Gainax Ending/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A weird ending.

  • Straight: The main character gets killed at the end of a serious detective movie. Then his corpse gets up, and it (along with everyone else) starts singing about how he had his whole life ahead of him.
  • Exaggerated: The main character gets killed at the end of a serious detective movie. Then his corpse gets up, drives to the movie studio, shoots the director, writer, and actor playing him, talks about the proper use of meta-fiction for ten minutes, and then God starts another Great Flood.
  • Justified:
    • Word of God states that the musical number at the end is just a Dying Dream of the protagonist.
    • The main character was a powerful psychic, and manages to maintain a grip on the world in pure spirit form and is actually manipulating everyone with his mind, either through mind control or telekinesis.
  • Inverted:
    • A weird beginning.
    • The ending is a lot less weird than the rest of the series.
  • Subverted: The protagonist wakes up from his Dying Dream in a hospital room, having just barely survived.
  • Double Subverted:
  • Parodied:
    • It's a Twist Ending Parody Episode, so everyone is backstabbing each other, revealing more and more complicated plans, repeatedly revealing that each person's preception of reality is a lie, several plot points are introduced out of nowhere, and then everyone explodes into Tang.
    • A Winner Is You
    • The characters, reading the script for their very own story, decides they are sick of the writers' antics, and make their own ending. They launch a tactical nuke at a building called the "fourth wall", before storming into the writer room, kicking everyone out, and rewriting their own story. They force the film crew to continue with their version.
  • Deconstructed: The ending is really a result of the protagonist going more and more insane, leading to a distorted preception of reality.
  • Reconstructed: As above, except that he pulls it together to pull off a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • Zig Zagged: Everyone explodes into Tang, the hero gets his mind back together, beats the villain in a totally rational way... but then time starts going in reverse, hallways start spinning, and an ancient alien pirate king possesses the hero to have an epic guitar duel with the local alien girl.
  • Averted: The ending makes perfect sense and fits into the story's tone.
  • Enforced: "No grand finale will live up to fans' expectations. Let's give them something so unexpected it messes with them."
    • "Well folks, looks like we ran out of budget. Here's some Clip Shows instead!"
  • Lampshaded: "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!"
  • Defied: "Look, can we just skip the confusing allegory this time? I just want to get to the giant robot fights."
  • Conversed: "Man, INSERT_SHOW_HERE had a weird ending, didn't it?"
  • Played for laughs: Like exaggerated, except without the rant about meta-fiction, and the protagonist writes his own ending to the movie where he beats up the bad guy and gets the girl (which we then see).
  • Played for drama: 99% of the time it's going to be this by default.

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