: Re: How common *are* happy endings? I'm curious. After reading some other questions, I've been pondering about the frequency and reason for happy endings. That is, a positive and/or hopeful ending,

@Sent2472441

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To add a little to Scarlett's answer (which is excellent BTW):

Happy endings are far more prevalent than tragic ones because they're easier to pull off badly.

In order to understand how an ending should be executed it is necessary to understand a little about endings.

It cannot have escaped your attention that in many happy endings a male and female protagonist are united in a relationship. One theory about why this is comes from Jungian psychology.

This theory states that the uniting of a man and a woman represents, psychologically, the reconciliation of the rational and the emotional (which are not necessarily the same thing as the ego and id in Freudian theory but share some common features). Jungian theorists have put forward the notion that as we all seek this reconciliation the story of how a protagonist we identify with achieves this goal is what is of interest to the reader.

It is possible, for various reasons, for an author to take a set of incidents, tack on an arbitrary happy ending which is completely divorced from the journey of the protagonist and still produce a story which satisfies some audience members. This could be termed a sentimental ending where sentiment is the enemy of true emotion.

It is also possible for an author to tack an arbtrary tragic ending on to a plot leading to a nihlistic ending.

In both cases the story tends to seem stale. However people have a higher tolerance for being told a sweet lie and a greater likelihood of speaking out against a toxic one.

For this reason a tragedy must endeavour to have some sort of balance or else it is likely to be rejected by a large number of audience members. A lower number of audence members tend to reject sentimental rubbish.

Whoever said dying was easy and comedy was hard was speaking somewhat ironically. In truth, however, it is a lot easier to see when you have screwed up a tragedy than it is when everyone is happy at the end of the story.

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