irhinoceri:

oliverpaulot:

oliverpaulot:

i am SO SICK of unhappy endings. idk about anyone else but the #1 reason i like fiction is because everything can always work out no matter how bad it is. “what if the good guys lost” shut up. you are so fucking boring. give me happy endings or give me nothing

not that y’all have to reblog this version but i wrote this post because i was frustrated that people claim that happy endings are “unrealistic” and “disrespectful to real people” but i feel like that misses the point of Fiction, i.e. Not Real, and like. who’s to say happy endings Aren’t realistic? of course there’s more than one way to tell a story and process experiences etc etc but maybe i spent too long being abused and wanting to die to accept that Everyone is Destined for a Sad Ending. isn’t it reassuring to read about characters who, against all odds, triumph and find happiness? doesn’t that give you a shred of hope for your life?

This post got a lot of hostile responses and passionate rebuttals in the notes. This actually came across my dash with some snarky “gee OP maybe some people like to feel something other than happiness” response as if that was a legendarily hot take. Disappointed by the person who reblogged that one, to be honest.

I get that people are attached to their sadness porn, and get defensive at the idea that some may find constant suffering boring, but a lot tumblr took this one person’s preference for happy endings way too personally… like OP was gonna come into their homes and take their angst fic away from them.

So. This reminds me of when I was like 19 or so, and I was all about angst and unhappy endings. Like, I still kind of am an angst writer, but one thing really made me rethink my stance that unhappy endings were somehow better and more true and authentic than happy ones.

I made a friend over the internet who hated sad endings and said “no thanks” to any media I recommended to her that didn’t have a happy ending. At first I thought that is was childish and immature of her, even though she was around 30 and I was just about to turn 20.

But I was definitely the one being childish.

She had had a much, much harder life than me. Yeah, I had struggles, and I was depressed. But she had gone through A Lot. Death of family, chronic sickness, estrangement from family, homelessness, failed relationships that left her so broken-hearted she had sworn off dating and self-isolated to protect herself from more disappointment. In the time I knew her, she would often go AWOL for weeks or months because she was homeless due to being unable to work because of her chronic illness, and so she couldn’t access the internet, and I would worry that she was dead. I had no way of knowing.

She could write some pretty angsty fiction, too, mind you. We were friends because of loving each others’ writing. But she wanted happy endings. She challenged me to end my stories in less tragic ways than I had planned. To try to figure out happiness even when I thought it would be easier just to end it sad. She wanted the suffering to be worth something, in the end. And how could anyone in their right mind begrudge her that? To argue against that? To tell her that her stories should end badly? Should I have told her that her sadness defined her more than her hope for joy? Is that more respectful?

So yeah, if you’re gonna be on tumblr talking about how happiness is trite and boring, all I can say is that you don’t fucking know the life stories of people who only want happy endings, who reject sad, tragic endings, or who are tired of entertainment that is chiefly derived from death and trauma and loneliness and hopelessness. Maybe it’s fun for you to vicariously experience struggle because your life has been easy and that bores you. Or maybe it’s cathartic for you precisely because you have suffered… but if that’s the case I’d think you’d all have more empathy. Hey, maybe you just really like to feel emotion when you consume fiction and watching other people be happy doesn’t elicit any emotional response in you, and you cannot fathom why it is comforting for some people to see things work out well. Who knows.