City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Noooooooo!

Ad Astra

By Ad Astra,
Posted on: 2010-03-19 05:27 in Suggestions and Ideas

 

Posted

OP:

There's a MA arc with a premise similar to what you're suggesting. It's not so much that you fail; it's more an oversight in cause-effect relationships. If you really get into that story, it will break your heart.

Now I just need to remember the name / ID of the arc . . . .

 

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Originally Posted by Grouchybeast View Post
I know it so totally isn't the point, but my inner biologist is yelling, the humans are okay? When there are no animals? Don't you know what an ecology is?
It's a fantastical short story, lighten up

Also, IIRC from Gaiman's comments in Smoke & Mirrors, he wrote it at the request of PETA (though he wears a leather jacket and loves steak).

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Bill, what the hell, man? You're better than this. Why would you of all people use a sliding scale argument THAT obvious. There is a WORLD of difference between having the confidence that a story won't end on a downer ending and having no story at all. No-one said you have to have everything given to you. You have to fight for your right to party, as it were. But that fight has to amount to something. And, what's more, you can't compare a cliffhanger ending with a downer ending. They're just not the same thing.
Yeah, the scale was a bit extreme, I admit, but after the hundredth "Oh, by the way, you win, bad guys (or good guys) gone, nobody else hurt, didn't even scratch the paint in the halls," there's no... excitement, I suppose, or development - going to the next point -
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As far as anime goes, even though important characters have the tendency to get cut in half a lot of the time, the story itself tends to have a clear, obvious resolution at the end. Well, unless it decides to pull an Evangelion ending and I realise I just spent 64*20 minutes wasting my time and I do my best not to punch my expensive stuff. Like I said - I'm not against drama, or even tragedy in my fiction. Hell, that's what makes fiction so good. I just want an ending that makes the whole experience worth it, and a downer ending just is not this.
/agree on Evangelion. That was just... yeah. That said - your last sentence is the entire point, to me, of where we don't agree. I would *love* some "Guess what, sometimes things just don't work out" endings finishing up a good story arc. Or, yes, even in the middle (I disagree, obviously, with Alpha's take on the sudden-10-minute-mission. For one, it's a personal challenge to beat it, whicih I usually do and for another, there's *reason* for the overall goal of that mission to fail - whether it's by your personal defeat or the defeat of that mythical "other team."

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And again - are you seriously suggesting that some movies (let's go with movies) have to end in downer endings so the audience won't know what to expect? Because that's not how it works. When people go to watch a movie, they expect a decent ending that provides closure, and when they don't get it, they storm out.
"Decent ending that provides closure" is not automatically "shiny happy ending." Jumping to TV shows, one of my favourite endings is Blackadder Goes Fourth. The series is placed in WWI, with the usual Blackadder/Baldric/rest of crew shenanagans - but it ends with the order for them to go over the top, chase across no-mans-land ... and then cuts to a shot of the flowers in Flanders Field. Alternately, though it's not the end of the series, just a character's run - Henry Blake's departure from M*A*S*H. All we have is him taking off in the helicopter to go to the airfield - then life proceeding as usual until Radar comes in and announces his plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan with no survivors.

Now, should every - or even most - stories have this sort of ending? No, obviously not. That, in its own way, is as wearing as "Oh, don't worry about it, everyone but the bad guy comes out fine in the end" gets boring.

re: Dragonball/DBZ - Cut out all the time someone's floating in midair, glowing and screaming "aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH" getting an attack ready, and you'd finish the series in a week.

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I have never seen a story that ended on a downer ending that was actually good to read, watch or play. Ending a game on a downer ending and never releasing a sequel to fix it is just as bad as releasing a game that ends on a cliffhanger and never producing a sequel at all. And Soul Reaver slipped by the latter on the skin of its teeth.
Then you've missed some good stories. Of course, the definition of "downer," too, can be a matter of personal taste - not just "everyone dies."

Now, is it *rare* to have it as an ending, versus a cliffhanger (again, Empire Strikes Back?) Sure. I'd say it's probably much, much harder to write (write well, that is) than "Bad guy gone, hero gets girl/guy/whatever, everyone lives happily ever after." But that doesn't mean it should be excluded as an ending, or failure for the reason of a story should be avoided or be reason for calling that story "bad." Failure doesn't even have to be complete failure - "We won the war!" is shiny-happy-a bit naiive. "We won the war - now what about the orphans, wounded, all we need to rebuild" strikes a more realistic chord.