Esoteric Happy Ending: Difference between revisions

* The indie drama ''Sleepwalking'' tries to make its ending seem like a happy and uplifting one: The mother finally returns realizing that she does love her daughter and her brother has realized how he is not enjoying life and decides to take charge, ending with the optimistic line "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Well OK except for the fact that the mother is still unemployed, now homeless along with her daughter, and is probably going to get charged with abandonment and not be allowed to keep custody of her daughter who'll be forced back to her hated foster care and probably won't end up well. Meanwhile her brother will have to {{spoiler|spend the rest of his life as a fugitive for the murder of his father.}} Not all that uplifting after all.

* ''[[Seven Pounds]]'' which tries to make Tim's obsessive self-flagellation and ultimate suicide a morally uplifting [[Heroic Sacrifice]].

* ''[[Rocky V]]''. Rocky kicks Tommy's ass in a street fight, but he's still broke, and Tommy is still the champion. No wonder Stallone declared it [[Canon Discontinuity]].

* ''[[Source Code]]'': Colter ''finally'' creates an [[Alternate Universe]] where the train disaster is averted and he gets to live [[Happily Ever After]] with his new girlfriend... in the body of her old boyfriend Sean, who is now essentially dead since his consciousness has been overwritten. Colter will now have to adjust to living a life that is not his, with a family and career which are utterly unknown to him. And there's one alternate reality where Sean's friend remembers his last actions as irrationally attacking a random guy because he looks Middle Eastern, before falling onto a railroad track.

* At the end of ''[[Infamous (video game series)|In Famous]] 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.