Do you like happy endings? Or do you like tragedy? Does the hero have to ride off into the sunset, having saved the day and living happily ever after? Or are you okay with the hero or heroes dying in order to accomplish their goal?
For me it’s all of the above. I like it all, on one condition; The sacrifices have to be meaningful.
I don’t read stories or watch movies to find out that change is impossible and the hero ultimately fails. And yet storytellers still pull these kind of shenanigans.
If the hero throws themself in front of certain death to buy another character more time to escape, that is heroic because the sacrifice bought something. If the hero throws themself on certain death but the other character doesn’t escape, and they both die, you’ve just wasted my time and I’ll probably never buy another story of yours again.
Human culture crafts myth to entertain, but also to feed the soul. Hopelessness is a poor form of nourishment.
There are far too many stories out there where the creators were intent on communicating hopelessness, and if I had to guess why I’d say the creators have a poor understanding of sacrifice.
Anything goes in a story. There’s no rule that says what characters live or what characters die, or even that the characters accomplished what they set out to do. There is only one rule in my book…
The sacrifices must be meaningful.
I guess I do a combination of all of the above, but I have no problem ending something in tragedy. I think tragedy is hard to sell (metaphorically speaking) to an audience though. It’s hard to make a reader love a character and have it end in death and still have that reader enjoy the book. By nature I think we all really want to see the protagonist succeed.
On a side note, I’ve been writing a lot of stories that end differently than they began. What I mean is that the character begins by wanting something and in the end, when the opportunity arises for them to get it they come to the decision that they don’t really want it anymore. I have a story called Asher that took that approach, where he wanted to be like everybody else, but in the end, when he realized that being like everyone else would mean sacrificing his humanity, he decided not to be them at all. I like the story a lot, but the person who usually crits my work hated it. I don’t know if that has to do with the fact that she doesn’t read much SF or if it is just a bad story, but I love the story.
Anywho, I’m rambling. If you can pull of a tragedy, I’m all game :).
I don’t think tragedy is hard to sell to audiences. It just has to have meaning. If somebody dies, I want the death to mean/signify something in an obvious way.
If it’s the hero, their death has to buy something. The freedom of others, or saving lives. If there are two heroes I really like and one of them has to die in order so the other will live, I will buy that.
I just don’t like being cheated, is all. I’ll have to look up the name of it again, but there was this one movie I watched a couple years ago where these two heroes went through hell and back, and I wanted to see something good come out of the horror. The filmmakers ended it by having the two heroes both get shotgun blasts in the face.
Ok, what was the point of that? Everything they went through was for nothing, and I had just wasted 2 hours of my life on a story that went nowhere.
Screw art, at that point it’s just a complete waste of time. People who do that should just stay at home and tell stories to themselves, and bask in their own obscurity.
The ending doesn’t have to be happy, it just has to be *satisfying* — see The Departed as a great example of that.
Well could a story be equally effective if nothing does get resolved in the end? What if the moral of the story is that some things are worth dying for, even if the chances of succeeding are slim to none? I’m trying to think of an example of this. I know I’ve seen some, but I can’t think of any at the moment. The closest I got was Cool Hand Luke, but that’s not really what I was thinking. Though I could use that as an example.
If you’ve seen that movie you know that Luke dies in the end (he’s shot while running from the cops). Luke isn’t really a hero, not in a traditional sense. He’s actually a criminal serving time for a crime. Technically I guess you can say he is heroic because he is fighting against conditions that are inhumane, but really he should be in jail because he’s a criminal. But we still feel for the character even though he dies in the end of the movie…so would that count as satisfying even though nothing truly gets resolved?
Yeah. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is another. I think the theme there is “Authority will always find a way to stamp out free will.”
In the end the main character getting lobotomized is the ultimate victory on the part of authority to take away his free will.
But I think that ending is satisfying because we know the hero is fighting a losing battle from the beginning. The storytellers propose the thesis that authority is ruthless, and will not tolerate free will. They establish this premise early on, and I always felt that was just as much if not a stronger part of the story than the actual plot.
Hero getting a lobotomy just confirms everything we believe about the evils of authority figures. “I told you so!” – Therefore satisfying.
Now if they hadn’t focused so much on nurse Ratched’s battles with the hero Randle, and hadn’t emphasized his constant testing of her and really drove that theme home, then Randle’s lobotomy at the end would seem senseless and confusing.
It’s also the nature of the setting. They’re in a mental institution. Randle could escape at any time, but he chooses to be there. He doesn’t so much want to be free (he could just leave) as he wants to be free in the face of authority.
In a sense he creates his own doom. That combined with confirming the audience suspicions about authority creates an ending which justifies everything we know to be true.
The story just has to make sense, and extreme events that happen need to have happened for a reason, even if that reason is not apparent until the end.
Chiming in a bit late here.
The story ought to dictate its ending. Sometimes it will be happy, unhappy, resolved, or unresolved.
Sideways didn’t resolve anything really, but it did show the start of a new story arc and a meaningful change in its central character.
The Proposition ended well on one level, but completely devastatingly on another.
Bliss (both the Australian movie and its source novel by Peter Carey) ended in death, which turned out to be a very happy ending.
Even later…
I agree that the sacrifices have to be meaningful or at least leave you with a feeling of hope.