Five Reasons Why Happy Endings Can Be Bad For You

1.     In life, not every story has a happily ever after.  And even when good things do happen, it is rarely all good.  Most of life it about balance, and good can’t exist without bad.  With a lot of stories, though, even semi-unhappy endings aren’t very good.  Even if an ending isn’t happy, even if the hero does die, it has to have some meaning, some form of closure.  But once again, life isn’t always like that.  Humans make mistakes, and more often than not, they don’t get the chance to right them.  

2.     It seems like every story has to have a happy ending now.  Why?  Partly because sequels are so popular at the moment.  What’s becoming even more common is to have the hero pretend to die, or almost die, but never put them in any actual danger.  Six recent example:  StarTrek Into Darkness, Halo 4, Dark Knight Rises, Sherlock Holmes: A Games of Shadows, The Avengers, and Pacific Rim.  Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  Out of those, all share very similar endings, and four deal with the hero personally delivering a bomb, supposedly to go down with it, and then miraculously surviving. 

3.     Happy endings can be irresponsible.  I’ve always argued that censorship of certain content is unfair and irresponsible.  Particularly since I write a lot of military centered stories, censoring the horrors of war seems completely unfair to those who have suffered through them.  To portray their experiences as anything less that what they experienced seems to me to be doing them a disservice.  If you’re uncomfortable reading about war, then imagine what it’s like for those doing the fighting, or the innocent people who get caught in the crossfire.

4.     Happy endings let readers off the hook, and undermine any emotional value of the story.  This advice I first received from Michael Meyerhofer, my first creative writing teacher.  I’d written a story dealing with commercialization and the environment, and ended it with a joke.  He said that the joke undermined the power of the story because it let readers off the hook, lightening the mood and distracting them from the true purpose of the story.  

As Alan Alda's character, Hawkeye, says in M*A*S*H, "War is war and Hell is Hell, and of the two, war is worse.  There are no innocent bystanders in Hell."

      That’s not to say humor is out of place in serious writing, M*A*S*H did a great job of balancing the two, particularly later in the series, but ending on a positive note can leave people feeling content rather than pondering the meaning of the writing and wondering how it applies in their own lives.  

      A recent story that does a good job of not letting readers off the hook is Lotería, by Mario Alberto Zambrano.  In the end, the protagonist makes an interesting decision, one that leaves the reader with mixed feelings and really lets the themes play out fully.  It gives the reader something to think about, and that was really refreshing.

5.      It can be inhuman.  Sometimes in order to achieve a happy ending, writers force characters to make decisions they probably wouldn’t if they were human. Anymore when I write, I try to portray characters as realistically as possible, even if that means sometimes letting them make decisions that are different from what people expect from traditional stories. It wasn't something I did when I started writing, or even until recently.  I grew up in a world of happy endings, and even when I killed off characters, it had to matter.  

      But I think it can often be more important to stay true to the humanity of a character and let them make the decision they would make, rather than forcing them into an unrealistic situation just to find closure.  That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy stories with closure, just that sometimes they can be frustratingly unrealistic.  I’m curious to see what other writers think of this.  

      One story that does an excellent job handling its characters realistically is the video game The Last of Us, in which the protagonist makes a controversial decision at the end. It is a decision many people might disagree with, and not one you’d expect. Yet it makes the most sense for that character, and is true to his humanity.

Now, I’m not saying that every story has to have a darker ending, not at all.  There is be a place in the world of literature and film for optimistic, escapist stories, but it should be a place, not the majority or the entirety.  Also, as I said, mixed endings that leave the reader thinking are, in my opinion, probably both the most realistic and the most effective.