In Defense of Happy Endings
Something I am tragically opinionated on is the tragically controversial concept of happy endings in fiction. As a young teenager first learning about writing, probably 50% of the writing advice I got from people in my same (fandom) circles amounted to “don’t make it too happy, make it really sad, heartbreak is good, make it as tragic as possible”. You can’t log onto Facebook without seeing discussions about ever-tragic shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead; and I’ve lost count of the amount of people I’ve seen praise those shows for being “realistic”, for being superior in their tragedy.
But, hear me out: what’s so bad about happy endings?
The goal of a writer should always be to make the audience feel something, regardless of what they’re writing. Comedy writer? You want to make your audience laugh. Memoir writer? You want to make your audience feel connected to the subject. Textbook writer? You want to make your audience feel regret for spending $700 to read someone explain what triangles are. “Feel something” encompasses a huge range of emotions. So why, out of all the emotions you could make an audience feel, do we get so stuck on sadness?
Let’s explore the “why” before the “why not”. The “why” is pretty straightforward: making people sad is easy. Make a character — if you don’t feel like spending time developing them, use some shortcuts to make them immediately sympathetic (a small child, a cute animal). Then have something really bad happen to them. A simple A + B = C formula with infallible results.
Well, until it starts to fail. Because the thing about relying on tragedy is that your audience doesn’t have any chance to really get attached to the characters. A character’s sorrows make us cry for them, but their joys make us really, deeply feel for them. And when you establish that you’re going to kill off just about one character per episode, you get the opposite of the cartoon “nothing bad happens to these characters so I never worry about them” effect. You get an emotionally numb audience who doesn’t bother ever getting attached to your characters because, well, why bother getting attached to a character who probably won’t last the season?
An anecdote: When I moved from Seattle to Georgia, I thought that I would never adjust to the heat (averaging around 10–15 degrees higher than Seattle in the fall). In reality, it took me about a week before I had switched from viewing 70 degrees as “hot” to “pleasant”. A week back in Seattle, and I had switched again. Point being, people actually have a very low tolerance for how much of something they can take before they get used to it. If all you give your characters is suffering with no reprieve, the audience grows numb to it and just… stops caring. And suddenly, your greatest #writinghack has become your greatest weakness. Suddenly, you’re losing your audience.
But does this mean that all media needs to be all happy all the time? No, not at all. But you have to strike a balance, and you have to apply tragedy with thought. “Joe wakes up and has coffee and then goes to work and then comes home” and “Joe wakes up three hours late to work, breaks his arm getting dressed, crashes his car, gets fired for being late, and then his house catches on fire and he dies” are both equally boring in different ways. It’s about finding a balance between the two that matches the tone of your story and draws the audience in effectively.
Allow me to compare two fantasy-based media I’ve enjoyed: Game of Thrones (which I don’t think does tragedy well) vs. The Adventure Zone (which I think does).
Look, I’m gonna make a confession here. I tried to like Game of Thrones. I really, really did. But eventually, I just couldn’t really take it anymore. I did enjoy it for a time, genuinely, but then it just wore on me. Some people do like this show, of course. A lot of people, for that matter. And I get why — it has a lot of really, really good aspects and does do a lot of things right. But for me, and for an increasingly large number of people I know, spending an hour a week immersed in something so bleak gets a little more depressing than most people can find enjoyable.
On the other hand, The Adventure Zone. For the unfamiliar: The Adventure Zone is a humorous Dungeons & Dragons podcast created by Griffin, Travis, Justin, and Clint McElroy for the Maximum Fun podcast network. I recently binged the entire series, and one of the high points for me was that the characters were allowed to have good things happen to them. They got days at the spa, time spent with people they cared about, festivals and jokes and laughter and deep, genuine, honest friendship.
And they also faced tragedy. Death, and loss, and betrayal. And because the balance was weighted towards the humorous and lighthearted, the sorrowful moments struck as even more poignant because they contrasted so heavily with the rest of the podcast. Finding out everyone’s sad backstories midway through the podcast — after getting to know and love these characters as lighthearted beings — was so much more effective than if they had just been introduced with their backstories leading them in. Comedy first, then tragedy.
Now, all this isn’t to say that I absolutely hate Game of Thrones; nor is it to say that I view The Adventure Zone as perfect or infallible. And they are, at the end of the day, going for very different tones (comedy vs. drama). In a large part, it’s a matter of preference. Some people do just prefer their media a little darker, and more power to them. I don’t have any issues with that.
My main issue arises when people try to tell me that tragic media is better because it’s more realistic. That happy endings are inherently stupid because real life doesn’t get happy endings, that media where all the characters are awful people who hurt each other incessantly is better because that’s how the world actually is. See, that really, really bothers me.
Because here’s the thing about the world: we are the ones who shape it. All of us living on it — you, me, the people you love and the people you hate — we all, collectively, decide what the world is. And when you look at people being awful to each other (in reality or fiction) and shrug it off as that’s how the world is, you’re giving people like that permission to continue doing that. Because if that’s how the world is, then they don’t have to change. It’s not them, it’s the world.
But what if we stopped doing that? What if we glorified heroes, just a little more? What if we stopped viewing depressing media as the truest form of realism and instead held each other a little more accountable for the times when we act like that? Call me a soppy optimist, but hear me out: what if we made media that reflects the world, not as it is, but as how we know it can be?
