[ SECRET POST #2315 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2315 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 081 secrets from Secret Submission Post #331.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

IMO, the problem isn't so much that unhappy endings are more common in real life as it is that a lot of writers, both fic and pro, can't write an ending to save their life. They rush the resolution, or they write something unintentionally horrifying, or they realize at the eleventh hour that they've written themselves into a corner and have to decide between an asspull and a rocks-fall ending. Sad endings tend to get away with it more easily because they generally follow the overall momentum of the story - if you have 60 chapters of bleak circumstances and things looking like they might just be hopeless, it isn't a shock when they turn out to actually be hopeless in chapter 61, even if it can be incredibly unsatisfying. On the other hand, if they turn around suddenly and everything wraps up happily, you have mood whiplash and cranky readers, not because the ending's happy, but because it's poorly executed. (Which does leave a lot of room for personal mileage varying, and you certainly do get the opposite situation sometimes, where the plot is trundling along happily and then SUDDEN UNAVOIDABLE CLIFF WITH GIANT RABID SHARKS AT THE BOTTOM.)

There's also the problem of what to classify as a happy ending. When a lot of people (not all, possibly not even most, but a lot) talk about happy endings, they're talking about some variation on "good guys win, hero gets the girl, everyone we're supposed to care about lives happily ever after" unequivocally happy endings. The sad endings category frequently gets to host the bittersweet delegation, which covers the entire range of "mostly happy but with a note of loss" to "mostly bleak but with a ray of hope", which means there are a lot more options to play with, and it ends up suiting a wider range of story tones largely by default.