Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily...

[maerdi]

I can't help noticing that the fictional media I've been consuming all seems to end in a Happily Ever After sort of way. I can see the appeal of the wish fulfillment ending; after all, it's probably far easier to gain repeat customers from a happy ending than from a more muddled, possibly more realistic one. And yet, part of me has trouble with

Comments

[maerdi]

I do understand your idea of suspension of disbelief, but I also feel like a good story is something that teaches you about the world, and it pains me a bit to have good, interesting lessons consistently marred by an entangling with the lesson "people always get what they deserve / in the near future right will prevail".

I think we're much more susceptible to internalizing ideas that are prevalent in our media than we think we are, and so I think any single idea that is ubiquitous enough is fairly dangerous.

[maerdi]

What I object to is the general attitude of "happy endings in stories are so simple/unrealistic/etc,"

I think any ending that wraps up all the loose ends is simple and unrealistic, and happy endings seem to be most often the ones that imply that everything is settled and fixed in perfection forever.

as if being depressed by a work somehow makes it Deeper or more deserving of praise

I disagree that a story that doesn't have a happy ending must therefore make the reader depressed. There's lots of room for bittersweet, not completely wrapped up, mixed, and a beginning of a new story endings (to name a few).

I think that the fetishization of suffering among intellectuals

I'm intrigued by this idea, but don't think I've seen or experienced it myself. Can you give me some examples?

much more dangerous to society than happy endingsMy point was that those good people in the world who _do_ experience pain and suffering are taught that they are somehow deserving or to blame, that they aren't _good enough_. I think that's a horrible

[maerdi]

Thank you for your response, istgut. When I first read your comment, I thought to myself "gosh, he seems to have taken that very personally", but when I came back to respond, I thought I didn't have much evidence for that view. Thank you for being insightful and honest enough to bring it forward.

Like you, I am more sensitive to the issues and points most relevant to my own experiences, hence this post. However, that doesn't mean that I don't adore childrens' movies far more (in general) than adults' movies, and we all know that childrens' movies are rife with happy endings. In addition, I am also genuinely curious about what you have termed "the fetishization of suffering", something I've heard of before, but something I haven't paid much attention to. I would be happy to hear about your experiences with this phenomenon.

[maerdi]

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and a couple of things have come to mind. Hopefully you are up for a bit of a discussion, despite the lag and the triggers

[maerdi]

(... continued)

So let's move on to a different aspect of your ideas: "People who often have nothing to complain about make a huge showing of how much they have suffered in order to seem Deeper." I'm going to stretch this idea to apply both to the consumers who want their artists to suffer in order to prove something about themselves and to the artists who feel they must suffer (or prove suffering) in order to be a legitimate or Deep artist.

I'm not sure I've seen this occur broadly in practice. But maybe I've just missed it... I'm good at dismissing things that I don't think are worth my time, so it's possible that I've just been selectively not seeing things. I certainly know about the "suffering artist" idea. And I don't think that suffering is completely irrelevant to art. In particular, writers and artists who suffered from depression and poverty are probably quite a bit more capable of writing / arting about depression and poverty than artists who don't have that experience. The key here is about arting what you know.

[maerdi]

(... continued)

Sometimes we want art that doesn't teach us anything, that just makes us feel good. We want it to resonate with our feelings, emotions, and experiences, to reinforce or reinvigorate our own happiness and view of the world. There's nothing wrong with that. But I would claim that this art can be Good Art, but that it's rarely Deep Art. I'd like to be clear, however, that this is different from Happy Art, which, in the hands of an insightful Artist, can still be quite Deep (and all the more touching for taking us to a place of insight about Happiness