PLEASE, STOP WRITING HAPPY ENDINGS

I’ve been promising a post about this for ages and now I finally have the opportunity to procrastinate on something, so I’m going to do it.

This is a plea to other writers and game designers to start seriously considering the power you wield so that you can use it ethically and responsibly.

A note on nomenclature: I’m going to be preferring the term “narrative” here over “story” because many people tend to have a limited perspective on what constitutes a story. All works of media, even those without an explicit plot, have a narrative: even Pong has a start (when you begin playing), conflict (you want to win), and ending (when you finish playing).

The power of narratives
Narratives, more than anything else in the world, have a powerful ability to shape people’s perceptions of the world around them. It should follow naturally then that people who construct narratives (whether you write prose or design games) should be held responsible for maintaining stewardship over their narratives and ensuring that they’re transforming the perspectives of their readers in an appropriate and ethical way.

To illustrate my point, here’s an exercise. Do you believe that stealing is wrong? Probably. Can you pinpoint the moment in your life when you decided that? Maybe, maybe not. It’s a belief that was ingrained in you through exposure to many narratives that all, implicitly or explicitly, asserted the same message. Perhaps you stole something as a kid and your parents put you in time out, or maybe they hit you, or maybe they lectured you that stealing would get you thrown in jail. These narratives all follow the same basic template: You want something -> You steal it -> Something bad happens and what you stole is taken away again -> You learn your lesson.

It seems like one of the most basic and self-evident truths, but it’s not something that children come equipped understanding automatically. Instead, it’s a lesson that gets taught. Maybe it’s taught many times. When we hear the same message from lots of different people, we start to subconsciously understand it as the way of the world. The more we hear it and in the more different contexts we’re exposed to it, the more universal a truth it seems to be.

Children don’t really have a sense of right and wrong aside from the one they develop by digesting the narratives they’re exposed to growing up. What are property rights? What does it mean that that toy is “mine” and that toy is “yours?” All of this is learned through narratives. We tend to roll our eyes and tune out when people lecture us, but when we’re personally invested in a sequence of events (whether it be through reading a book or experiencing them in reality), we’re wired in, receptive and sympathetic to the outcome. Humans are extremely good at recognizing, integrating, and applying patterns. It’s the fundamental allure of games. Therefore, when we (consciously or not) recognize a pattern in narratives, we start to integrate it into our understanding of the world.

Narratives in fiction
Fiction is an incredibly powerful way of conveying a narrative because we can imagine ourselves in a situation that we might never encounter in reality, allowing us to learn from an experience from the safety of our homes.

The most important part of a story is its ending. Generally, the ending is when the protagonist applies the lesson they’ve learned from the story and either succeeds or fails at achieving their goal. The protagonist is the vessel through which the narrative of the plot is conveyed. What they ultimately end up doing, and what ends up happening to them, becomes the message that readers take away from the work. Captain Ahab and his crew are destroyed by the whale, showing that revenge is a self-destructive voyage. Romeo and Juliet die meaninglessly, showing that surrendering yourself to emotion is harmful to yourself and those around you. Aladdin and Jasmine live happily ever after, showing that all you need to do is become rich and lie to someone in order to find true love.

People laugh when I bring up examples of Disney movies and usually say that I’m overthinking kids’ movies, because Disney is a brand so firmly associated with being kid-friendly that questioning the value of their works is funny. But Disney’s messages are so over-the-top toxic that it’s kind of low-hanging fruit. How about Harry Potter? Voldemort is murdered, showing that killing someone who wronged you is not only okay but necessary, and it fixes all the world’s problems.

Maybe you think it’s acceptable to murder people who do bad things, and if so, I can hardly fault you; it’s such a pervasive message in all of our media that it’s hardly a surprise that so many people accept it. Try to think: why is it that you believe that? Can you remember when you started to think that way? Narratives are powerful. They shape our worldview in ways so subtle that we don’t realize they’re doing it. We incorporate their messages into our identity and defend them, even without knowing where the belief came from.

Happy endings
Whether we intend them to be or not, all narratives are inherently argumentative. Most sports movies argue that the path to victory is through lots of tough practice and teamwork. But is that really self-evident? Can’t you normally overcome someone who’s better than you by cheating? And so these movies often have a subplot where someone gets caught cheating and they suffer for it, arguing that cheaters never prosper. Sometimes, the good guys win even though the opponent is cheating to show just how strong their teamwork is.

But in the real world, cheaters prosper all the time.

As writers, we’re all familiar with the fact that most stories follow the three-act structure. The protagonist starts off with a lesson to learn, fails to achieve their goal because of their ignorance of the lesson, then finally learns the lesson and uses it to solve their problem. The lesson is usually a pretty unadventurous cliche: teamwork is good, caring for others is important, you need to take responsibility for yourself, etc. Picking a good lesson is easy.

But a lot of writers stop there. Just as important as the explicit lesson of the story are its implicit lessons. What methods does your protagonist employ to achieve their goal? What moral choices, large and small, does your protagonist make along the way?

-Does the antagonist die in the end?
-Does the protagonist kill any of the antagonist’s minions?
-Do wrongdoers learn their lesson or are they irredeemably evil?
-Does the protagonist lie and cheat?

All of these are commonly glossed-over and accepted tropes but each one is making a statement about the way the world works. This finally brings me to: what’s wrong with happy endings?

Narratives follow the same basic argumentative form: if you do X and Y, then Z will happen, where Z is the ending. If Z is an undesirable outcome, then the narrative warns you against the dangers of X and Y. But if Z is desirable, then the narrative not only condones doing X and Y in order to achieve Z, but suggests that it’s the “proper” way of achieving Z.

The problem with happy endings is that they’re inherently prescriptive. A narrative with a happy ending is a guidebook, teaching readers the correct way to live their lives. When you write a narrative with a happy ending, you have a very tall order ahead of you: you need to be aware that you’re condoning the protagonist’s methods and everything they learn.

-In a narrative with a happy ending, killing an antagonist condones capital punishment, violence, and war. Just making them dissolve or fade away or otherwise sugarcoating it doesn’t escape this message; you’re still metaphorically killing them.
-In a narrative with a happy ending, having wrongdoers be irredeemable is to claim that rehabilitation is impossible, that once someone has done something wrong that they’re evil for life. This often goes hand in hand with killing them.
-In a narrative with a happy ending, if the protagonist uses deception or trickery, then the narrative asserts that the ends justify the means and that lying and deceit are okay.

And maybe you agree with those messages. If so, then maybe you don’t have a problem encouraging them. But if you don’t, then you need to think strongly about why it is you’re incorporating them into your story. Do you want other people to think that way? Do you want to be responsible for other people thinking that way?

Even if your narrative is completely scrubbed of undesirable messages (which is no small feat), the notion of a happy ending is itself a political statement. In the words of media researcher Ed S. Tan, “a happy ending corresponds to prototypical representations of justice.” If you do the right thing, then you’ll get what you want. If you do the wrong thing, then you’ll be punished.

If you’re unfamiliar with the just-world fallacy, then maybe that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing to you. Consider instead turning those statements around: if you don’t get what you want, you didn’t do the right thing. If you were punished, then you did something wrong. Happy endings reinforce a conservative worldview and implicitly condone victim blaming.

A personal note
I had a pretty rough upbringing and I often turned to books and games as a form of escapism. They offered some solace from the problems I struggled with by reassuring me that if you did your best that everything would turn out okay, and that the people who wronged me would eventually get their comeuppance. But no matter what I did to try to shut out my problems, they didn’t go away. Many of them grew worse as time went on.

As I became more mature and accepting of my situation, it became both difficult and painful to continue reading. There wasn’t a happy ending in sight for me, and the people at whose hands I suffered were never any worse for it. They most certainly didn’t learn a lesson. I struggled with relating to the books that everyone else loved because I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile what they said about the way the world worked with my personal experience with it.

Sometimes, I wondered if I deserved it, if I had done something wrong, or if there was something just “wrong” about me that made me deserving of everything that happened to me. It might sound silly if you’ve never been through it, but I’m sure others who grew up with tough childhoods can relate. It’s easy to accept difficult and painful situations as a part of life as a coping mechanism, and when you do, you’re faced with the need to explain it to yourself to make your view of the world consistent. Because our narratives teach us that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people, often the only way to resolve this paradox is by wondering if you’re one of the bad people. I felt ashamed, guilty, and worthless.

One of my most powerful childhood memories was when we read Bridge to Terabithia in school. It was a really shocking and upsetting book, and it was one of the first works that really challenged the way I had been taught to look at the world. It was the first time a story spoke to me. Sometimes, bad things happen to good people, for no reason at all. Everyone cried when we read it, but I was overjoyed. Maybe there wasn’t something wrong with me after all, and maybe I didn’t deserve everything that happened to me.

I credit works like that with starting to bring me out of the deep depression of my childhood. As books with moving endings tended to be way above my reading level or too serious/literary for my tastes, this was when I started getting really into games, particularly RPGs, where I could find the drama and tragedy that resonated with the events of my life. I developed a more nuanced way of looking at the world and I began questioning fundamental assumptions about the nature of good and evil (like if they even existed!).

Responsibility
I struggle a lot with writing happy stories (if you’ve played any of my games, this should come as no surprise). When I was young, I just couldn’t relate with happy characters in any way except intense jealousy, and even now I struggle to see happy characters as anything but shallow and unrealistic. But now, remembering the struggles of my childhood and having spoken with others who shared my experiences, I’ve started to wonder if happy stories are not merely unrealistic but actually harmful.

We live in a world where innocent people suffer constantly at the hands of others who not only are not punished, but reap tremendous rewards from it. As a society, we tend to overlook this painful truth because it runs contrary to everything we’ve been taught since childhood. Research has shown that people who believe in a just world tend to blame victims of crimes or to deny they ever happened, because that’s the only way to reconcile what happened with their view of the world. It encourages complacency, to accept that people who are wealthy and powerful must have done something to earn it, and that the poor must simply be lazy.

Given how virtually all narratives aimed at children implicitly condone the popular notion of justice, it should really come as no surprise that beliefs about good vs evil and good things happening to good people are so thoroughly ingrained in our public consciousness. Because of that, when I start to conceive of a happy, none-too-serious, heroic story about good triumphing over evil, I feel guilty. Can I in good conscience contribute to a worldview that’s actively hurting countless people all the time?

It’s easy to invent excuses (“it’s just a story!” “it’s just a game!”) to escape responsibility so that we can happily write whatever kinds of stories we want, but as writers, we wield a tremendous power to transform the world. We need to analyze the stories we’re writing and make sure they’re nudging people in the right direction. When you’re planning out your stories, ask yourself what messages and behavior you’re condoning. Who could your story hurt? Who could your story help?

If you only take one thing away from this, I want it to be that there’s no such thing as “just a story.” No matter how cute, or brainless, or light-hearted a story is, it is making a statement about the way the world is. Your responsibility is to take ownership of that statement and to ensure it’s something that in some way betters the world.