2018-09-17 22:54:32

So i was wondering, why do most books alwaise have to go good in the end, like, for example, in Percy Jackson and the Hero's of Olympus, they somehow fight titan's and giants, and i know sometimes they had godly help but still!
This topic is asking what you think would happen if the books didn't alwaise go graite, like, for example:
If Artemis wasn't able to save Holly in the Lost colony, or was it the time paradox, I alwiase tget them mixed up, in the Artemis Fowl series. Or they didn't manage to close the doors of death and there was an endless bloodbath in hero's of olympus. etc, etc, have fun with this! I want details!

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“Yes, sir. I am attempting to fill a silent moment with non-relevant conversation.”
“You don’t tell me how to behave; you’re not my mother!”
“Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.” – Data (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

2018-09-18 00:39:19

If you read The Trials of Apollo you'll see that things don't always go well. Maybe in the end as you said but something happened in the The Trials of Apollo that wasn't good.

Kingdom of Loathing name JB77

2018-09-18 00:55:45

A lot of horror and sci-fi shortstories don't go well at all, and some genres also lend themselves to bleak endings. Cyberpunk is particularly bleak and a lot of stories end badly.

Brave New World is about people being drugged into happiness by an evil government. Another story is about a world where people are forced by a hyper-capitalist government to consume products and shop and those who don't get lobotomized until they don't have the restraint to say no to impulse shopping.

The Marching Morons is a story where the entire world, except for a few people has gone completely stupid due to stupid people outbreeding smart people. and the story "The End of A Chapter" is about humans having to abandon earth in accordance with a galactic treaty and the feelings of loss and loneliness in the story are not only deeply sad, but out to the point of being scary.

Mary Shelley, the woman who wrote Frankenstein, also wrote a story called "the last man" which ends with one man left on earth, desperately searching for another person as a global plague has killed everyone they know and has seemingly depopulated the entire planet except for him. Again a story that loneliness crosses over from merely sad to being terrifying and nightmare fuel.

Frankenstein itself, the book, is itself a tragedy, the monster, who justs wants companionship lives a life of persecution and misery, Frankenstein (that is the scientist) loses his entire family, including his wife on their wedding night before himself dying. That story is one where nobody wins.

and as I said, a lot of horror and sci-fi really lends itself to sad or unhappy endings where evil wins.

The books you are mentioning are mostly juvenile and young adult books, when you get into adult fiction you'll find that a lot of classic lit, in historical novels, sci-fi, and horror often go bad with unhappy endings in the end.

Just think about Romeo and Juliet, King Leer, or Hamlet, three of Shakespeare's most famous and best plays, all of them end with everyone of note dying horribly. The bad guys in those plays die too, but there are no wedding bells or "happily ever afters" there.

Another story has a man landing on Mars, remembering his childhood pretending to be John Carter from the Edgar Rice boroughs books, only with the story ending with the fact that those memories are halucinations he's feeling as he is suffocating when he crashes and is running out of air.

2018-09-18 02:25:48 (edited by flackers 2018-09-18 02:42:42)

Walter Tevis springs to mind when I think of someone who doesn't do happy endings. The Man Who Fell to Earth is extremely bleak, and Mocking Bird is an underrated sci-fi classic that kind of has a happy ending of sorts, but not in the way you would think. That also reminds me of Perdito Street Station, which I always felt the author pulled his punch a little at the end, but it still isn't a happy ending. The Judas Tree by A.J. Cronin is a fantastic book with a very bleak end too. Then there's Bridge to Terabithia, which is the rarest of things: a kids' book without a happy ending. I also read recently The Watcher by Charles MacLean, which not only doesn't have a happy ending, but doesn't even have any kind of proper resolution. You're left wondering what the hell you just read. And there's The Tenant by Roland Topor, which has another WTF end that could never be called happy. As has been said, these books are out there thank God. I always had the greatest respect for Woody Allen when he made the Purple Rose of Cairo and refused to change it when the money men said it could do much better business with a happy ending, and Allen replied but the whole point of the film is that life isn't like the movies, so there'd be no point making any of it if you did that. So there are people out there who can make good stuff without having to fall back on feel-good endings, and there is a minority of people who like it that way.

2018-09-18 13:00:54

tragedies are stories designed to warn you of problems, that began when humans lived in caves. Adults had to pass down to their children what not to do. It was better to say your brother fell out of a tree, than to say don't climb trees or hold on tight when you climb trees.
Most people today enjoy romances or comedies rather than tragedies.
They hide the fact that we all die in the end and that is a tragedy.

2018-09-18 13:53:07

Thumbs up for post 5. I also believe that people need heros/super stars, to somehow be able to bear with life tragedies. Maybe this is another reason for why most series/novels end up good like prison break?
Regards

2018-09-18 14:27:35

Personally, I found both Artimis fowl and the percy jackson books felt a little too safe and kiddy to me. They were fun, but I never really got the sence that anything seriously bad might happen to a given character, hell in Percy Jackson the monsters don't even die, much less have actual battles, they just get zapped and teleported away.
This is why I only read up to Percy Jackson and the last olympian and wy I likely won't be reading any more of the series, since even a ya series I prefer to feel that characters aren't safe and bad things might happen, and hell yes the final ending might be bad, hell look at the death count in harry potter or the bloody grim ending of the Hungar games as examples of ya fiction with that sense of darkness.

On the topic of endings generally,  on the one hand I do find it depressing how common pop corn, happily every after endings are. On the other, if the happy ending has been earned with enough bad stuff happening, or has enough of a sting in the tale, then they can work quite well, indeed following George R R Martin there is almost these days an anti happy policy, which has just as many pit falls as the alternative \if the grim ending feels just  like a cop out.

to take one example, China Mievil is someone I don't think does! happy endings, howeever where I appreciated the ending to Perdido street station and to Iron council, I was less keen on the ending of The Scar, mostly because the main character was a really cold, unemotional scumbag who was largely unaffected by anything so you really didn't care where she ended up, and the nicest character in the book who'd been through the ringer was just left hanging following a tragedy and you weren't sure what happened to him.

It also depends as Bookrage said upon genre and style, for example horror, cyberpunk and distopea often have very grim endings, indeed a favourite of mine that falls into all three of those categories is Harlen Ellison's classic novella I have no mouth but i must scream.

On the other hand,  sometimes when your expecting! a super grim ending and something good happens, if the author has shown themselves capable of being grim and killing people it can actually have the opposite effect, for example Rand was so bound to die at the end of the wheel of time  was quite the surprise that he didn't.

Then of course, with multiple characters, you can have it happy for some and not for others, this indeed seems the tendency in many series.

I personally think this is  song of ice and fire will go, although I will say from the other fiction I've read by martin he isn't exactly a man to do happy endings, still I'd rather like it if he did let some characters such as daenerys come to a place of piece eventually.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-09-18 15:01:47

it's not just books evrything

2018-09-18 22:37:55

hmm, you all raise good points.
The general idea of the topic wasn't to name books with bad endings, but what would happen in books with good endings if it didn't alwaise go graite for them.
I do agree that in Artemis Fowl and others it does feel like they get too lucky sometimes, Artemis Fowl makes sense sometimes, but the fact that he translated Gnomish in, what was it? a few hours! Is just friggling rediculous.

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“Yes, sir. I am attempting to fill a silent moment with non-relevant conversation.”
“You don’t tell me how to behave; you’re not my mother!”
“Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.” – Data (Star Trek: The Next Generation)