 If I mention anything here, assume there will be spoilers for it. But, everything I bring up has been out for at least eight years already, so don't worry about being spoiled for anything recent. When discussing any sort of finished media, people tend to focus on the endings. The sixth sense is memorable mostly because of the big twist that puts everything earlier in the film in a new light. Every Shyamalan film since then has been bad partially because he felt the need to throw in a big twist that makes everything earlier in the film more nonsensical. Just look at any television show that gets popular enough. People will complain about the ending. Pacing too fast, too slow, characters act in a way that doesn't match your fan fictions, villains suddenly become stupid at the end, maybe things just feel unsatisfying in a way that you can't explain. Whatever the case, you can be assured people will whine for years afterwards. A big part of this is just that the internet has created a specific type of nerd who believes all the stuff they consume must cater to their every whim or it's objectively bad. It types bitch and moan a lot, which gives off the impression that their opinions are more popular than they really are. So I won't focus too much on popular reception, it's too hard to measure. That said, obviously some endings are bad, some are even horrible. I have a whole Top 10 video on it. And I have to wonder, how much do endings actually matter? The first time I realized that endings could be bad is when I saw Remember Me. It's a cute romantic movie about Robert Pattinson where he doesn't watch his girlfriend sleep. He dies on 9-11 just for the sake of tragedy. It's pointless and a tad exploitative, which just left a sour taste in my mouth. Since then I've wondered, what exactly makes an ending bad? And I've settled on a simple answer. Whether or not it feels satisfying. Does it make you feel like the time you spent getting there was worth it? If it doesn't, that makes you annoyed at your time being wasted. That's why bad endings of TV shows generate so much vitriol. They're a huge time sink. When I was 15 years old, I spent two hours watching Edward Cullen act like an endearing ass instead of a horse's ass, and it amounted to nothing. To make it worse, they brought in a real life event where real people died to try and add to the sadness, I guess. If Pattinson had died in, say, a car crash, it still would have been bad, but it would have felt less like it was piggybacking on a real tragedy. Does a good ending save a terrible work of art? Usually not. If Breaking Dawn had really ended with a massive battle that killed a bunch of characters, it would have been entertaining. Maybe even changed the way we viewed the entire series. Wouldn't make everything that came before worth it, though, and it would probably have pissed off everyone who liked the books up until that point. They were looking for a sappy love story and that's what they got. Changing it to something completely different at the last second leaves everyone unsatisfied. What about a bad ending? Does it diminish what came before? Well, sometimes. Island in the Sea of Time is a fun series, even if the author is a nutcase, with a ton of great battles and looks at how our world would change given the circumstances. But the main villain also gets killed by a tertiary character with no struggle from the heroes, letting them coast to victory. Plus, there are several pieces of sequel bait that never panned out. What's going to happen with Walker's daughter? Will the Islanders who crashed their airship on the Eurasian steppe survive? Will Mick Andrews succeed in setting up his empire in Kush? Who knows. There was no commitment here. I put it on my list of top ten worst endings for a reason. So the end was immensely unsatisfying. But does that detract from what came before? Not really. It doesn't change anything major about the world, characters, or themes. It's not revealed that the whole thing was a dream or a hallucination, which we should all agree is the worst kind of ending. You could even argue that this ending enhances the themes of the books, since Walker was destroyed by social forces he set in motion rather than the good guys just being better at war. And the sequel baiting about his daughter and Mick Andrews, each setting up their own empire, seems to suggest that the world is much bigger than the characters mentioned in the series, and that the world will continue to change and evolve in different ways than our own. The idea that no individual is in charge of society or culture is what the books were pushing from the start, and the ending supports that. From that perspective, it's kind of interesting. It's still one of the worst endings I've ever read. Yet when I look back on the series, I mostly remember the fun parts from earlier. My overall opinion is still positive. No, the only way an ending really damages what came before is when they do something like undermine the themes or make the journey feel pointless. The reason that it was all a dream is the go-to example for a shitty ending is because of just that. It makes the journey feel pointless. Why should we care about all the adventures Dorothy went on in Oz when it turns out none of it happened? She was never in any real danger, and those beloved characters were all fake, so they didn't go through any interesting arcs. I mean, I hate that movie either way, so it doesn't matter to me. And yes, I've read the book, which isn't much better in this regard. Dorothy still goes through a lot of trouble to try and get home, only to learn that she could have tapped her shoes together from the start. It still makes things feel pointless. This is particularly insidious with twist endings, and Hollywood movies are particularly bad about twist endings. Signs is a tense horror movie about an alien invasion told from the perspective of people on an isolated farm. While it has issues, I really like it overall due to the scary, oppressive atmosphere. It really makes you feel like you're stuck on an isolated farm with aliens around. Then the end comes and it turns out the aliens die when you pour water on them. If an opponent can be defeated that easy, it ceases to be scary. In this case, it makes the characters seem kind of stupid and weak for being scared of these things in the first place. You're telling me they didn't get any do on them while they were running through that cornfield? Or that they never stepped in a puddle by accident? It's just dumb, and it detracts from the whole movie. There are some fan theories that help explain this, but if you need to go that far for your story to make sense, there's a deeper issue. How about in Now You See Me when we learned that magic is real and the bad guys can use it, even though the whole movie up until that point was about how magicians utilize misdirection and prior expectations to fool people? The villain never actually wanted to catch them, meaning they were never in any real danger. Or remember me when Robert Pattinson dies in 9-11 because they wanted it to end tragically. Or The Last Exorcism when we find out that apparently there's been a satanic cult operating this entire time. We just never saw any evidence for it until the last three minutes. And we still got all the footage from the cameraman, somehow. So all the talk about the nature of faith and the debunking of supernatural occurrences is, say it with me, pointless. Or when the Planet of the Apes remake ended with Mark Wahlberg going to the present day, which has changed from the real world due to his actions, even though the eight planet is supposed to be the future and not the past. Then he commits multiple racially motivated hate crimes in the 1980s. Wait, that wasn't a movie. I could do this all day, but it would devolve into me reciting the endings of a bunch of movies. Twist or surprise endings are an amazing way to make everything that came earlier fall apart. Obviously, twists aren't inherently bad, and that goes for twist endings too, but they need to do several things to work well. First, they have to be surprising. Second, they have to make sense. And third, they have to make you view things from a new angle. Most of the time, people focus exclusively on the first one and forget the other two. Sure, you could go back and lay the breadcrumbs that lead to the outcome, but it's much easier to just throw shit in there that doesn't tie into anything and often doesn't even add up. M Night Shyamalan has turned this into an art form unto itself. The happening opens with a mysterious epidemic of suicides sweeping New England. We don't know what's causing it, then we learn it's the plants. Literally. The trees and bushes start convincing humans to off themselves. It makes zero sense, ties into exactly zero themes, and it's impossible to deduce based on the information given beforehand, but it took viewers by surprise, so I guess it's a good twist to Shyamalan. The movie also ends on a weird, it's happening again note, which is dumb and doesn't make me dread anything the way a cliffhanger ending should. A lot of Goosebumps books had the same problem. They end on a, the main character is about to die horribly, note with no resolution, and all for the sake of just surprising the audience. But maybe you disagree with my assessment there. What we can all agree on is that Serenity is the definition of batshit insanity. It ends with the reveal that all of the events took place in a video game. This is because a young boy wanted to cope with his father's death, so he designed an elaborate fishing simulator where his father could have sex with his mother and kill his stepdad. Then he succumbs to grief and joins Al-Qaeda, only to become one of the 19 hijackers who committed the 9-11 attacks. That last part is fake, but would you have guessed if I hadn't told you? And don't get upset with me for spoiling a more recent movie, you were never going to watch it. That brings me back to the initial question, how important are endings? It depends on how much the ending affects everything that came earlier. I wish I could give a more definitive answer here, but I just can't. This is a complicated topic that needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. There simply isn't a rule I can give that would apply in every situation, which brings me to the topic of simplicity. Some people are too harsh on simple endings. They act like endings need to do backflips and cartwheels across the finish line to be good. They don't. Sometimes the best way to end things is the good guy's win and the bad guy's lose. The ending of The Lord of the Rings movies is exactly what you would expect in most ways, the good guy's win and the bad guy's lose. That doesn't mean it's not fucking awesome. We still get huge battles. All the character arcs reach a satisfying conclusion. The journey the heroes went on mattered since the world would have been doomed without them. It hits all the correct marks. Would this story have been better if Frodo slowly started to think that Sauron had a point and decided to join him at the end? Or if the heroes failed? Or if they succeeded only to go home and find industrialization destroying their beloved nature? Wait, that actually happened in the books. The point is that a predictable conclusion isn't a bad thing unless you're working on a genre based around surprises, like murder mysteries. If you're making an action movie where Schwarzenegger has to flex on terrorists or whatever, just end it with him killing the bad guys in a shootout. If you're making a comedy about some idiot friends trying to get to White Castle and it with them eating at White Castle, you don't need to get fancy. Developing stories to solely be surprising the first time through is how you start putting in twists for the sake of putting in twists and I've already gone on about that. You listen to songs you like over and over again. Other forms of media don't have to be exempt from this. They can be enjoyable more than once. The desire for writers to do something different is the reason they take risks and go for untraditional endings and that's a good thing. I'd rather they take risks that don't always pay off than do the same thing every time. Maybe the fan base will shit themselves in the short term, in the long term it will keep your work in the public consciousness. Serenity is bad, but I'll remember it till the day I die. But this desire also makes them take risks and go weird with it when they don't need to. Like I said, sometimes simple is better and if you take something that should end simply and try to make it complex just for the sake of making it complex, you run into trouble. Take Animorphs, for example. In the final book, the heroes managed to save the earth from the yurks, which is what the whole series built up to. It was a satisfying climax. Then it kept going. The main characters' lives fall apart in various ways. Then some new aliens show up and then most of the heroes die in an attack that will kick off a new war. It's convoluted and it comes out of nowhere and it makes the previous conflict feel less important in retrospect. In a word, it's bad. I know that the author has given some reasons for why she ended the series in such a way. She was making a point about how wars are always awful even when the, quote, good guys win and oftentimes a new villain will appear just so a new war can start. Those are some solid points that doesn't make them fun to read about. We spent nearly 60 books with these characters only for most of them to die in a kamikaze attack against an enemy we learned about a few pages ago. That's not a satisfying ending no matter how you package it. Everworld, written by the same author, is even worse because there's barely an ending at all. Things progress until the eve of the final battle and then it just stops. There's no climax or denouement to speak of here. We just never find out how things resolve, which makes everything before feel like a giant waste of time. What happens to the characters? I don't know. At least in Animorphs, we know that they all died. Here there's no resolution at all. It's genuinely one of the worst endings I've ever come across for that exact reason. Look, it's really not that complicated to make a decent ending. Making an amazing one is harder, obviously, but a decent one is easy. Just make things conclude in a manner that makes sense for what came before. If what came before doesn't seem to be leading towards a satisfying conclusion, don't try and throw everything on its head with nonsensical twists. Go back and tweak what came before so it leads towards a better ending. If a character's development doesn't seem to be going the way it should, go back and shove it in the proper direction. If you don't know how to make the reveal of who did the murder surprising and cool, change what sort of clues the audience has access to to improve it. How important are endings? It depends. Overall, though, they're not a big deal. They're the last thing you remember and so most of the importance attributed to them is simple, recency bias. After some time passes, the true quality reveals itself. And if you come across an ending that was bad, before sending death threats to the creators, ask yourself one question. Was this just less satisfying than it could have been or does it actively ruin what came before? If it's the first one, don't send death threats. If it's the second, still don't send death threats. Throw your internet-connected devices into a lake and go outside for a while. If you find yourself complaining about an ending years later unprompted, go outside. If you find yourself crafting inane conspiracy theories to explain why an ending was bad, go outside. Follow those instructions and fewer of your friends will stop talking to you. Hello and aloha. Thank you so much for watching this far. If you see all these names here, these are my patron guys. Over on Patreon, they send me money once a month and they get access to stuff like early videos and get to vote on polls and, you know, other fun stuff. And all their names are here. My $10 and up patrons are Oppo Savilainen, Eris Targaryen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Antsiljevich, Dark King, Echo, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Matthew Bordrow, Michael Weingartner, Microphone, Peep the Toad, Return of Cardamom, Sad Martigan, Silyr the Vixen, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, and Vaivictus. They're all great. If you want to get your name up here, consider donating to my Patreon. 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