Do you feel that way with other fiction? Detective stuff? Superhero stuff? Outer space stuff? Doctors saving patients?
I think that Apricus has a good point.
I think that reading a stylized narration of a characterâs actions can make it feel much clearer what the right and wrong decisions are. It can create a sense of moral clarity.
Itâd be like the difference between reading about a character who wastes time on Facebook instead of studying for an impending exam⌠versus actually being a person IRL who spends time on Facebook instead of studying.
I think when you read about someone else doing it, it can feel more obvious when theyâre making a mistake. Besides, authors often write in a slanted/stylized sort of way that makes it clearer what the right and wrong decisions are.
(Also, viewing oneâs own actions through someone elseâs perspective can have the same effect. E.g., having a boss looking over oneâs shoulder can make one more acutely aware of when one is doing something subpar.)
I donât think so. Perhaps because being a detective, astronaut, or doctor requires skills that I donât have (and itâs intuitively obvious to me that I donât have those skills).
I donât think I could be as good of a detective as Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. (At least not without decades of practice. And even then, Iâd probably still fail to reach their skill level.)
Maybe people view moral knowledge/skill as easier and more accessible than technical skill. Perhaps people feel that itâs easier to become a hero than a brain surgeon.
Some people think that only tragic endings are respectable and that happy endings are naive. Which is because they hold the malevolent universe premise and believe that life is fundamentally tragic.
Spoilers for We the Living and 1984:
A part of the theme of the novel is about the futility of achieving physical values in a totalitarian state, which logically concludes in the heroine dying. Rand does not view the battle between the individual soul vs the collectivist soul, or the men of mind vs the leeches, as futile battles, so FH and AS require happy endings.
We the Living is less tragic than 1984. In 1984, Winston loses his grasp on reality and betrays his values. Kira dies fighting for her values and with her soul intact. Kira dies happy and with dignity while Winston is forced to live a life worse than death.
Some of them would look down upon happy endings as âfeel good storiesâ, whereas real art, they would say, is supposed to challenge you, to make you uncomfortable.
Randâs books arenât about making you feel good, instead their effect should be to give you spiritual fuel and inspire you to pursue values in life. Her books do challenge you. They challenge you to strive for moral perfection and settling for nothing less. âFeel good storiesâ would tell you that youâre okay as you are and that you need to change nothing about yourself.
Depends a lot on the show. Sometimes police procedurals also include stuff like protagonists getting into gunfights, which would be adversity in real life but are often portrayed as mostly just thrilling and badass.
But in general I mostly had long form stories such as novels and movies in mind. Serialized shows often donât have the same adversity every episode but they might have the protagonists face some serious adversity periodically, e.g. season finales or dramatic 2-part episodes.
Most episodes of House he is just snarky and the patient is the one facing adversity, but every so often he ends up in prison or has a traumatic drug induced hallucination or whatever. If you look at the totality of any given showâs run, most of them do have genuine non-trivial adversity pop up at least a couple times. But again I do agree it varies based on genre, and some genres are fairly low in adversity.
Yeah, I agree. I did intend to imply this with this line (bold added):
Many protagonists in successful fiction experience very real, serious setbacks.
You mentioned Star Trek⌠while many individual episodes may be fairly low stakes, over the course of their runs (mostly thinking of the ones I know well, from the 90s; TNG, DS9, VOY) there is a lot of really serious adversity! Characters are tortured, imprisoned, experimented on, stranded in hostile environments for extended periods, injured in critical condition, die, lose loved ones, face major moral dilemmas that challenge their beliefs, etc.
I have become a much bigger fan of Star Trek after rewatching it recently, I think overall it does this sort of thing better than many other examples of serialized fiction (Law and Order, etc.) where I agree with you more.
No, I do think FH shows success as hard within the story. I was just saying that because it has a happy ending for the protagonist I think a lot of people can come away from it feeling good. And that can extend into feeling empowered, like they can do it too, like maybe itâs not that hard, etc.
Some of these reactions are probably good, but my guess is that they can also lead to overconfidence. This feels like a classic difficult problem between confidence and overconfidence. You donât want people to feel demoralized and hopeless, but itâs also not good if they get arrogant and sloppy.
I donât really have a solution to that problem. To the extent I donât think a solution to it is present in Randâs fiction, I donât think thatâs her fault. Itâs not really the problem she was trying to solve anyway.
Yeah I have not read that but I am aware of it and was pretty sure that it had a bleak ending. I only mentioned FH because thatâs the only one I remembered well and was pretty confident about.
I also think storytelling often follows guidelines about when it is or isnât a good idea to have a bleak unhappy ending. Some genres and types of stories can more reliably get away with bleak endings.
Dystopian stories are a good example. AS & FH have elements of dystopianism in them but I think they are more like big dramas. I havenât read We the Living but my understanding is that itâs more of a true dystopian story. So that would track.
Also, I have a theory that short stories can get away with bleak endings more reliably than long form stories. Not to say long form stories donât have bleak endings sometimes. But I think itâs much more common in short stories. I have noticed this a lot in Science Fiction. Short speculative Sci-Fi is often bleak, dystopian, horrific, or otherwise has sad/bad endings. Long form Sci-Fi, even if it is overall bleak, will usually have some element of hope in the ending.
My guess for why this is: Bleak endings can leave readers feeling bad. But the longer time youâve spent with the protagonists, the more emotionally invested you are, the worse it can end up feeling. For shorter stories, the bleak ending can be sad but the thought-provoking and challenging elements can be interesting enough to be the primary thing the reader thinks about. For long stories, it can be harder to appreciate that stuff if the ending of the story is too bleak and all of the characters the reader grew attached to end the story in a horrible place.
No. Dystopia means:
an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.
We the Living is set in communist Russia. Itâs realistic. Itâs not like 1984 which tries to imagine a hypothetical society. Randâs true dystopian book is Anthem, which is set in a hypothetical communist society which is worse than the USSR. FYI, Anthem is short and you could read it in one sitting.
Oh, oops! I was absolutely confusing We the Living with Anthem. Anthem is the short dystopia.
Is We the Living also short? Does Anthem have a bleak ending?
Guessing I wasnât thinking of We the Living at all at any point and was only ever thinking of Anthem by mistake. Or I got them confused in my head and conflated them into one short dystopian book with a bleak ending. I have not read either of them.
I think my broader comments still stand. Also, realistic historical dramas (whether fiction or not) are another genre that often have very bleak endings regardless of the storyâs length. Depending on what era of history, at least. I think this makes sense⌠History can be very bleak, and people often know the broad strokes of the bleak historical period before they start the story. Both of those facts contribute to it being a more accepted type of ending.
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Got it.
I must have done this then. They morphed into a single book in my mind.
For my physical copies with roughly same font size and page size, WTL is 443 pages and FH is 727 pages.
This depends on the philosophical world view of the author. If they hold the malevolent universe premise then itâs inverted; tragic endings are the default and happy endings require justification.
That applies mostly just for intellectual fiction. With such fiction you kind of make a trade off where you learn something about the human condition or society but have to get sad over the tragedy. For popular fiction the goal is more to make it enjoyable than to make it didactic.
Surely there are people who enjoy sad stories without much philosophical substance in them, but I think theyâre a minority. Though I can think up vague examples of people saying âthe ending was so sad!â implying it was good without talking about what it teaches you. So maybe Iâm underestimating how much people like sad endings.
I can imagine that people like fiction that makes them feel something. Boring fiction that spark no emotions is worse than those that spark negative feelings, all else being equal.
For Rand, the justification for the tragic ending in WtL is not realism, but the philosophical meaning it implies about collectivism. She talks about this in the end of The Art of Fiction.
~yes. Do I think itâs actually easy being as good as Sherlock Holmes (or more realistic detective portrayals)? No. Does it feel like that to me when I read him/watch him. Yes. Same for superhero stuff. Outer space stuff. Doctors saving patients, too. Maybe its my unfamiliarity with the field at times? So I donât have a good reference? Like when I was younger I was a bit more interested in sports (never played any though and was never a sports guy). I tried doing some basketball stuff. I have an appreciation for how hard those things are because I have a personal frame(?) to reference here. Though I say that, I do think I could read some basketball fiction or a story and still think it easy.