Should good always prevail over evil?

[Mindfire]

Wouldn't have bothered me IF there was more to come. If that was the end of the whole thing, it would be rather disappointing.

I can picture the adults yelling obscenities and throwing popcorn at the screen while the kids simply sit open-mouthed in shock. lol

 

[Ankari]

I think that you have to handle the Good Vs Evil conflict like Robert Jordan begins his books. When a book ends with the good guy losing/dying, the author has to convey that this is an ending and not the ending.

Joe Abercrombie does a good job with this in his trilogy.

Steven Erikson does this all the time. In Deadhouse Gates, the story is far from a happy ending.

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

I wonder how people would have reacted if Return of the Jedi ended with Vader beheading Luke, the Rebel Fleet being destroyed, and the Death Star blowing up Endor.

If 11-year-old me knew that this ending would kill the franchise, thus sparing 28-year-old me from Midi-Chlorians, Jar Jar Binks, and Teen Angst Vader...

...yeah, even then I'd hate the ending. And cry. But only because 11-year-old me wouldn't understand the long term benefit.

 

[Penpilot]

I can picture the adults yelling obscenities and throwing popcorn at the screen while the kids simply sit open-mouthed in shock. lol

I think you just described my reaction to the end of the Matrix trilogy. There's a prime example of not meeting audience expectations.

 

[Rullenzar]

People crave a good story. It's not always who wins that matters, but the struggles, companionship, sacrifice, a character goes through to prevail that grip people. It gives people hope in their own lives subconciously or directly to face their own struggles.

If your character sacrifices his own life to defeat an evil at the end of a novel the reader is saddened and wishes it could have ended with said character still alive but they love the ending regardless. If the character dies and the evil power wins taking control of whatever he was after the reader is in most cases left feeling cheated unless your villain has been humanized and has a point of view incorporated into the story.

In my opinion this can only work if your main character is the villain. Which opens up a new set of problems for writers if not done right.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I think Shakespeare's tragedies prove that you can end a story with an unhappy ending. That said, I don't encourage people to write more tragedies.

 

[ALB2012]

You know what else is full of war, death and murder? Fantasy novels.

So, yeah. I don't think we read fantasy to escape the evils of real life. I think we read fantasy to escape boredom.

To quote George Lucas: "Drama is conflict, conflict means violence of one kind or another." The reason we get a lot of bad news is because the good news isn't nearly as sensational. The problem with this is, of course, that we tend to get a pretty bleak outlook on life.

However, there are a lot of good news out there. Happy endings happen in real life all the time, we just don't get to hear about them. And that's exactly why it's dangerous to think that the triumph of evil is more realistic than the triumph of good - because it reinforces an illusion too many of us are already living in.

Good points:0

 

[Addison]

I read somewhere, I forget where....How To Write Fantasy Volume 1 I think. Anyway, in it there was a discussion about good versus evil, which prevails and what not. One of the scenarios was when both sides win. It all depends on what your hero is really after. Is he out to destroy the antagonist? Or just to get to a place to find a rare flower to save his ill wife? In their example it was a race between hero and villain, neither one really knowing the other, to get to this rare plant. The hero wanted it to save his ailing wife and the villain wanted it as a ransom. Like, he threatens to spread the disease (and he has the only cure) unless they bow under his rule. The hero gets a flower for his wife and the villain gets the rest for his plan.
So you really want to think about what type of story you're writing. Figure that out and it could open more doors.

 

[wordwalker]

I think Shakespeare's tragedies prove that you can end a story with an unhappy ending. That said, I don't encourage people to write more tragedies.

I always think of tragedies as an extension of the idea that a story ends with some good people winning and some losing. In a classic tragedy, almost everyone loses, but the audience survives and sees it all happened because Macbeth was greedy, Hamlet was indecisive, etc, so there's still a winner. (In a more modern tragedy, everyone loses because Life Is Awful, and that's what the audience wants to hear anyway so they win.)

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I always think of tragedies as an extension of the idea that a story ends with some good people winning and some losing. In a classic tragedy, almost everyone loses, but the audience survives and sees it all happened because Macbeth was greedy, Hamlet was indecisive, etc, so there's still a winner. (In a more modern tragedy, everyone loses because Life Is Awful, and that's what the audience wants to hear anyway so they win.)

I don't really think that the audience getting something out of a story counts; they're not part of the story, they're the audience.

The real question is, what's your goal with the story? If your goal is to tell a morality tale, then you can quite certainly end with bad things happening to people. Aesop's fables and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm commonly demonstrate this.

That said, modern audiences aren't usually looking for fables. I've noticed that works with unhappy endings, even if they're heralded by critics, tend to have a narrow appeal among the larger audience. Not that there's anything wrong with that; if that's what you want to do, fine. But if your goal is to write something that most readers will like, unhappy endings are a bad idea.