I’m compelled by stories where the characters suffer a lot, but only if there’s catharsis in the end. If they just die without ever getting to recover I’m OUT because what’s the fucking purpose then? Voyeurism? Bye
But happy endings are literally SOOO boring
So are you
The three most boring kinds of endings:
-I refuse to tell you the ending, you have to ~decide for yourself~! -And then they woke up. -And it was all miserable and pointless and nothing got fixed and nothing was better and everybody died or lived morosely ever after, now stay awake all night contemplating the futility of life and feeling shitty so I can masturbate to the idea that i have made Powerful Art.
Protip: it doesn’t take any skill or insight to make people feel bad. Just like it doesn’t take any skill to refuse to come up with an ending and make the reader decide, or to handwave all the questions of the narrative by saying they were never real at all. What takes skill is to gather together all your woven threads and knot them in a way that won’t unravel, that completes the narrative, satisfies the reader, and makes sense under scrutiny. That can be bittersweet sometimes! Characters can sacrifice a lot for their ending! It doesn’t have to be rainbows and kittens! But if the ending makes readers wish they hadn’t invested emotional energy in the outcome of the story, then the story has failed.
Don’t be lazy. Don’t cheap out on your ending. Work to put together something readers will be glad they read, even if it made them cry.
IF THE ENDING MAKES READERS WISH THEY HADN’T INVESTED EMOTIONAL ENERGY IN THE OUTCOME OF THE STORY, THEN THE STORY HAS FAILED.
That’s it! That’s the point!
I will definitely not disagree with “if the ending makes readers wish they hadn’t invested emotional energy in the outcome of the story, then the story has failed”.
However.
I will point out that what will cause this does in fact vary wildly by reader. And catharsis is wildly and intensely personal.
My favourite Shakespeare play, hands down, is King Lear. And done properly, the end message of King Lear is in fact “it was all miserable and pointless and nothing got fixed and nothing was better and everybody died or lived morosely ever after.”
At the end of King Lear, there are three living people on stage: Edgar, Kent, and Albany. Except then Kent goes off to kill himself because Lear is dead, leaving Edgar and Albany with no actual win.
Nobody wins in this play. Everybody loses. The badguys lose. The good guys lose. There isn’t even really any meaningful return to order: there is no Fortinbras who comes in to sweep the old rotten dynasty away in a new and vigorous move; Augustus does not enter from stage left to bring about the new and vigorous Rome; the Prince does not finally get his head out of his arse, and both Montague and Capulet as well, and end their feud -
There’s nothing. There’s Edgar, and Albany, in a broken and fragmented country that now has no king and no heirs (Edgar has no claim to the realm, only to his father’s lands, and Albany has the … most tenuous claim ever to maybe his now-dead-wife’s third of the realm … ) with no redemption and nothing but … an end.
If done correctly it is a brutal bleak play about people hurting each other all around in a circle with no hands clean, the story of the inherited trauma and damage of multiple generations and the brutal reality of the decline of a previously strong mind under the power of dementia, with pride and fealty and ambition and misdeeds and institutional brutality of social status all bringing us together to this stage full of dead people and no meaningful future.
I fucking love it. It is cathartic as fuck and I will fight you over it.
It is absolutely true that it has no inherent objective superiority to something rather more uplifting. Its bleakness itself is not what makes it amazing (that’s the crafting of how the fuckery of each character traps them in this net of horrible that ends with the end of the show); the bleakness is neutral and imparts no particular virtue.
But also … the bleakness is neutral, and imparts no particular vice.
Happy endings can be lazy, and they can also be cowardly; brutal endings full of woe can be lazy, and they can also be cowardly; and any kind of ending to any story might be not for you, as a reader, and there’s no need to justify that any more than there’s any need to justify loving either one. Catharsis, and the emotional response to a story, is very personal, and shifts and varies not only from person to person but within the same person at different times.
So if you happen to have a story that just ends with absolute brutality, go ahead and write it that way. Someone out there will love it; a bunch of other people out there will hate it. But that’s going to be true for anything you write, because stories are personal.























