Real life can sometimes suck. Loved ones die, people lose their homes, and natural disasters wipe out whole towns. This kind of suckage is one of the reasons we long to escape into stories. Unfortunately, stories have increasingly become darker and darker, with endings that out-do real life.
Take The Mist, for example. In this tale, an Army experiment goes awry and unleashes a torrent of extra-dimensional creatures into our world. A few characters try to escape, but their vehicle runs out of gas and it looks like the whole world is engulfed in the mist that brought the nightmarish beasts. To spare loved ones and friends the terror of having to deal with the mist, the main character shoots them, but there are not enough bullets to take him out too, so he leaves the car to confront the monsters. Then, less than a minute later, the mist clears and the Army is coming through killing the creatures. When he realizes that if he'd held out a few minutes longer, his son and all his friends would be alive, he screams. A fucked up ending to be sure.
That might be something to say "whoa!" about if it was one-off, but more and more stories are going for this kind of edgy ending, where life sucks even worse and no one is happy. To tell you the truth, it has started to piss me off. I don't know about you, but I get invested in these characters, and I want to see them do well. When things turn out shitty for them, I feel a sense of betrayal.
Readers yearn for happy endings. Yes, some arteests and fancy-farts may think all-the-time edgy is great, but it drags us down in a world that is already shitty. Do our escapes have to be equally shitty.
Some writers seem to have caught on to this and have changed. Robert Kirkman(SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF THE WALKING DEAD COMIC AHEAD...TURN BACK NOW!!!) just ended his long running comic. His original idea was to have the zombies win the world. There'd be a statue of Rick Grimes, savior of what was left of humanity, only the pullback would reveal it was overgrown with vines. Then there'd be a scene of the walkers striding past. The dead had won. Thankfully, Kirkman came to his senses, admitting that ending was dumb and rendered the entire story pointless. His new ending, while not unicorn farts and rainbows, is at least hopeful and optimistic.
The point is that we should try all we can to make the story end on a happy note, or at least a hopeful one. No, we shouldn't be Pollyanna, but readers will get pissed off if they came to get away from the real world and we force feed them a pile of dog turds. Don't do that to your readers. Give them a way to feel good about life for a few seconds. Sometimes it's all they have.
Take The Mist, for example. In this tale, an Army experiment goes awry and unleashes a torrent of extra-dimensional creatures into our world. A few characters try to escape, but their vehicle runs out of gas and it looks like the whole world is engulfed in the mist that brought the nightmarish beasts. To spare loved ones and friends the terror of having to deal with the mist, the main character shoots them, but there are not enough bullets to take him out too, so he leaves the car to confront the monsters. Then, less than a minute later, the mist clears and the Army is coming through killing the creatures. When he realizes that if he'd held out a few minutes longer, his son and all his friends would be alive, he screams. A fucked up ending to be sure.
That might be something to say "whoa!" about if it was one-off, but more and more stories are going for this kind of edgy ending, where life sucks even worse and no one is happy. To tell you the truth, it has started to piss me off. I don't know about you, but I get invested in these characters, and I want to see them do well. When things turn out shitty for them, I feel a sense of betrayal.
Readers yearn for happy endings. Yes, some arteests and fancy-farts may think all-the-time edgy is great, but it drags us down in a world that is already shitty. Do our escapes have to be equally shitty.
Some writers seem to have caught on to this and have changed. Robert Kirkman(SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF THE WALKING DEAD COMIC AHEAD...TURN BACK NOW!!!) just ended his long running comic. His original idea was to have the zombies win the world. There'd be a statue of Rick Grimes, savior of what was left of humanity, only the pullback would reveal it was overgrown with vines. Then there'd be a scene of the walkers striding past. The dead had won. Thankfully, Kirkman came to his senses, admitting that ending was dumb and rendered the entire story pointless. His new ending, while not unicorn farts and rainbows, is at least hopeful and optimistic.
The point is that we should try all we can to make the story end on a happy note, or at least a hopeful one. No, we shouldn't be Pollyanna, but readers will get pissed off if they came to get away from the real world and we force feed them a pile of dog turds. Don't do that to your readers. Give them a way to feel good about life for a few seconds. Sometimes it's all they have.
Oh my goodness yes. Yes. Yes. So, I read a book where the main character was female, living in a foreign country. She was really unhappy. She ended up cheating on her husband. At the end, she admitted to him. You see, this whole book is about this and as the reader, you see her inner turmoil about this whole decision she made. She is so miserable she did this and she wants to make it right. And you know? The ending was horrible and sad. She dies because of throwing herself in front of a train. It's like I hated the author because of that! I get the character made a mistake and I wasn't expecting perfect but the ending left me hating the author! So hope means so much. It really does.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet some writers want to know why we stop reading them.
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