Searching for a Full Moon.
I rewatched most of Full Moon wo Sagashite in 2021, but I drifted away from it with two episodes to go. A year later, I've finally got around to rewatching the ending.
I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to get emotionally reinvested when there was so little of the anime left to go. My fears were completely unfounded; I cried through the entire final scene.
Full Moon wo Sagashite is a bit of a mess in some respects, but it has a lot of heart, and perhaps one of my favourite endings in fiction. Maybe one day I should put together a list of endings I found particularly effective. Other examples coming to mind are Your Name (which, come to think of it, has some similarities with the Full Moon wo Sagashite ending), Revolutionary Girl Utena, Higurashi: When They Cry: Tsumihoroboshi and the Umineko: When They Cry visual novel series.
(Although, come to think of it, both of those When They Cry instalments had epilogues I prefer to disregard. At least Umineko is very supportive if you want to pick and choose what's canon!)
I don't know if the ending of Full Moon wo Sagashite is even objectively that strong; there are points in its setup that make me go 'wait, there was never any previous indication that this could happen'. But it hits me so hard in the heart that I don't care.
A satisfying ending - or an unsatisfying one - can have such an impact on a work of fiction as a whole. I enjoyed Persona 5 Royal, but I'm deeply frustrated that I liked the ending cutscene much less than the end of the original Persona 5, which I adored. I hated the end of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and it retroactively soured me slightly on the entire game. I'm unlikely to ever replay Virtue's Last Reward, because I was so disappointed to learn that, rather than building to any sort of resolution, the entire game ended up feeling like thirty hours of setup for a sequel.
Conversely, the end of The Sexy Brutale made me like the whole game more, and I loved the end of Trinkets, which helped to elevate a largely middling series. And then you have cases like Merlin, where I really enjoyed the final episode itself, but the failure to build up to it made the ending a bit unsatisfying.
To some extent, of course, it's a subjective thing. In my case, I tend to broadly like endings that give a sense of another story ahead and to broadly dislike endings that kill the protagonist. It's definitely possible to have a good ending where the protagonist dies, but I feel that killing the protagonist is often something writers do if they don't know how else to end a story. Maybe I'm just programmed to prefer endings that offer more potential for fanfiction, though.
I don't know if there's a point to this entry. Just thinking about the power of a good ending, I suppose.
Are there any endings you particularly like, or particularly dislike? Do you have ideas about what makes an ending satisfying? For the writers among you, do you have any patterns in the endings you write? (Personally, I tend to lean towards open endings, and I'll often focus more on characters learning to live with problems than on resolving them.)
I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to get emotionally reinvested when there was so little of the anime left to go. My fears were completely unfounded; I cried through the entire final scene.
Full Moon wo Sagashite is a bit of a mess in some respects, but it has a lot of heart, and perhaps one of my favourite endings in fiction. Maybe one day I should put together a list of endings I found particularly effective. Other examples coming to mind are Your Name (which, come to think of it, has some similarities with the Full Moon wo Sagashite ending), Revolutionary Girl Utena, Higurashi: When They Cry: Tsumihoroboshi and the Umineko: When They Cry visual novel series.
(Although, come to think of it, both of those When They Cry instalments had epilogues I prefer to disregard. At least Umineko is very supportive if you want to pick and choose what's canon!)
I don't know if the ending of Full Moon wo Sagashite is even objectively that strong; there are points in its setup that make me go 'wait, there was never any previous indication that this could happen'. But it hits me so hard in the heart that I don't care.
A satisfying ending - or an unsatisfying one - can have such an impact on a work of fiction as a whole. I enjoyed Persona 5 Royal, but I'm deeply frustrated that I liked the ending cutscene much less than the end of the original Persona 5, which I adored. I hated the end of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and it retroactively soured me slightly on the entire game. I'm unlikely to ever replay Virtue's Last Reward, because I was so disappointed to learn that, rather than building to any sort of resolution, the entire game ended up feeling like thirty hours of setup for a sequel.
Conversely, the end of The Sexy Brutale made me like the whole game more, and I loved the end of Trinkets, which helped to elevate a largely middling series. And then you have cases like Merlin, where I really enjoyed the final episode itself, but the failure to build up to it made the ending a bit unsatisfying.
To some extent, of course, it's a subjective thing. In my case, I tend to broadly like endings that give a sense of another story ahead and to broadly dislike endings that kill the protagonist. It's definitely possible to have a good ending where the protagonist dies, but I feel that killing the protagonist is often something writers do if they don't know how else to end a story. Maybe I'm just programmed to prefer endings that offer more potential for fanfiction, though.
I don't know if there's a point to this entry. Just thinking about the power of a good ending, I suppose.
Are there any endings you particularly like, or particularly dislike? Do you have ideas about what makes an ending satisfying? For the writers among you, do you have any patterns in the endings you write? (Personally, I tend to lean towards open endings, and I'll often focus more on characters learning to live with problems than on resolving them.)