I need to check this more often...

[End Master]

You know that little comments section that rarely ever gets used? Well I was checking it today and here's funny comments in that section that some guy called drevenhaug made about AVSIS AND Death Song apparently way back in January.

Enjoy!

Death Song
OMG dude!!!! How could you not make a good ending, not a single one?! Do you know how depressed I feel right now? You are sick!!! YOU are the lich king. I'we read through every bad ending on purpose hoping and wishing that I'd end up with the good one, where the world gets saved and he gets together with the female general or something.

OMG OMG OMFG!!!

What have you done? You are evil!!! AAAARGGHH!!! I feel like crying right now. This is horrible.

To be honest, I have always felt that it's kitchy to make good endings in stories but now I realized that it isn't. Hoping for the good is my nature, humans' nature, SENTIENT BEINGS' NATURE!!! What the fuck has happened to your nature?!?!?!

How would a book like LOTR or Narnia or whatever feel if it had a horrible ending? It would feel horrible. Well, that's how your story feels, horrible. I feel empty and disillusioned and like I've totally wasted my time, I've been tricked and used. I suffered through all that gory, violent, cruel, sad shit that happened to the character (me in a way) and I got nothing for it. Makes me wanna kill myself right now.

Fuck you man!

AVSIS
WTF, I thought I was a negative, pessimistic person, but you seem to be it because you like it!!! How could you write something liek this?! WTF is wrong with you?! What is wrong with the world?! This is just sick and wrong and evil. I'm not some puritane christian twat, I don't dissaprove of the individual events and endings you write about, what I despise is that you're just being destructive, you're not presenting any good sides, you seem to just be making fun of people that get problems and have unhappy lifes. That makes you the saddes kind of person. Are you a fucking psycopath? Don't words like empathy and compassion ring a bell?

Ok, I might be ufair and overreacting, I only quickly run through the female storyline and I just finished your Death Song story and wrote a comment about that. But I must say, BAD impression. I have been feeling bad all day and I decided to read your stories hoping I'd feel better but I ended up feeling worse.

And even with Death Song it's not like I didn't enjoy the story, I did, that's why I read the whole of it and rated it 9 when I was in the middle of it. But you've fucked up, you've given your readers a total anticlimax. Your'e a sadist with your audience.

Fuck you again you stupid jerk!!!

Wow, guess it's a good thing he didn't read Love SICK, or else he might've really gone off on me!

[donteatpoop]

I thought I was the only asshole who used comments.

I like this guys style though, he really tells it like it is. Also, I concur: Fuck you, EndMaster.

[ChubbyTeletubby]

Seconded.

Motion passes.

EndMaster is fucked.

In a good way.

The thing about EM's pessimism though is that it's blunt. Grounded.

That's it. It's just real observation. In all fairness, we will all die horrible deaths, with unending regrets. This is life. Romance is for the naive.

We will all die horribly and painfully. Lonely.

Whatnot.

Ya. Here:

Sorry.

[End Master]

Heh, really he’s only got himself to blame though, I put a big ass warning on the first page of AVSIS, so there’s no excuse there for him to continuing to read it.

And as for Death Song, he said he systematically went through EVERY ending just to find a good one. If he got so emo the first couple of times “he died”, why the fuck would he continue with the so called psychological torture that I was supposedly subjecting him to?

That’s like watching to someone you hate on TV giving a speech about more shit you hate, yet continuing to watch it. Sheesh.

It’s weird that he must’ve read the only two stories I have that don’t have any “good” endings for though. Either that or he just bitched about those and ignored the other 12 stories I got up that have tons of good endings in them.

Oh well, he still gave Death Song a 9 which must’ve fulfilled some sort of masochistic desire he had, so it’s cool.

[donteatpoop]

Jeffisthebest used to make the same argument to me about Ducky Park. "There's no 'good' endings." And I was like; "Are you kidding? He gets to sue Ducky Park in two of the endings and jerks off to a Girls Gone Wild commercial! How much better can an ending get?"

You just can't please some people, End.

[Dragavan]

My question is why does there have to be a good ending? I hate that argument. Not all stories are happy ones. In fact, a lot of my favorite movies and books don't really have happy endings. Let the depressing stories stay depressing and the horrifying stories end horrible. Things should be judged on how well they do what they set out to do, not on how happy they made you.

If somebody set out to make the most disturbing and downer of a story ever told and it let you feeling sickened and depressed, they they did a great job. If they set out to make the scariest movie in the word and you left afraid to even go outside of the light of the theater, they did a great job. If either of these stories ended with a "happy ending" it would have diluted the effect they were going for and made them less than what they could be.

This is one area that a lot of foreign films really excel, even if they suck in other areas. They have the concept that not every story has to have a happy ending firmly in place. A lot of Japanese horror movies end with everyone dying. A lot of French dramas end with people in misery. Even many Canadian movies don't do the happy sappy American ending thing that Hollywood is so good at, which is another reason I often stick to Indy movies when I want good story.

[End Master]

Yeah, and what would've been so bad about Sauron winning? That would’ve been cool.

Not Saruman though, he was a traitorous asshole.

[ChubbyTeletubby]

Here, here!

Sometimes, even in the most 'depressing' of stories, the reader will find the few unpredictable rays of light that DO penetrate the darkness of the tone to uplift the story to heights unattainable by work done merely to serve the base human senses.

This is why I really don't watch most of what Hollywood vomits these days. It bores me.

I like nuance. I like surprises.

I like reality grounded in reality. And even in the most horrible of circumstances, there is always that one dying ember of hope.

Always.

EDIT: Saruman was a bastard. He had a secret fondness of the halflings leaf. Both he and Gandalf had a great interest in the halflings. Saruman once was wise, but he fell when he started trying to compete with Suaron.

[Dragavan]

He may have had a thing for the halfling's weed, but it seems like everyone else had a thing for the halflings themselves. If you don't believe me, just read the Very Secret Diaries. Hell, if you just like to laugh and haven't seen them before you should read them anyway.

[Leblanc4prez]

Heh heh... me Likey!

[ChubbyTeletubby]

HAHAHAHAHA!!

Good stuff, Drag. Good stuff.

[apotheosis]

Happy endings are for pussies with no taste in art. If it is "feel good" then chances are it sucks the big one.

[Dragavan]

Happy endings are for pussies with no taste in art. If it is "feel good" then chances are it sucks the big one.

I disagree with that too.

If the goal of the work is to give feelings of happiness and pleasure, then doing that is a success. If the goal of the work from the start is to create a story that makes you smile and happy (like a Sleepless in Seattle), then they are still making something successful and worthwhile. The problem is that many of these things Hollywood gets their hands on are not stories about this, but they still try to tack on an ending that gives that kind of feeling. They have what is obviously a depressing drama about pain and tragedy, but suddenly everything turns out happy at the end for no good story reason.

The main thing is to be true to the goal of the work. No matter what that goal is (to make somebody cry, to make somebody smile, to make somebody excited, to turn somebody on, to scare somebody, and so on). Don't chicken out and try to appeal to everyone by making it end happy with a little neat bow.

[Leblanc4prez]

What about closure? My stories leave so much unsaid... then people get pissed off that there will be no sequal... well fuck em... if they want a sequal they can write it...

[Dragavan]

What about closure? My stories leave so much unsaid... then people get pissed off that there will be no sequal... well fuck em... if they want a sequal they can write it...

Again it depends on what the whole point of the story is supposed to be. Slice of life type things often don't have any real closure because life doesn't end when the story does. Most stories should have some kind of closure, but that doesn't mean all threads have to be tied up. Again, some of the best stories I have seen or read do not really end, but they do have a sense of closure.

For example, take my favorite movie of all time (if you can really quantify such a thing): Memento. That movie didn't have any kind of real ending at all, nothing was conclusively solved, and tons of threads were left dangling... but it felt complete. It had closure. It did what that story needed to have a sense of closure without actually having it be an ending or telling you what you thought you wanted to find out at the start. You never find the killer. You never see him stop looking. You never see him cured... nothing. It was brilliant.

Another example of this was Stephen King's novel Cell. This was a book about a non-nuclear apocalypse and zombie-like holocaust where a man was trying to get to his ex-wife and son, who may or may not have been turned into one of the "zombies". A lot of people were shocked and upset by the sudden end of the book. I was shocked too, but I loved it. It was the closure the story needed, but didn't answer a damn thing. He has this thing he can do to possibly save his son... one last chance... With the press of a preverbal button. He does it, he pressed the "button", and the book ends. We never find out if it works or not. That's not the important part of the story. All that was important was getting to that point and seeing if he would do it... and he did. Closure, without an ending of the story. Also, I might point out, a sappy happy ending either. I wonder how the movie will go (no high hopes there)?

A lot of people seem to misunderstand the meaning of closure when it comes to stories. It does not mean an ending. It does not mean a satisfying conclusion. It does not mean everything explained. It simply means that what was meant to be understood through the storytelling is done and you can walk away feeling that it meant something. The guy doesn't have to get the girl. There doesn't have to be a lesson learned. You just have to feel that what was meant to be there is complete.

So, it is possible to tell a story that doesn't have closure, but it should be rare and it should only be done if not having that closure is part of the point of the storytelling.