: Re: Can a successful book series let the bad guy win? I have a five book series and I have plotted them all out. The main bad guy wins in the end. My problem with this is my girlfriend keeps

I think Amadeus hit on the core of the issue with doing this - "good" ultimately triumphing over "evil" is by far the more popular archetype, and for very good reasons.

Setting aside the idea of "good guys" and "bad guys" for a moment but thinking about it in terms of "protagonist" and "antagonist", the reader is (typically) intended to sympathize with the protagonist and is invested in them and psychologically shares in their triumphs and failures. When the protagonist wins so does the reader. It's the same mechanism as supporting sports teams, when "your" team wins you feel like a winner too.

That's not to say you can't have failures and losses along the way, if anything they are almost an essential - but ultimately we all want those we support to win.

That's not to say you can't have the antagonists win, but it all comes down to why you want that ending. You need a very strong reason for doing it and the outcome needs to be something that is crucial to the story you are trying to tell rather than a twist for twist's sake. You haven't said why you want the series to end that way but if it's nothing more than "because the good guys usually win" I would say that's unlikely to be enough.

1984 is, as others have mentioned, one of the more famous examples of the "Bad guy winning" formula. As with the other Orwell novel everyone knows (Animal Farm) this is the novel as a political and social commentary. Here it's crucial to Orwell's intent in writing the novel that the protagonist lose because he wants the reader to believe that were the dystopian world of 1984 to become a reality that they would lose too. 1984 doesn't aim to entertain, it aims to teach - the fact that it's wrapped up in a well written novel is just the delivery mechanism for Orwell's political message.

This is an area you need to be very careful operating in, especially in a series. The longer the reader spends with a group of characters the more invested in their "cause" they will become and the more personally they are going to take it's ultimate outcome and the more substantial reason you need to end it with them losing.

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: You could have a look at how this is done in Sarah Pinsker's story "And Then There Were (N-One)" which has (almost) all the characters with the same name. They can be identified by different

: Re: Can a successful book series let the bad guy win? I have a five book series and I have plotted them all out. The main bad guy wins in the end. My problem with this is my girlfriend keeps

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: Tell your audience that the sparrows are cheeping and use italics for the translation. This is a technique that I've seen in a few books for communication that isn't verbal/audible the italics

: How to cite the place of a conference in Chicago manual of style? I am confused about what should I add in the place of conference in the Chicago manual of style? Place of the publisher

: What's a moment that's more impactful on a reread called? I've met a few of these but the most recent instance was two characters discussing buying a third character a drink when they all

: You could have a look at how this is done in Sarah Pinsker's story "And Then There Were (N-One)" which has (almost) all the characters with the same name. They can be identified by different

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