We love happily-ever-after stories:
We want the good guys to win -- although in reality, the good guys don't always win and sometimes it's hard to spot the good guys. And often we pick books to read in which the good guys look like us.
We want the world saved, but we're aware that that same world may need saving again the next year, or even the next week. Isn't this the gist of superhero comics?
We want the protagonist to fall in love. We assume they never break up, no matter how ludicrous their matching is. Opposites attract, sure, but that's opposites in experience, not morals and values.
We assume the end of the book is the end of the story. It's comforting, because it's not real life. Perhaps it's an escape from real life.
I will argue that happily-ever-after is a bad thing in real life. Why? First, because we couldn't stand that in real life. It is human nature to move forward, and moving forward always concerns a sense of loss -- loss of innocence, loss of friends, loss of the secure past, sometimes loss of life. The poignancy of age and mortality season our lives with a deeper meaning.
Second, total stagnation would make us uneasy. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates how frustrated people get with the same thing over and over again. Scenarios where nothing changes are the material of Twilight Zone. Stagnation is the "uncanny valley" of life -- it resembles life, but it's not really life.
I love Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. I literally cannot bring myself to read the series any more after the stories of abuse her daughter revealed, but Darkover was one of my writing influences. However, in her series, she had a talent of making happily-ever-after stories end badly in the sequel, often offstage. The renegade telepaths of the Forbidden Tower are mentioned in future books as having been killed by fanatics. The heroic Regis Hastur becomes a paranoid, prematurely aged man in later years. This became part of the intrigue of the series, because those deaths set up new plot lines and character development.
When we writers don't write series fiction (duologies, trilogies etc), the happy ending stands without need for update. In series fiction, we have the opportunity to make our world richer by continuing character strands in positive or negative ways.
In real life, we keep striving, and there are many endings in our lives, but many beginnings as well, until the ultimate end.
We want the good guys to win -- although in reality, the good guys don't always win and sometimes it's hard to spot the good guys. And often we pick books to read in which the good guys look like us.
We want the world saved, but we're aware that that same world may need saving again the next year, or even the next week. Isn't this the gist of superhero comics?
We want the protagonist to fall in love. We assume they never break up, no matter how ludicrous their matching is. Opposites attract, sure, but that's opposites in experience, not morals and values.
We assume the end of the book is the end of the story. It's comforting, because it's not real life. Perhaps it's an escape from real life.
I will argue that happily-ever-after is a bad thing in real life. Why? First, because we couldn't stand that in real life. It is human nature to move forward, and moving forward always concerns a sense of loss -- loss of innocence, loss of friends, loss of the secure past, sometimes loss of life. The poignancy of age and mortality season our lives with a deeper meaning.
Second, total stagnation would make us uneasy. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates how frustrated people get with the same thing over and over again. Scenarios where nothing changes are the material of Twilight Zone. Stagnation is the "uncanny valley" of life -- it resembles life, but it's not really life.
I love Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. I literally cannot bring myself to read the series any more after the stories of abuse her daughter revealed, but Darkover was one of my writing influences. However, in her series, she had a talent of making happily-ever-after stories end badly in the sequel, often offstage. The renegade telepaths of the Forbidden Tower are mentioned in future books as having been killed by fanatics. The heroic Regis Hastur becomes a paranoid, prematurely aged man in later years. This became part of the intrigue of the series, because those deaths set up new plot lines and character development.
When we writers don't write series fiction (duologies, trilogies etc), the happy ending stands without need for update. In series fiction, we have the opportunity to make our world richer by continuing character strands in positive or negative ways.
In real life, we keep striving, and there are many endings in our lives, but many beginnings as well, until the ultimate end.
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