Esoteric Happy Ending: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|"''This is the most unhappy 'happy ending' I have ever seen!''"

 

A director/author/etc. writes what he thinks is a [[Happy Ending]]. Surely, nobody could think of a more wonderful, uplifting way to conclude this story!

* The ending of ''[[Angel Beats!]]'' is about as esoteric as they come. Everyone {{spoiler|except Otonashi}} eventually moves on and leaves the afterlife, which seems like a vaguely happy [[Bittersweet Ending]], if you ignore the whole "if we leave we'll probably be [[Fate Worse Than Death|reincarnated as water fleas]]" thing, which was...assumed, logically but without proof, early on and never debunked. Even worse, in the last scene {{spoiler|Kanade and Otonashi finally confess their love for each other, which makes Kanade disappear, causing Otonashi to understandably [[Say My Name|flip out]]}}. But ''that'' extreme [[Downer Ending]] is ''maybe'' undone by [[The Stinger]], in which {{spoiler|they appear to find each other again in some future life...[[Epileptic Trees|but many people think this last scene is a dream]]}}. In short: plot resolved with ambiguous [[Fridge Horror]], last scene is happy but may not be real, so...who knows?

** There was the short ova Another Epilogue that definitely showed that {{spoiler|Otonashi stayed and became the Student Council President, and that he's [[I Will Wait for You|waiting to be reunited with Kanade.]] }} This is obviously setting up a new season, so we can only wait to find out how it will turn out.

 

== Comic Books ==

 

== Fan Works ==

** Funnily enough, this is ''exactly'' what happens in an episode of ''[[Growing Up Creepie]]''. It turns out that not everyone agrees with Creepie that "everyone gets turned into giant mutant moths" (or, more generally, bugs) is a happy ending.

* As a rule, anything written by a [[Nightmare Fetishist]].

* Roald Dahl's ''[[The Witches]]''. The protagonist learns that he's stuck as a mouse and that mice don't live very long, but he's happy because he'll probably die near the same time as his elderly grandmother and doesn't care about living if he's not with her.

** The two also ponder Bruno's fate. One states that his mouse-hating mother probably drowned him in a bucket. They don't really seem very disturbed by this possibility.

* At the end of ''[[Atlas Shrugged]],'' Galt's Gulch is the only non-Crapsack place left in the whole world. Which is great, because all of the looters and moochers are gone and the good people can rebuild the world, right? Then you remember the [[Inferred Holocaust|millions of innocent children who were left to starve...]] (Then again, by the book's morality, this is the looters' and moochers' fault rather than anything to blame on the protagonists.)

** Very much a case of [[Values Dissonance]]. Rand makes very clear her belief that leaving the weak to die rather is the moral choice. Moreover, she spends several pages earlier in the book arguing that everyone other than her heroes were either the causes of society's collapse or complicit because they did nothing to stop it (including children, apparently).

* ''[[The Soldier Son]]''. After almost three books of stressing how bad it is for Nevare's soul to be split, he is finally reunited with Soldier's Boy and absorbed by an ancestor tree, together with his beloved Lisana. Is the end? No, he is split again. Admittedly, that half gets back together with Amzil, marries her and inherits the Nevare estate, but wasn't it bad to have one's personality split? Other issues concern the discovery of gold that draw the Gernians away from the Speck lands: how long before they'll return? And finally, Nevare completely destroys the source of the Plainspeople's magic in the process, basically sealing their fate. This is given almost no attention.

* The ''[[Inheritance Cycle]]''. What with {{spoiler|Arya staying behind to become Queen, maybe forever, and Eragon leaving to raise the dragons, again, maybe forever, plus the huge mess Eragon leave the other characters in, what with the issue of magic and rebuilding the Empire, many a fan was left either sad or pissed off, depending on what you hoped would happen.}}

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* At the end of ''[[Infamous (video game series)|Infamous 2]]'', the player discovers that the Ray Field Energy that Conduits use/generate is deadly to ordinary humans, and that the [[Big Bad]], a godlike entity called the Beast which has devastated several major cities and killed millions, has been using the psychic energy of the people it killed to activate all of the Conduits, who are the only ones who will be able to survive the Ray Field Plague engulfing the Earth. In the "good" ending, the main character uses a device which dissipates the Ray Field Energy and kills the Beast - by killing every last person on the planet with the Conduit gene in one single moment of mass murder. Afterwards, almost everyone either forgets about the Conduits or demonizes them as monsters who got what they deserved, while the rulers of the oppressive, corrupt dystopia which they had lived in before manages to quell the murmurs of rebellion that had been set off by the events of the first two games and reinstate the status quo. In short, the "good" ending - which is presumably intended to illustrate how "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - consists of helping ensure that the world stays under the heel of morally bankrupt monsters by slaughtering everyone who could even potentially develop the power to change things.

** Not that the "evil" ending is much better: humanity is sentenced to a slow, lingering death as the Ray Field Plague continues across the world, and the Conduits are forced to watch all their non-Conduit friends and relatives die, either from the Beast or from the disease. Once the massacres are over and done with, the Conduits are left as the last few surviving human beings on the planet, saddled with the job of rebuilding the world from scratch. For good measure, the Beast himself can't live with himself after all the murders he's had to commit, and transfers his powers onto [[The Hero|Cole McGrath]], forcing ''him'' to become the Beast. Either ending, you're a mass murderer- it's just that in the good ending, you're a ''dead'' mass murderer.

** {{spoiler|Hey, now, [[Development Hell|we may not have seen much of him]] [[Vaporware|for a little while]], but have a ''little'' faith in Gordon Freeman. Seriously, the wheat field she's in looks too even and cultivated to be wrecked by the Combine or anything from Xen, and at the end of the Art Therapy DLC you can hear a man's voice yelling outside--humanity's made it. It's a [[Bittersweet Ending]], but a hopeful one.}}

* ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'' ends on an upbeat note, with Squall having made substantial progress in overcoming his emotional issues, Ultimecia defeated, and [[The End of the World as We Know It|Time Compression]] thus prevented. Unfortunately, the [[Stable Time Loop]] means that Ultimecia's rise in the future, and her subsequent reign of terror up until her death at the hands of the protagonists, are inevitable.

** Though the ending of ''that'' is ''clearly'' supposed to be the brainwashed version, with comedic-horror elements that [[Nightmare Fuel|some people got that bit of a chill down their spine from though it's supposed to be funny]], there are actually several stories where being turned into [[Petting Zoo People]] comes with a [[Lotus Eater Machine]] effect. Highly common are [[Transformation Sequence]]s where the person is panicking and screaming at the beginning, but each stage of the human-to-nonhuman conversation also shows the character in a different stage of a "WTF is happening to me?!"-to-"Being a [[Catgirl]] rocks!" conversion. (Yes, even - or especially - if you [[Gender Bender|started out male]].) Is it that you forever lose your mind along with your form, or the fact that you don't ''really'' know you won't like being a winged centaur until you try it? ...yes, it's definitely ''one'' of those, isn't it?

** There's a similar tendency in hypnofetish stuff - art, fiction, whatever - in which [[Happiness in Slavery]] is ''incredibly'' common. Sometimes they're a submissive soul and it's a dream come true, which is only ''moderately'' creepy; it's when they're ''not'' submissive until they're brainwashed into it that things get really unnerving.

* The ending of ''[[Starship]]'' features Bug {{spoiler|accepting his bug form and getting his true love February, Tootsie and Mega-Girl getting married and everyone saving the bug world from the G.L.E.E. Happy right? Well, what happens when the G.L.E.E. comes back and investigates? Where do the Rangers go from here, are they stuck on the planet? Mega-Girl is still a robot. So what happens when Tootsie ages and dies while she stays the same? And Bug is still a bug so he and February have, at most, probably a week together.}}

 

== Western Animation ==