I’ve recently had the opportunity to chat with some readers of my two adult SF humour novels, ALWAYS GREENER and THE RUDE EYE OF REBELLION, and their thoughts highlighted something I’ve been thinking about for a while: why, especially in sub-genres like Hopepunk, which my books are firmly part of, we need more stories that don’t have a tidy, happy ending.
The three act structure and beat sheets like Save the Cat exist in books and movies for a whole pile of very good reasons. And yet, they also have a lot to answer for, in that they push creators firmly towards stories that end with a third act dénouement where the main character resolves the conflict or conflicts of the story and mostly everything works out for the best. This is a core genre expectation for anything other than purely adult stories, and even in adult fiction, it is such a dominant dynamic that it is hard to come up with many examples of stories that don’t finish on a happy, or at least mostly happy, ending.
There are perfectly good reasons for this as well, starting with the fact that happy endings make for happy readers, and happy readers leave better reviews and buy more books. At the end of the day, we are selling an entertainment product, and if that product leaves the reader (or the viewer, for a movie) unhappy or unsatisfied with their expectations of a happy ending after they’ve spent hours with you and your characters, then it stands to reason that you haven’t done a particularly good job as an entertainer.
But the key flaw with that premise are those « expectations of a happy ending ». Since childhood, we’ve been formatted to expect and demand that satisfying, happy resolution by the end of the story. It is essential, in fact, since all of Act Two of a modern story or movie is spent torturing the main character and ramping up conflict, and at that point, we are always so prompt to tell our worried children not to worry, « everything will be fine in the end ».
Just looking at a weather forecast these days is more than enough to show us that reality doesn’t work that way. There is and always must be hope—we can and must do better as a species and a global society—but that shit doesn’t just happen because we’ve suffered through Act Two and have reached Act Three of the story we’re starring in. It takes a whole lot of work.
Beyond the other quirks I’m perhaps excessively fond of in my little novels, such as my tongue-in-cheek etymology footnotes, the fact that some readers absolutely love the rough endings in ALWAYS GREENER and RUDE EYE, while some others are clearly put off by the absence of a happy ending might be my new, favourite thing about the feedback from my books.
To me, Hopepunk means always fighting for a better future—in the case of my books, a direct democratic one that breaks with the short-sighted corproate world-state that is a mere projection of where we are today—but also always facing the realities of the crap we have put ourselves in today. And a major part of that reality is that the stories lie, and happy endings don’t magically work themselves out.
It’s up to each of us to keep striving and making the world a better place, happy endings or not.
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