Weddings for Everyone

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Did you ever hear the old song 'Going to One Wedding Brings on Another?' "

—John Thorpe, Northanger Abbey

After the plot is done, multiple couples are paired off and there's a massive wedding ceremony.

According to Christopher Booker, the definition of a comedy is where three or more relationships are in disarray and/or kept apart by one central relationship being kept apart, so fix the hero's relationship, and the others fall into place. By that logic the most logical ending to a comedy would be to have the side relationships work out when the central one does, so it makes sense that things become fine in the end.

Or it could be that people like a happy ending and marriage is one of the accepted happy endings so multiple marriages is even happier.

See: Pair the Spares and Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends. May result in a Babies Ever After epilogue.

As an Ending Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Weddings for Everyone include:

Fan Works

Film

  • The end of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers features, not surprisingly, a sixtuple wedding. (One of the brothers already got married earlier in the film.)
  • The ending of Saving Silverman features a three-couple wedding at a Neil Diamond concert.
  • The film Four Weddings and a Funeral ends this way; of course, how could a movie all about lots of weddings not end this way?
  • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, of all movies, ends with a triple wedding—witnessed by one of the main villains, who is now a homeless bum. The other villains are all dead, since they were hustlers, Nazis, lesbians, or transsexuals, who are Too Filthy To Live (well, the Nazi is too filthy to live). Roger Ebert insists that this ending was meant to be a parody of skin-flick moralism. I can't prove otherwise...
  • The The Lord of the Rings films end like this, with Aragorn and Arwen's coronation and marriage, followed by the hobbits returning home and Sam and Rosie getting married. In the book Faramir and Eowyn get married too, but this is cut from the films, leaving only a "Falling in Love" Montage in the Extended Edition.

Literature

  • The Belgariad ends with most of the Loads and Loads of Characters getting married (or reconciling a strained marriage in one case). Everyone who doesn't as well as all the new characters end up getting married at the end of the sequel series The Malloreon.
    • The Redemption of Althalus also worked out like this. The Elenium and Tamuli, not so much as the Belgariad and the Malloreon. Tynian and Ulath remain confirmed bachelors while Berit and Bevier remain without any permanent attachments as well.
  • Jane Austen loved this trope, often Lampshading the tendency for one marriage instantly to inspire expectations of another:
    • Northanger Abbey mentions the trope but doesn't use it.
      • Actually it sort of uses it in a logical way- while the character who mentions it is disappointed, one marriage does make another possible, for financial reasons (a sister's profitable marriage makes it possible for the brother to marry an only moderately well-off girl; and the sister in question is a likeable character, so it sort of counts).
    • Sense and Sensibility: Ends with 3 couples married.
    • Pride and Prejudice: Ends with 3 couples married. Mr. Darcy wanted to show Elizabeth that he was a good person so he paid for one of her sister's weddings and reunited another one with the man she loved.
    • Mansfield Park: Not too long after getting her niece Maria engaged to Mr. Rushworth, Mrs. Norris starts shipping Julia with Mr. Crawford... and is furious to hear he proposed to Fanny. So her plans to invoke this trope fail.
    • Emma: Starts with one wedding and ends with 3 more.
    • Persuasion has 3 weddings throughout the plot, just not all at once at the end: Henrietta Musgrove to Charles Hayter, Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove, and of course Anne Elliot to Captain Wentworth.
  • In the final book of The Roman Mysteries, three couples get married or are stated to have been recently married:Flavia and Flaccus, Nubia and Aristo and Diana and Marcus, Pulchra and an unnamed person.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings features several marriages after the destruction of the Big Bad, albeit technically spaced over several months: Aragorn and Arwen, Faramir and Eowyn, and Sam and Rosie Cotton.

Live-Action TV

  • Boston Legal, of all shows, ends with a double wedding Denny/Alan and Shirley/Carl and the possibility of more.
  • Subverted in Noah's Arc. Just before Chance and Eddie's wedding Alex comes across a ring and two plane tickets in Trey's jacket, and thinks Trey is getting ready to propose. When Eddie and Chance sign the commitment papers, Alex jumps up to ask if they can do another wedding, and says he'll marry Trey. Turns out the tickets were for him andGuy to go on a six month relief mission in Africa, and the ring is just to remind Alex that Trey loves him.

Theatre

  • Nearly every comedy by Shakespeare. The most egregious example is As You Like It, which has four couples getting married at the end by Hymen, the God of Marriage.
  • A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum doesn't exactly marry everyone off, since a lot of the girls are concubines, but just about everyone's paired off in the ending montage.
  • Gilbert and Sullivan liked to marry off multiple couples or even the entire cast. The latter happens in The Pirates of Penzance (except the Major-General and policemen), Patience (except for Bunthorne), Iolanthe ("'tis death for fairy not to marry a mortal")
    • In some productions of Pirates, the Major General and Ruth get together at the end too.
    • In The Movie, the Police Captain and Ruth get together.
      • The Pirate Movie, a rather bizarre adaptation from 1982 starring Kristy McNichol, ends its pirate dream with Mabel invoking a Time Stop and literally pairing off every pirate with one of her sisters (and two pirates with each other). This is because, as the youngest, she cannot marry Frederick until all her older sisters are married.
  • The musical Spamalot ended with Arthur marrying Guinevere (AKA "Lady of the Lake") and Lancelot marrying Herbert. It's hinted other characters get married in the "Not Yet Wed" number.
  • Mozart's The Magic Flute ends with both the hero Tamino and his comedy-relief sidekick Papageno paired up with their love interests.
  • The Drowsy Chaperone ends with this. Basically, everyone except the two gangsters are married by a passing aviatrix.
  • Anything Goes: The cast breaks up Evelyn and Hope's wedding so Billy can marry Hope, freeing up Evelyn to marry Reno, prompting Whitney to propose to Mrs. Harcourt. Some productions even take it Up to Eleven and marry off Moon and Bonnie also.

Web Comics

  • A Magical Roommate has four weddings during the strip's run, and the Where Are They Now epilogues mention several more. Of all the major characters that have their ultimate fate described, the only major one who remains single is X.

Western Animation

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