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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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I played Link's Awakening with my wife and daughter. My wife was taken back at the ending (surprised, not disliking). I think she basically just assumed the whole time that it wouldn't end with everyone on Koholint basically dying, or vanishing from existence.

This got me thinking about how I played this, or watched my brother play it, when I was the same age as my daughter. None of the media she consumes challenges her with difficult endings. Everything HAS to return to the status quo at the end, because we can't risk anyone being unhappy. In Frozen, Anna is unfrozen. In Moana, even Maui gets his fucking hook back after it breaks. Fake out deaths and fake out status quo changes happen left and right, but it is really rare to see something that actually sticks.

I love downer endings, and I think it made me who I am. It makes me sad and disappointed and a little disgusted to see basically all of the media of my kids' day be bland and not challenging them to really feel something other than a vague blandly happy dance party ending. Dance party endings aren't new, but have been made ubiquitous in the past 20 years. Same with fake out deaths, and I blame Marvel for that. I guess I personally chalk this all up to the general trend towards never making anyone uncomfortable, which is tied in with the corporatization of media and corporate-memphization of media.

I love downer endings

I, along with probably the vast majority of readers, dislike / outright hate downer endings. I hate writers killing off characters I care about just "because the emotional conclusion needs main character to suffer loss" and other such bullshit (see eg. Harry Potter). That's just lazy and sloppy and feels like the writer pulling out the rug from under the reader in an intentional "hah, hah, fooled you, idiot!"-middle finger gesture instead of proper plotting and writing.

What I have no problem with and even like is the A Song of Ice and Fire type thing where it's made clear that this is the type of book where People Die (or even Anyone Can Die). The book sets proper expectations and then the "will they survive or not?" question becomes a part of the enjoyment when reading.

For a while (this is years ago) I got so fed-up with forced happy endings that I wanted the "this would be the logical outcome of what went before" bad endings.

But then again, after a while, where every ending is a bad ending and it's all morally grey and grubby and we're all cynics together in the rain and the muck, I wanted some happy endings again.

Forcing a happy ending where it shouldn't go is poor work, but so is "and everyone dies in the end, ha ha, I'm the Joker" type endings. I think this is why A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms got so much positive reaction: what, a guy who has a heart of gold? and is doing his best to live up to the noble qualities he thinks a true knight should have? and he isn't slapped down as a fool for it?

Same with Project Hail Mary - what, a guy who gets to have a happy ending instead of dying miserably and hopelessly in space? who gets to rescue his alien best buddy? Grace Rocky do indeed save stars?

Where a downer ending fits, it should be included. But grimdark for the sake of it burned itself out.

I’m inclined to forgive Project Hail Mary for that given the that it’s a giant Jesus allegory.

I don't think it is a Jesus allegory. There's certainly the Hail Mary pun, but plot-wise it's just a straightforward 'hero overcoming the odds' story written by an atheist.

In Protestant America, "Hail Mary" is more likely to be a gridiron-driven reference to an unlikely last-minute turnaround than it is to be a reference to the common Catholic prayer.

My sense about character deaths is that they are bellwethers for how serious the author is willing to be about following the plot where it is taken, like a sort of "will the ACLU defend actual nazis?" question. If the writing bends over backwards to let everyone survive, chances are it will also opt for the simple, emotionally safe option in other less obvious aspects, since it seems like a small sacrifice to make if you have already given up on allowing death, and only by removing all other sources of emotional discomfort does it become possible to capture the emotionally fragile segment of the market.

It might be too much of an ask to make a realistic war story child-friendly, but if you already wrote a story about war with no casualties, then going further to make one party a Disney villain with zero nuance and never letting the good guys tell a noble lie seems a more acceptable price to pay for getting the money of 10 year olds and polytraumatised sociology students.

In addition to what @roystgnr says, I feel like Rowling suffered from a syndrome many authors do, which is that she ended up loving her characters and as such didn't want to kill as many of them as would have made sense. Who really died in the final battle, that we actually care about? One half of an identical duo, Lupin, and Tonks. That's not that much, and many more would have been warranted if the Death Eaters were actually a real threat.

Maybe, but it is a children's story, and the expectations would have been that Lupin and Tonks get their happy ending after all they suffered before that. No, they die, and their child is left an orphan. That's dark enough for a kid's story: sometimes bad things happen to good people, and it's not fair, but this is how life is.

Harry Potter as an example is kind of strange. Harry's parents being dead is intro backstory. Mid-book 1 you find out that Wizard Hitler murdered them. Book 1 climax, you learn WH is coming back. Clearly there's some deadly shit about to go down.

Yet it takes until Book 4 before we get a major character death, and Book 6 before we get one that Harry and the readers really care about! The Watsonian explanation (Dr., not Emma) appears to be that Wizard Hitler is just even more outnumbered and incompetent (excepting the wizardry) than Regular Hitler was, and needs to lay low a lot, but the Doylist explanation is clearly that Rowling knew she was writing for kids and needed to pull her punches a bit.

Yet it takes until Book 4 before we get a major character death, and Book 6 before we get one that Harry and the readers really care about!

Yes, that's my point. It gets established for almost five books that no one the readers truly care about is harmed, then Sirius gets offed at the end of book 5 and in the final battle of the entire series in book 7 more people get offed with no preparation and with nothing left of the book for their deaths to even influence. Those deaths just feel like a poor writer going "the tropes say I should kill some characters, so I'll just off them right like that".

In contrast Dumbledore's death is long foreshadowed and provides good progression for the story and thus feels like natural instead of being an ass-pull just to piss of the reader.

So it's not that character deaths or loss for the main characters are bad as such but many times they're poorly done and just make the reader feel bad.

Yeah. I basically just treat the deaths as non-canon, especially given how prevalent and underwhelming they are all at once at the end. She's basically just like "okay, I don't need this character for the rest of the story, might as well kill them for some cheap feels". I'm not sad they're gone because I don't think Rowling earned it, in the same way that an author who has their character train for 10,000 years in a hyperbolic time chamber offscreen hasn't really earned their power spike and I don't treat the number seriously.

That reminds me of when I was reading Alice in Wonderland to my daughter. When I got to the end, and Alice woke up and it was all a dream, it blew her damned mind right out of her skull and through the milky way. She'd never encountered a since "and it was all dream" story before, so I'm glad Alice in Wonderland got to be her first. She talked about that "twist" for days on end.

That said, unlike almost every other book I've read to her, she never asked for it again. I think something about none of it being "real" took the stakes out of the story and ruined it for her.

That said I've opined for ages that there is nothing truly challenging in kid's movies anymore. Something that will give them some well deserved nightmares to work through. Like pink elephants on parade, or children being turned into donkeys, or Willy Wonka's magic tunnel through HELL, or the first 10 minutes of Transformers: The Movie where they kill literally every character you got attached to over about 100 syndicated episodes you'd watched in repeat since before you were making memories.

Man I'm dating myself with these references.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish wasn't bad on that front, but that's the only thing vaguely modern that I can think of.

Hey, I went to see Coyote vs. Acme today (Great movie! Go see it to give WB the middle finger!), and there was a trailer for a new movie by the folks who made "Coraline". If we can count on anyone to give children nightmares in the modern era, it'll be them...

All the sadness is front loaded.

Frozen, the parents die in a storm.

In moana the grandmother dies.

In the latest Star wars han solo dies and then Luke dies.

In tangled a baby is kidnapped.

Etc.

Coco has a proper sadness at the end. So there's at least something.

This post is poetry.

I too feel like I've see fake-out deaths happen more and more often, and I don't know if it's me growing up or if it's a real thing. But it just seems to keep happening in basically all major mainstream media works, like in the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones where, e.g. Jon Snow was saved from falling into an icy lake by his uncle coming out of nowhere, and then during the Battle of Winterfell, we kept seeing character after character get overwhelmed by zombies, only to cut away, and then later see that they somehow got out perfectly fine. Or the latest Star Wars films where we saw Kylo Ren walk out of a crashing spaceship unscathed without explanation, and then later come back from falling into a pit to save Rey, and then have Rey "die" only to get saved by him. Or recent Marvel films like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness where Wong fell down the side of a mountain, only to be revealed to have landed on a ledge to survive. I haven't watched the latest Jurassic World film, but I heard that there was a scene near the end where a major character says "go on without me" to do a last stand, only to show up 15 minutes later unscathed, to be rescued.

If there is indeed a trend, I feel like it has to do with the extension of childhood that's been happening all throughout the West at least since my millennial generation and possibly longer. The writers want the benefits without the costs, the power without the responsibility, to have their cake and eat it too, to have that emotional death moment without the death. Children get to enjoy some of that, because they (usually) have guardians to take care of the responsibility stuff while giving them the benefits. I also expect that this effect might be stronger among mainstream media writers, as, I'm guessing, they're more likely, due to nepotism, to come from more wealthy and well-connected families which can allow them to live as children for decades at adult age.

I was thinking about Star wars recently, and one conclusion I came to is that it's really strange that these are films that:

  1. Were originally driven by a creative vision
  2. Were so beloved by fans, who knew them inside and out and just positively worshipped them
  3. And somehow, stewardship of them were handed over to corporations. People just doing their bare-minimum job, trying to get good numbers to please the board of directors and not offend anyone, but who don't really give a shit about anything.

Like, I wouldn't trust my corporate self to write and produce the continuations of beloved franchises. When you're at work, if you're not a visionary, you just care about not getting fired and keeping people happy.

It's just bizarre. Of course they failed so hard.

One problem's that, at scale, it has to get handed over. Even in the height of George Lucas-era Star Wars, you had stuff like suits arguing spice wasn't a drug (one of the bizarre situations where Kevin J Anderson was the good guy!), just because it wasn't practical for some rando writing a weird one-off novel in the universe to talk to the chief, if the chief's doing anything else. And that's kinda the good ending: Star Trek was notorious for no one in corporate caring about anything but the tv shows (and eventually not even that), so you'd get this endless parade of original fiction recycled into EU fic, regardless of whether it fit the characters or setting in the slightest.

But you definitely do get some variation. For all golden age minecrafters complain about Dinnerbone (sometimes with reason: hidden lava one-blocks in the nether), the difference between beta-era design and 1.12+ is pretty obvious. And even then, you can tell people care about the game to some extent, at least compared to some of the more obvious slop.

Star Trek tie-in fiction was rigorously policed; no out-of-character actions for the main characters (from the TV shows), the main characters don't die, no original characters that steal the spotlight from the main characters, everything had to reset so the next writer churning out the next book started from a clean slate.

The very earliest novels got away with more, because (as Diane Duane says) "from Paramount’s point of view, Star Trek novels were merely another kind of merchandising, like plastic phasers and James T. Kirk action figures" so they weren't keeping a close eye on them. But then the tie-in novels became a valuable merchandising stream, and that meant looking for professional writers (rather than fan writers turned pro) to do them, and the drawing-up of guidelines as to what could and couldn't be done in the 80s and updated in the 90s.

I don't know what the current state of play is, given that we got ST: Disco and Starfleet High, so the tie-in novels might be wild and woolly again: yes we welcome trans pansexual non-binary differently abled neurodivergent body-positive multiracial folx of colour as main characters! your villains not only can, but must, be cis het old(er) conservative white guys!

That's fair: very few big intellectual property things are completely unpoliced by their owners. I was moving more from the early TOS works being hilariously off-kilter, but even TNG and some early Voyager stories were often very weird from a tonally and character look. Not even necessarily bad books: Children of Hamlin was reasonably good and even got the general TNG ethos, but it's just written like someone had a glance at a wikipedia summary of the series.

IIRC, much of the strictness of the guideline enforcement in the tie-in novels was due to one guy (Gene Roddenberry's assistant Richard Arnold) who apparently saw himself as enforcing the Will of Gene on the unenlightened writerly horde. Though it's not clear how much of it was the Will of Gene as opposed to the Will of Richard Arnold; apparently on more than one occasion an author managed to do an end-run around Arnold and contact Roddenberry directly with his proposed novel which had attracted Arnold's ire for some reason or other, only to have Roddenberry say "looks fine to me, go ahead and publish it". In any event, Arnold and his influence on the tie-in novels went away shortly after Roddenberry's death, and the guidelines loosened significantly.

just because it wasn't practical for some rando writing a weird one-off novel in the universe to talk to the chief

This seems like an easily mostly-solved problem: if the suits are confidently unanimous you don't bug the chief; if not, you send a quick email, archive the response, and summarize it in the Show Bible.

Not a perfect solution, since the suits might be unanimously idiots or might have not seen some foreshadowing or planning that part of "established" canon was a lie, or the chief might still change his mind later and not care that a random novel gets invalidated by it, but still better than adjudicating canon by majority suit vote.

This seems like an easily mostly-solved problem: if the suits are confidently unanimous you don't bug the chief; if not, you send a quick email, archive the response, and summarize it in the Show Bible.

I don't think we're there yet, but this seems like the kind of thing LLMs could be used to handle. However, LLMs could also obviate the need for an actual coherent extended universe, as the sheer volume of fanfiction being generated could take away the meaning and value of official canon in the eyes of fans.

Star Wars failed in the fan mind before it was handed over to corporations. Lucas had control of the prequels and they had problems.

Definitely agree, but it's very different. The prequels were not a problem of vision, but of execution (for the most part). They failed because Lucas was old and thought he was better then he was, not because he tried to please too many people.

And that failure mode was such that they kind of ended up really weird and quirky, though really bad. I kind of believe that if the prequels had a normal script revision process, and actual directors, they might not have been completely terrible. This is in contrast to the Disney ones which failed because they're bland and corporateized.

Lucas spent the better part of 20 years trying to get someone else on board to direct another Star Wars trilogy. He was lobbying Steven Spielberg especially hard in the mid-90s. Spielberg finally told him, in the nicest possible way, that if Lucas wanted it done so badly he should fuck off and do it himself. So he did. It’s not like he was overprotective of his baby, no one else wanted it.

That's interesting. I didn't know that either. I wonder why no one else wanted to do it? It seems like that would have been the dream project for a lot of up-and-coming young directors.

And yeah... I can't help but think that it would have been better off with someone else other than Lucas at the helm. Spielberg would have been amazing, I wonder why he was so against it? Maybe he was just scared that he couldn't do it justice.

I didn't know that, that's interesting.

I think the problem is partly in the forst films Lucas had push back on his bad ideas from other talented people and partly Lucas had a blind spot about what fans liked about the series (the Jedi thing but also lots of things he changed about the originals in the special editions) and was further removed from the source material as he aged and viewed his past through increasingly nostalgia tinted memories.

Definitely. That's what I mean by saying that he thought he was better than he was, and that it would have been solved with a normal script revision process. By the 90s, he was untouchable, and no one would have dared give notes to the man who made Star wars, but that's exactly what it needed. Everyone needs an editor

Definitely agree, but it's very different. The prequels were not a problem of vision, but of execution (for the most part). They failed because Lucas was old and thought he was better then he was, not because he tried to please too many people.

The basic idea of the prequels is fundamentally bad. The cool thing about the original movies is that the force (and jedis by extension) was mysterious it could do miracles but you didn't know if it could any specific thing. That only works if there are almost no jedis going around (which the original trilogy did, Luke wasn't even a real one), if you fill the setting with jedis it either becomes a fixed set of spells (the prequels), which only appeals to DnD nerds, or a deus ex machina that solves every problem (the sequels), which appeals to nobody.

Don't bring up the EU, nobody reads that.

The original trilogy really is a miraculous convergence where brilliance met technological limitations in the best possible way, and he was somehow lucky enough to remove all his bad ideas while keeping all his good ones. All of the missing stuff contributed to the magical, mysterious atmosphere, while he kept just enough details to make it seem realistic. The prequels were... the opposite.

Yeah, but Lucas's vision for the original trilogy was similarly bad right from the start, with the "Whills" being conscious microbes living within the Force. This was in his earliest drafts for Star Wars. I don't know why he removed it before making Star Wars a reality, maybe a reader talked him off this idea but it saved the movie, and by the time he made the prequel trilogy, no one could talk him off bad ideas.

Don't bring up the EU, nobody reads that.

The EU is widely read and beloved by Star Wars fans. Hardly "nobody".

Not to the same extent as now, IMO. The prequels have their haters, but they have just as many fans. The sequels are so bad that even some prequel haters have softened their stance and talk about how at least Lucas had a vision, even if it was imperfect. The sequels do have fans, to be sure, but they are by far in the minority whereas opinion on the prequels was much more evenly split.

I'm an Old School Star Wars fan (I saw A New Hope in theaters when it was just a little SF flick starting to get buzz).

I think you're forgetting just how much fans loathed the prequels when they first came out. Well, loathed is a strong term. They still went to see them. Fans had been waiting for 16 years after Return of the Jedi, the hype was overwhelming, and while A Phantom Menace was of course a box office success, hardcore SW fans were trashing it and the rest of the prequels almost immediately. Today maybe the backlash against Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd's acting seems overdone, but at the time those prequels felt like a huge let-down, as pretty as they were. The plot went in weird directions, the characters weren't what people were expecting, and of course over a decade of EU content and fan speculation got blown away. The prequels were really... not good, and the consensus was that George Lucas was a good visual director but hugely overrated as a writer.

Of course, then the sequels came out and made the prequels look like golden age SF by comparison.

I'm old enough to remember watching the prequels in first run in cinemas, and the hatedom for the prequels at the time was worse than the hatedom the sequels got. The prequels are less hated now because of the passage of time. It doesn't help that the prequels recovered from a truly atrocious start (The Phantom Menace remains in my view comfortably the worst of the nine) meaning that Revenge of the Sith not sucking was something people ignored at the time, whereas the sequels got worse and worse (The Farce Awakens is a perfectly OK remake of A New Hope).

I'm not forgetting that at all. But I think your argument is missing that there was not only the group of fans who loathed the prequels. There were also fans who enjoyed them quite a bit. I remember going to see Phantom Menace as a teenager with my friends, and we all came out of that movie stoked about how cool it was to see the Old Republic and the Jedi order at its peak, things we had only imagined before. I fully acknowledge that there were fans who very vocally and bitterly hated the prequels, but they were not even close to unanimous among the fan base.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the prequels were (mostly) fine as movies, particularly The Phantom Menace. They weren't fine as Star Wars movies.

I think my take is best summed up by the midichlorian scene. In a different setting, this is a fine scene! Sure, you can measure the space magic capabilities of someone with a blood test. That's fine! If it was in Star Trek, sure, or if it was measuring for bionic strength in Mass Effect, for instance. It is, however, completely wrong for Star Wars and The Force.

It is, however, completely wrong for Star Wars and The Force.

Exactly. Star Trek is (or was) hard(ish) science, the technobabble was at least a pretence at 'based on current understanding of scientific principles'. Star Wars is space fantasy, so blood tests for midichlorians sits very uneasily alongside 'I got spontaneously pregnant without having sex'. Going back to the original movies, the Force and the Jedi etc. are regarded as 'hokey ancient religions' and mysticism, not Based On True Science.

The prequels have their haters, but they have just as many fans.

How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality? Similar to all the people who love Disney direct-to-video sequels because they grew up with them.

If that's the true explanation, then just as the prequels started to be rehabilitated in the public eye as people who saw them as kids grew up and started making video essays about why the prequels were great, I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?

I think some of that is "I thought the prequels were shit, then I saw what they did with the newer ones, man I didn't know when I had it good" (same as with Jackson's Hobbit movies against Rings of Power). Did anyone really want Kylo Ren, man-boy rebel without a clue? Or the 'mystery' around Rey: her parents abandoned her and ran away! No, they will come back for her one day! No, they were junkies who sold her and crashed their ship and died! No, she in fact has a secret destiny as the descendant of Palpatine which is why her parents hid her!

How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality? Similar to all the people who love Disney direct-to-video sequels because they grew up with them.

This is an open question, and certainly it's nonzero, but my anecdotal experience is that, even among the younger viewers, respect for the prequels (mostly undeserved, IMHO) seems more driven by how much better they are than the sequels than by nostalgia. I've seen a number of completely new young fans who never watched the prequels or the sequels (or the originals) until recently express the opinion that the prequels are much better than the sequels.

If that's the true explanation, then just as the prequels started to be rehabilitated in the public eye as people who saw them as kids grew up and started making video essays about why the prequels were great, I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?

We should be able to detect this pretty soon, if not now. The Force Awakens came out 11 years ago, which is less than the 16 years between The Phantom Menace and that film, but still plenty of time for then-10-year-olds to become influential in the social medias to shape the overall public view of it.

How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality?

Partly that.

But part of it may be that but a lot of it is just that the term "prequels hate" can mean the films or the setting.

A lot of people hated the films for the way they handled certain characters and plots or because they felt the CGI was overdone. But that is not the same as hating them as settings.

Many fans were willing to take the bit of the films they didn't like in exchange for a living Republic and Jedi Order and Republic and all the stories you could tell with them

So a lot of people have more fondness for the "prequel era" because that stuff also included Republic Commando, The Clone Wars, etc.

That audience is younger and so has gained more power and influence over time. Especially since the attempt to mainly cater to the OT-setting fans after the LucasArts sale was a huge disaster, partly because they confused Prequel Film Hate for New Worldbuilding Hate.

I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?

We might. The problem I see is that there's almost no consistent throughline in these movies and their setting is basically the OT setting but worse. But maybe the books are cool. I couldn't bring myself to check.

The prequels were disappointing to fans because they weren't what we had been waiting all this time for, it barely "looked" like Star Wars but they were Lucas's new vision, something new cooked fresh with new base ingredients. Now it turns out I'm allergic to slapstick cartoon rabbits in my space operas, but that recipe can have its fans. The sequels were exactly what the fans had been waiting for, it looks like Star Wars from front to back, but they ultimately served us an old batch of og Star Wars that had been wasting in Lucasfilm's vault with moldy rotten ingredients; yes it's the original recipe but the quality and freshness isn't there anymore.

What would have satisfied fans is doing what Jon Favreau did with seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian. The original recipe for Star Wars is samurai/western + pulp sci-fi setting, The Mandalorian (seasons 1 and 2, it got bad after) was adapting new or different samurai/western stories in the setting. Same recipe, fresh ingredients.

Same recipe, fresh ingredients.

Given that Disney owns both now, I've been thinking a spiritual successor to Firefly would fit well in the Star Wars universe. But I wouldn't trust the company blindly to produce a good show these days.

Andor was good, though. Same idea; new characters and setting.

I don't think Firefly could be made in today's Hollywood - it is far too obviously the Lost Cause in space.

Maybe... But the prequels seemed to succeed as children's movies and as vehicles for other media like animation and video games.

The sequels seem to have produced first anger and then apathy. Even the children don't care. Only the mega fans that seemingly can't get offended by anything seem excited. No media products seem to be set during or after the sequel trilogy, everything is just set way earlier or at most between the OT and ST.

Something has gone very wrong with the sequel trilogy in a way that they didn't with the prequel trilogy.

While I don't especially like the prequels, they do have a kind of child-like earnest charm that I enjoy.

At least Rogue One bucked that trend in the Star Wars films. Spoiler: Everyone dies

Rogue One is probably the third best Star Wars film.

Fourth if we count the Christmas special

I have not had the pleasure to see that fine film, the Ewok Adventure was enough for me of stand alone made for TV films.

You're right; Rogue One would be fifth.

They even managed a popular spin off TV show from it!

Dream stories are weird. Because you experience the dream as though you were really interacting with people, it is tempting to think of dreams as creating a new reality and everyone dying when the dream disappears. But that's just your experience. There's no tragedy and nobody's actually dying. The dream is fictional within the context of the story.

(This doesn't count stories where the dream explicitly creates something real, but I don't remember that happening here.)

(This doesn't count stories where the dream explicitly creates something real, but I don't remember that happening here.)

Marin becomes a seagull in the real world if you beat the game without dying.

I'd count that as an easter egg, not a plot element that proves it's all real.

I'm not so sure. I always interpreted that ending as suggesting that the Wind Fish was dreaming essentially real people into existence, which is why he can grant Marin's wish to be a seagull. Though it is quite sad if she's the only one who survives the awakening besides Link.

I see the Wind Fish as similar to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI or Anu, a deity who dreams beings into existence.

Heck, even in stories where it is a mortal doing the dreaming, the dreams can sometimes be "real." See the tulpa-like dream creations in Borges' The Circular Ruin, for example.

I think of it like this. Watching a movie is like eating. The ending of a movie can be considered the terminal condition. You eat because you are hungry. You eat and eat until you feel full, and then you stop. Without that feeling, you would just continue eating forever. A movie works in a somewhat similar way. Something happens, a crisis or a problem appears, and the story continues until we reach a point where we feel that the original question has been answered and we can stop.

From that angle, I think returning to the status quo can be looked at a little more charitably.

I find the nature law arguement from Christiany useful here. Something is good when it is allowed to exist according to its proper nature, while evil is often understood as a kind of damage, sickness, or deviation from that form. If a cat loses one of its legs, the answer is to restore the missing leg, not to decide that four legs are boring and give the cat six tentacles instead.

A story usually starts because something has gone wrong. So fixing the problem often means restoring things to something resembling their proper condition.

So it qualifies as a proper terminal condition. And it's also believable.

A happy ending can easily feel like cheating. The dead don't rise. Sacrifices can't simply be undone. Many things in reality are impossible or irreversible. So such endings feel hollow.

But the status quo has happened. We have seen it. The glorious past. People look backward and reminisce about bygone days because the past is real and imaginable. It happened once. Maybe it can happen again. To be normal, to be healthy, to have your family, to go home again, even without being extraordinary, shouldn't that already be enough to be happy?

This is the default answer. 30 points out of 100. Passable. But sometimes you just wish for more.

Fiction can be seen as a kind of prosthesis, like an artificial eye or leg: we use it to replace a missing part of ourselves. A 30 point answer can fill in the absence, but it doesn't fits perfectly. It's a general answer, made for everyone, so gaps remain.

A movie might end, but if the ending does not satisfy the audience, then in some sense the act of viewing does not stop. The audience starts looking for that satisfying answer somewhere else: another movie, another book, another game, another version of essentially the same kind of story.

There are not really a hundred completely different movies. Sometimes it feels as if there has only ever been one movie: the one you haven't reached the ending yet.

And that's roughly how I think about the psychology behind this.

I'd recommend more anime, then. #NotJoking

Back when the internet was making anime more accessible and known, one of the things I recall about the discourse of Japanese vs American cartoons was the quote-unquote 'maturity potential' of the media. A lot of Japanese anime is as sacharine as anything American, but there's also a lot more willingness to engage in darker themes and imperfect happy endings.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann infamously killed it's not-really-decoy protagonist a quarter of the way in, and ends with the savior of everything living alone as a widower with none of the glory of a hero. The Gundam series somewhat more famously was able to sneak a war drama into a toy advertisement because the executives didn't care, and 'Kill 'em all Tomino' went on to earn his moniker. The original Digimon ended with the children protagonists having to separate from their platonic life monsters after an almost seven-stages-of-grief. Full Metal Alchemist has an optimistic ending, but only after some real costs.

These aren't even the sort of genres or tragedies intended to make you miserable. The above are fairly optimistic, even triumphant, finales.

Oh, i definitely plan to show her lots of anime. But the ones I know are mostly for teenagers. FMA, Cowboy Bebop, The Big O, Trigun, Evangelion. Probably Avatar The Last Airbender is something I can show her when she's just a little older.

Ah, younger child?

In that case, I would actually recommend Digimon, series 1 and 3 in particular. If she can accept the dated animation style and the call-out-your-attacks monster battle format, there's a surprisingly deep childhood development story (or several) in there, with aspects for both boys and girls. Even if monster media are typically boy-coded, in contrast to pokemon the digimon companions are all fully-thinking characters in their own right who serve as foils for their child, both as a mix of easy best friend but also someone who gives them the push they need outside of their comfort zone. One of the conceits of the franchise is basically that maturity begets power. So the general format of an episode is that the focus human child is grappling with some flaw/fear/insecurity, overcomes it with the help of their companion, and emerges a marginally better child... but with much growing to go, and sometimes entire character arcs struggling with an issue, because these are 50-60 episode series.

The first Digimon series, Digimon Adventure, is basically a sort of Narnia-isekai where a bunch of kids at a summer camp find themselves in a mysterious new world with no adults to rely on. So they have to band together, figure out how to survive while trying to find a way back home, overcome interpersonal tensions to become friends who recognize eachother's strengths, and overcome their own weaknesses to become fully actualized. Along the way they stumble into / realize they are part of a much larger meta-plot, which forces them to face different sorts of malevolent forces that would harm / manipulate / exploit them, even as they make their own mistakes, forcing even greater maturity.

The third Digimon series, Digimon Tamers, is urban fantasy secret pet genre, but also an early 2000s AI allegory story. The kids are in 'real' Japan where digimon are 'just' children's media, but then the 'main' viewpoint character finds his partner, who was just born and has the mentality of a child, and has to keep it a secret from his family while starting to counter the digimon starting to emerge into the real world. A smaller core cast lets there be a bit more focus onto them, with greater themes of growing into maturity and responsibility but also forgiveness and redemption. Compared to the previous two, it delves more into the 'alien mindset' of not just monsters-from-another-world, but AI in particular who have various degrees of caring about humans across the spectrum.

Am I claiming it's a marvel of writing you'll love? Probably not. But it might be something you could tolerably appreciate while a child looks at the pretty colors or flashy monsters, and they might get a good moral or two out of it.

Adventure is also helped by having a really nice score.

It's been a long time since I played Link's Awakening, but I seem to recall it's not so much a downer ending as a "Buddhist" ending. To read it as "everyone dies at the end" is to impose a Western (Christian) lens on the story which is not present in the original.

If we're going to extrapolate a trend, maybe its that in the '90s there was more media being produced in Japan with distinctively Japanese cultural assumptions, since it was aimed primarily at domestic audiences, and the translation into English was only an afterthought.

The nightmare at the end is afraid of the dream ending though. There is definitely something that is lost

Interesting. What do you think is Buddhist about it? To be fair, I am Western, so I will always end up imposing some sort of a lens on that. There's a lot of western media and philosophy about dreams too, though.

It makes me think of the famous Iroha poem:

Colors are fragrant, but they Will eventually scatter; Who in our world Shall always be? The deep mountains of conditions [samskara] — We cross them today And we shall not have shallow dreams Nor be intoxicated.

Then we have the "Nightmares", which grow increasingly aggressive as you get closer to waking the Wind Fish. These represent attachments, which try to keep you trapped in the world of maya.

(Importantly, in the game, death is not the same as nirvana. Death just reincarnates you back into the world of illusion, and is an obstacle on your path to awakening.)

And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path? (OK, maybe this is a stretch.)

I won't go so far as to say that the game is "preaching" a Buddhist message. It just seems like its overall narrative speaks to a culture with Buddhist background assumptions, in the same way that (to take an example mentioned below) The Land Before Time is not exactly a "Christian" story, but the overall "sacrifice → tribulation → paradise" theme is one that Western audiences will understand instinctively because of their Christian background.

And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path?

Haha, I like that and I'd kinda buy it. The first Zelda game has 8 pieces of the triforce of wisdom, second has the 6 crystals for the palaces, third has the 3 pendants and 7 maidens, and this has 8 again.

There are only a few small numbers that a game can use. Seeing meaning in the numbers is pareidolia unless there's a lot more and the numbers are just a tiny bit of it.

Such as the old Ultima series, which invented an elaborate system of 3 core principles that combine into 8 virtues, and built the entire world and all the plot around it.

broken poetry formatting

In order to create a line break (such as between lines of a poetic stanza), you need to add two extra spaces at the end of each line.

Your wife was taken aback, but what about your daughter’s reaction?

Also, was this the Switch remake?

No, we played the original, not switch.

My daughter liked it a lot, but probably didn't fully grasp the implications. Also, I showed her the secret ending, where Marin gets her wish granted and becomes a seagull, so a little less sad. She also gets hung up on small details like "what is link going to do now that he's in the ocean?", and others like this, which makes sense, but it's not the point of the story. She may be a bit too young, but maybe it will stick with her and come back to it, like I did.

I remember playing Link's Awakening as a kid. And yeah, that ending hit hard. I kept expecting some kind of happy ending, and then the game just landed the punch. Which made it a million times more memorable and impactful.

This is what makes The Snowman such classic.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any children's media from 20+ years ago where the main character really loses something at the end. There are a lot of stories with a loss at the beginning (Batman, The Land Before Time, The Lion King, for example). Let me do an informal survey:

G:

  1. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971): happy ending
  2. Robin Hood (Disney, 1973): happy ending
  3. The Fox and the Hound (1981): loss
  4. An American Tail (1986): happy ending
  5. The Land Before Time (1988): happy ending
  6. The Little Mermaid (1989): happy ending
  7. Aladdin (1992): happy ending
  8. The Lion King (1994): happy ending
  9. Toy Story (1995): happy ending
  10. Babe (1995): happy ending
  11. Mulan (1998): happy ending

PG:

  1. Jaws (1975): loss
  2. Star Wars (1977): loss
  3. The Empire Strikes Back (1980): loss
  4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): happy ending
  5. The Return of the Jedi (1983): loss
  6. Ghostbusters (1984): happy ending
  7. The NeverEnding Story (1984): happy ending
  8. The Karate Kid (1984): happy ending
  9. Back to the Future (1985): happy ending
  10. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1986): happy ending
  11. The Goonies (1985): happy ending
  12. Stand by Me (1986): loss (I think)
  13. The Princess Bride (1987): happy ending
  14. Willow (1988): happy ending
  15. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989): happy ending
  16. Home Alone (1990): happy ending
  17. My Girl (1991): loss
  18. The Iron Giant (1999): loss
  19. Spirited Away (2001): loss

I'd do a more thorough survey but I'm tired. The basic story, though, is that G-rated movies have always had happy endings without much real emotional impact (The Fox and the Hound being a notable exception).

If you're looking for kids' movies with depth, I'd recommend Studio Ghibli. There's not a lot you can do about your kids' peers liking saccharine trivialities but it doesn't hurt to try introducing something more interesting.

Yeah, as mentioned in another response, maybe part of what I dislike is that there's so much fake out loss. Though I'm not certain exactly why that bothers me, and I need to think more about it.

And loss at the beginning vs loss at the end is a good distinction as well, and I'd also need to think about that more, too. At least loss at the beginning, vs no loss or fake out loss, affects the status quo, and shows kids that important things in life change: we really do lose people we love and they don't just come back.

Heh, and you're forgetting the most important loss in the neverending story - the horse! At the very least that was a scarring moment!

There are tons of children's movies that deal with the permanent death of a beloved character as a major part of the story: Bambi (1942), Old Yeller (1957), Charlotte's Web (1973), The Hobbit (1977), The Land Before Time (1988), The Lion King (1994), Antz (1998), The Princess and the Frog (2009), Summer Wars (2009), etc. They still have happy endings, but the fundamental message is that death is a natural part of life and we need to accept it and learn to move forward despite our losses. Why not show her one of those?

Yes, they are a little old, but that doesn't mean they are bad. The great thing about little kids is that YOU control what they watch, not them. If you think the media of your past is what made you who you are today, why not restrict her to that media? What is your daughter going to do, take out a Disney+ subscription on her credit card?

From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:

First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.

Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.

And from "Culture Is Not About Esthetics" by Gwern Branwen:

Or consider another medium: movies. Have you seen the IMDB’s Top 250 movies? There are excellent movies in there. Some are profound, others moving, and not a few profoundly moving. Why are you going to watch Transformers 2 or Ice Age 3? For entertainment value? But there are movies in that list which are far more entertaining, I assure you.

Even if you’ve seen the top 50, there’s another 200 to choose from. If you think the IMDB is too faddish and Internet-centric, there’s no shortage of other lists - the New York Times would be happy to tell you all about “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made” (6 years at 3 movies a week). And what about television? If we ask IMDB about movies by year or all the movies and TV episodes it knows about, it’s happy to tell us: 1,111,244 episodes; 263,524 movies; and 1,920,757 works in total (as of 2011-06-28). We can also look at movie production over time, where we find that as early as 1917 (109 ya) there were 5,490 movies made. (A current estimate for the EU is “1100 features and 1400 shorts per year”.) So even if we got in at the beginning, we never had a chance at watching so much as a small fraction.

Here’s a thought problem: suppose an intensive study revealed, authoritatively, that removing all subsidies and ‘intellectual property rights’ would cause movie production to fall by 95%. Would you regard that as a disaster, something to be decried and abhorred and legislated against? I suspect so. Suppose the study found that, specifically, this 95% fall was composed partially of movies never getting made, but also partially of movies getting made and then lost or never distributed or never shown at all (perhaps because in the absence of copyright, pirates would undercut them and take all profits); would this change your opinion much? Probably not for the better - if anything, it’s even more horrifying, in the same way almost winning the lottery but missing by 1 number is more saddening than missing it by 2 numbers.

But the interesting thing is that this is already happening: less than 5% of movies are available to the public[23], and only around 10% of silent films survive in any sense anywhere[24]. So that 95% fall has already happened; civilization seems to have survived[25]. (A reflection on the ‘movie canon’: if you believe the canon is aesthetically invalid and has not successfully picked out the best movies made, then that implies anywhere up to 90% of the best movies ever made are lost forever to you.)

[23] “…But tragically, some of the world’s strangest movies will never be available on DVD at all. The TCM database estimates that only 4.8% of all films ever made are currently available to the public. Though the Internet has been invaluable in finding strange and forgotten relics, some films, whether through accident, disaster or perceived disinterest, have been lost or temporarily displaced.” –io9, “Weird and Wonderful Movies That You’ll Never Get to See”

[24] “Pandora’s digital box: Pix and pixels”, quoting Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film and Television Archive.

[25] Of course, one could argue that there is something uniquely optimal and special about the current existing level of movie production, such that this invisible 95% fall is acceptable but another 95% fall would be cataclysmic. I hope the reader understands that this is a deeply untrustworthy position to take (and they should read the Bostrom link on the ‘status quo bias’) - I’d parody this argument as “oh, that 95% fall is OK because it still leaves us a number of movies which is bigger than some-number-I-made-up-just-now-based-on-the-information-you’ve-provided-me; but another 95% fall, well, that’d just be madness!”

And from "Culture Is Not About Esthetics" by Gwern Branwen:

My response to that seems like it will endlessly chase it around the Internet. I have posted it at least four times. Probably more, but I can only track down four occurrences. Let this be the fifth.

My previous response when we saw that essay before. I think I'll copy it here. Yet again.

I responded once on Lesswrong and once on SSC to this. So here we go again:

I think gwern sells short the argument that older fiction books are produced in different societies and reflect ideas and prejudices from those societies that we might not share. He addresses it in a reply to one of the comments, but the reply is mostly “there are prejudices in older works that don’t matter because the conflicts no longer exist” (for instance, the Pharisees in the New Testament).

I don’t think that reply is on point. While there are some prejudices that are obsolete, there are others which are not–sexism is endemic in older works, for instance. gwern’s reply to that is that the world was sexist back then and it would be worse propaganda to depict the old world with modern values. But that is only relevant insofar as the fiction is about the old world–fiction which is set in modern times can simultaneously depict less sexism than older fiction and be true to the world in which it is set. It also fails to consider that there’s a difference between accurately depicting the world as sexist and writing fiction which approves of this state of affairs.

And some ideas in some media are really new. Quick, how many American TV shows with female action heroes can you name that came out prior to Xena? Heck, forget sexism and any other form of -ism; how many American TV shows that are heavily story arc driven can you name that came out prior to about 20 years ago?

He also didn’t address differences that are not propaganda-based, such as there not being Shakespeare plays about the Internet. Science fiction is especially prone to this due to advances in scientific knowledge.

11/2016 edit: Also, people have pointed out that if there are more works of all types, there are also more top-X%-works (or more works that line up with a given person's preferences by X%).

I don't have time to read all of the cited stuff now, but I should ask, do you have kids? My experience is that they will want what they want, and you can't really fight against it too hard, because that makes them want it more. It all ends up being a negotiation, whether you want it to or not, unless you're willing to run your household like Captain Von Trap (and even he couldn't control his kids despite his efforts). I do show them all the things from my childhood and things I love, but you can't make them just like you, forcibly - it doesn't work. They know of the modern media from school and friends, and want that, hard. And in order to be a part of their life, you need to allow them to partake in it at least sometimes, or else they will be really unhappy.

And note: my daughter watches very little media, and doesn't control what she consumes directly, but rather by petitioning me for it. We basically have family movie night once per week, which is how she has taken in all the movies she has seen. We have no tv, and she has no iPad, and has never used one, and wouldn't know how to navigate kids YouTube.

My experience is that they will want what they want, and you can't really fight against it too hard, because that makes them want it more. It all ends up being a negotiation, whether you want it to or not...

That makes no sense to me. When I was growing up, if my parents disallowed something, that was all there was to it. Sometimes, if I could, I might try to go behind their backs (e.g. trying to catch Power Rangers on TV even though it was banned), but it was never a negotiation and nor did I have any illusions that I had a say in what was and early allowed. As I am not a parent I can't offer any meaningful advice or critique of any kind as to what the difference might be, only to say that your statement here is completely at odds with my experience growing up. And my parents were hardly super strict, either. It was simply well understood by both sides that this stuff wasn't remotely up for debate.

Well, it's possible you were not as strong minded a child as mine. How much were you willing to really push for what you wanted, and make your parents miserable until you got it?

As I said: I knew perfectly well that wouldn't have been acceptable. I don't think being strong minded even comes into it. I'm actually a pretty stubborn person (as many people can attest), but I'm not a fool either. I don't waste my energy on things that have zero chance of success, and as a child I didn't waste my energy on nagging my parents as a result.

Nagging is one thing. What about just becoming really sad?

My parents have way more backbone than to let that get to them.

Well, at some point as a parent you need to decide what's more important. I need my daughter to listen to me when it's important, but you have to pick your battles. I ultimately decided I don't want to send the message to her that I don't care about her feelings, and that I'm never going to listen to her preferences. I have the feeling that my parents may have been more like your parents to some degree, and I'm not certain I'm personally happy with the results, and how it has impacted my long-term mental health.

Maybe this is some of the appeal of horror media. It's one of the main forms of media that is just happy to end with a downer ending.

For example, I love that in the movie Weapons the parents and kids who were whammied by the witch didn't just get better when the spell was broken. Something was taken from them, and while months later some of the kids are slowly regaining the ability to talk, the parents, who suffered under the effects longest, have to be institutionalized.

I remember loving the Goosebumps books as a kid, and several books end with the monster or whatever winning. For example, I vividly remember the "baby's first body horror" book, Chicken Chicken, ends with the characters being cursed to turn into pigs, after they re-offend the witch that cursed and decursed them with a chicken transformation.

Though I suppose the problem is that when you start reading horror, you know the odds are weighted in that direction. (Even if there are several horror films where the evil is sealed or contained for a time, and the protagonists live to fight another day.)

Link's Awakening's a little weird because it's very vague about whether the island is remade the next time the Wind Fish dreams (or the people inside it are reincarnated/remade a la the Marin/seagull). But you saw a good bit of that sort of Labyrinth style complicated ending for a while, with A Link To The Past (Navi and the bad future go away, but so does everything good you did in that future), Wind Waker (Hyrule's wish is lost), and Twilight Princess (Midna goes away). But that said, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were both optimistic to the point of an awkward fit with the rest of the story, especially TotK.

Some of it's a not-unreasonable reaction to Newberry Award syndrome, because so many downer endings in even many great video games got pretty glurge after the fifth or sixth time, but it's definitely been a bit of an overreaction, especially at the younger end of the age range.

That said, while more complex or downer endings are more uncommon, they're not completely gone.

I remember finishing that game as a kid. Even then, I knew that 'it was all a dream' was a lazy, fakeout ending. I'd rather have a happy ending than that hackiness.

Well, they don't spell anything out for you, which is also something I like about it. But I don't think "it was all just a dream, and didn't really happen" is what was intended.

It was the dream of a deity, that link was caught up in. A god dreamed and by doing so created a realish place and realish people.

You can see that at the end, after link wakes up, he sits there thinking about whether it was all just his own dream, and is sad, but then sees the windfish flying overhead, and has some level of catharsis about the fact that it was real and worth it on some level. So the fact that the windfish comes to him at least shows that there was some magic going on, not just his own dream. Not to mention the secret ending showing that the windfish granted Marin's wish to live on in some way as a seagull.

I use the Twin Peaks filter:

It's all a dream.

That doesn't mean it's not real!

I'd push back pretty hard on this take, it's not your typical "it was all a dream" rug pull ending. I mean the game is literally called Link's Awakening, I don't think it's a fake out that Link was not awake the whole game.

And even beyond the title, the story insinuates multiple times that you are living in the wind fishes' dream and that the island isn't real; it's this slow realization that makes the leadup to the end bittersweet. It's not something they drop on you out of the blue as a "twist", the villains even talk about how everything will disappear.

The manga makes it even more explicit, I believe, that a large part of why the monsters are so riled up is that they know if they don't stop you, they all vanish.

They killed Data in that Star Trek movie and it's been just a shadow of itself after that. Even bringing him back (kind of) in Picard didn't do it for me. i will never fully forgive them.

I've had friends die and I still dream about them from time to time, as if it had never happened. Death sucks.

Maybe I'm immature or fundamentally out of touch with mortality but I don't take it well. Yes sure maybe there's salvation in suffering or whatever but I find very little art/positives in losing someone you have feelings for.

Interesting. I guess I could say there are 3 things you can do in media:

  1. Have deaths and downer endings
  2. Not have deaths and downer endings
  3. Have fake out deaths so you can avoid the downer ending

I love 1, but I probably hate 3 more than 2, and 3 is everywhere. I'm not 100% sure I know why I think 3 is worse than 2 though, I'll have to think about it.

You mentioned blaming Marvel fake-outs, but which category do you put Infinity War in? That was pretty shocking in the theater to the audience, and was probably also the franchise high-point (alternatively: final good marvel movie), although that's probably just a timing coincidence.

When I think about my reaction to various things like Godzilla Minus One, Fight Club, Rogue One, Fail-Safe, Dr Strangelove, Outer Wilds, 3:10 to Yuma, Double Indemnity, etc., I can't really pinpoint any consistent personal preference. I guess it probably is when a clear choice is made artistically, either way.

Godzilla Minus One was SO ridiculous. The movie sacrificed one emotional death (FMC's), one character development (the natural story arc is for MC to finally redeem himself for his cowardice by carrying out a successful kamikaze mission on Godzilla), and one dramatically satisfying ending (the threat is gone) on the altar of a sequel hook.

I means, tons of movies have sequel hooks, but they are usually schlock; Godzilla Minus One hurts because it was so good. It's like if Titanic had ended with an elderly Rose suddenly opening her eyes, startled, then the camera zooms into her window for a menacing shot of the same iceberg that sank the ship all those years ago!

the natural story arc is for MC to finally redeem himself for his cowardice by carrying out a successful kamikaze mission on Godzilla

It's unlikely that anything mainstream in Japan published after 1945 would glorify a kamikaze attack. (Unless it's Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato, and Matsumoto didn't like that ending for exactly that reason.)

One of the points of Godzilla Minus Zero is that kamikaze attacks were a senseless waste of life.

Yeah the last 4 minutes definitely subverted all my expectations, based on what they had achieved already. Didn't know if those choices were from a japanese culture angle, or yeah just the allure of making a follow-up. Although I still liked it and would always recommend it, I'm maybe less interested in rewatches.

then the camera zooms into her window for a menacing shot of the same iceberg that sank the ship all those years ago!

As long as this is accompanied by the foreboding godzilla theme playing, I suppose I'd allow it.

People can die without the ending being a downer (e.g. Anna Karenina).

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On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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