Noticing a trend in big, messy, epic fantasy toward endings where the hero chooses mercy and forgiveness toward the most evil big bad, but only after oceans of unnamed peon blood has spilled and lesser villains lie in broken heaps, and it's so cheap.
I freely admit I liked Steven Universe, but the ending worked because
-theme and tone had been building to it from minute one
-it was for 8 year olds
It's not a payoff when the dragon (jungian or literal) is still bleeding out a few feet to your left
The "for 8yos" is critical; as a non-8yo, major bummer how the ending & postscript kind of retroactively undercut the "body horror, war crimes, and guilt" that brought so much depth to the earlier seasons
I could likewise quibble with the execution but will bite my tongue as a grown adult taking a brain break. But it was always going to be something like that because that's what the show was *about,* unlike the gory, backstabby books that provoked the original observation
I've also kinda come to appreciate it because the diamonds are meant to be cruel adult relatives to Steven, who is a child. Having him defeat them with magic might be a happier ending, but it's not as realistic from that perspective. He handles things the best he can with the power dynamics in place
To add to this, I like how much Steven is shown to not want to be around the diamonds. He has talked them into undoing some of the damage, but he isn't on good terms with them (from his side).
Yes! And I love how one sided it is, while the diamonds don't really acknowledge the weight of their crimes. They act confused when he's uncomfortable around them, like "but I don't STILL do that." Too realistic unfortunately.
The dialogue, background art that still foregrounds ruined planets, and other tells in SU also show that the writers themselves were not blind to this. The movie and final season are all about probing this unease.
It's funny when people think they're criticizing the show by saying it's weird and uncomfortable to be suddenly expected to forgive the diamonds when a major plot point is Steven going "it's so weird and uncomfortable that we're suddenly expected to forgive the diamonds"
Just watched Coraline and I am shocked by how the Other Mother, despite in my opinion being very creepy and evil, is presented by the narrative as sweet and generous. Clearly the writers think it's okay to sew buttons into the eyes of children. I'm horrified.
I also have to keep in mind that:
Steven's entire goal when talking to the Diamonds was to solve the problem of the corrupted gems and the cluster. This was the only way to resolve the main conflict of the series, since only he and the Diamonds had the power to undo the all the damage they caused.
Ugh, I hate the "If you kill him, you will be just like him!" thing when the protagonists have marched there over an army of dead orcs and stormtroopers. Actually, NOT killing him because you feel some kind of personal connection to him while you're slaughtering minions DOES make you just like him!
There's a Pratchett quote about this:
βSomething Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. β¦"
β¦ "Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.
They'll watch you squirm."
β¦
"They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.β
Ironically, there's another Pratchett quote that says the exact opposite, in The Carpet People:
"'But we should kill him!'
'No. You've been listen to Brocando too often,' said Bane.
A piece of foreshadowing which is nearly paid-off when Carrot does, in fact, kill a man with hardly a word.
(Mind you, we can debate Carrot=goodβ¦ me, Iβm of the opinion thereβs a generous slice of Dexter-style psychopath in his personality)
I always liked the constant tension where Carrot knew he could become king with a word, and he also knew
the next that that would happen would be that Vimes would try to kill him.
I always feel like that's a subtle class thing.
"Oh, all these workers? These wage-earners just trying to feed their families? They can die, that's fine. But should I kill the Lord and Master who hires and commands them? Who belongs to the same narrative class as me? Now THAT'S a dilemma!"
I like the term narrative class, because sometimes it's a weird monarchist thing, especially in fantasy, but often the hero, villain, or both are of the came from nothing and became great variety. Not every death matters the same to the story, but if the characters know that, everything's fucked
Yes, but also, not quite, I think. The class thing is baked into the situation of every war. You can't afford to spare your enemies during the battle. So simple people die. But as the war is won, only then you get to generals, to politicians. At this point you can fall back on your norms (laws).
If your laws include capital punishment, sure, you can and should do a trial. Even though there's a always a risk that an old sympathizer would bring cyanide to the camera. But you kinda have to do it. Not because of special treatment, but because of a change in power, possibility, responsibility.
Yeah, but this is fiction. An ending rooted in these concerns would fit some narratives, sure, but the climax and fate of the main antagonist (if there is one) should serve the story being told. If it doesn't seem to, it can be revealing of assumptions and gaps in the author's thinking.
My point is that good escapist fiction we read for pleasure after a day of hard work should end with Nuremberg. Not a murder, not a "there's some good in you", but with a due process. Let the good win at least in pulp fiction huh!
Yes, the theme of "some people's lives are worth a *lot* more than others, based on their wealth, power, or importance to the narrative" is what I was going for.
The moral difference between killing a mook and a criminal mastermind is that killing the mook is *worse* by every possible metric.
Sure, with both of these points I can totally agree. Unfortunately IRL can be critiqued even more than fiction in this regard, but oh well. Even more reasons to write fiction "right", I guess! Not how it is, but how we want it to be!
Pissed me off to no end when I was watching a series and several times the good guys specified that their side didn't kill people. Except they chucked people off cliffs on the regular.
My dudes...what do you think happens to the bad guys when they hit the bottom? π¬
Disney kid's media rules! The three methods of combat are mysterious energy beams with nonspecific effects, holding each other's arms while grunting, and cliff.
Oddly enough, the same applies to many 5e D&D tables, just because Eldritch Blasting and/or grappling enemies off of cliffs is so effective on anything that doesn't fly.
I kind of want to see the inversion of this trope more oftenπ€
A hero who repeated shows mercy and prefers non-lethal tactics and tries to minimize casualties when fighting the minions who gets to the big bad and just cuts them down with extreme prejudice.
This is one of the things that ruined the Legend of Heroes franchise for me. It invokes how terrible and disruptive war is (and hints how violent it is for ordinary people) and then whenever the main villains are confronted you get some bullshit speech about friendship and they walk away.
This always sours my enjoyment of something and I always see it happen in stories that start off as revenge quests. Maybe it's an attempt at having the protag(s) realizing revenge isn't the best way to solve a problem but there's never any proper build up to the moment so it's just like... oh okay.
Yeah, that's the issue. I don't mind a pacifist protagonist or an "oh fuck what am I becoming" realization in the story, it's the eleventh hour pivot with no regard for the body count at 10:59.
And "oh fuck what am I becoming" genuinely could be so profound, like turning around and looking at the mess you've left behind you. But it oftentimes feels handwaved to me
especially tacked on to a story that's otherwise been an amoral, ultraviolent catastrophe, like someone wanted the feel good ending but couldn't be assed to pay any narrative price for it up until the climactic moment
Modern fiction is like, "Ah, my old friend, Darth Hitler, you've killed millions of people..." *injured groans in the background* "...but I knew there was still good in you, a hope that you'd turn against evil in the end.You did it, good job."
*claps hand on shoulder*
But in this pattern I'm increasingly seeing, it's ONLY Darth Hitler who gets spared after mowing through not just minions but lots of lesser evils, human gray areas, and innocent bystanders. Star Wars is underimagined schlock (affectionate), but it's not pretending to be anything else
the hero is complicit, no seeming about it! who's even reading a sprawling mess of massacres and schemes with an astronomical bodycount where the protagonist has been as murdery as anybody and hoping for a nice, pat, uplifting resolution?
From mine, I actually plan to do it differently. I'm not going to go into full detail, but the heroes never forgive, they just make the big bad villain suffer worst than death.
to be clear, you can do whatever you want. it's not the fate of the main antagonist that makes it, it's what the story set out to accomplish. a good ending is a culmination, not just a sequence of cool events.
Oh absolutely agree!
I'm just saying that I intend to make my stuff seem a bit more realistic and not just outright cheap and lazy. It's not easy to fit in a story, especially fantasy, but making the decisions and choices realistic and relatable is how a good story works.
I don't care if my stories seem "cool" even in scenes. I just want the scenes and overall message to make sense and not just dumb and just nonesensical.
One of the few times I find the trope makes sense is if killing the evil big bad turns them into a martyr for whatever followers are left.
But it needs to be dramatic. It needs to have that sense of "mate you are not coming back from this humiliation. Enjoy your quiet forgotten death."
