Her point was that a hack writer will incorporate some kind of mystery that 'forced' people to keep coming back if they want an answer. She isn't necessarily wrong, but a hack writer will use all
kinds of bad manipulation to try and hook an audience through shallow misunderstanding of their devices. Using or not using a given device doesn't make or break a work, it's how it's done. Lily is just pissy because these are the popular, overused devices of the day, and possibly pissy because whenever she tries to use them, people tell her it's badly done.