My love for “bad” endings.

(This blog is js gunna be a lot of messy thoughts and many many spoilers. With that said, enjoy reading!)

One of the movies that have really stuck with me is The Mist.

The movie takes place as characters are trapped in a supermarket, while monsters lurk in a mysterious mist. Everyone, blinded by fear, finally starts losing it and offing each other. A group of people, the main protagonist and allies, finally manage to escape after many losses. They escape via car until it runs out of fuel. With not much left to do, the protagonist and the group of people decided to do a group suicide, that which is a decision I still don't understand (you guys made it this far, might as well have died trying.) 

The bullets are one off, so the protagonist kills everyone in the car, including HIS OWN SON (I cannot stress enough how hard it was to sit through this scene) and he was left, waiting for any monster to kill him and free him from this torment. This was the most devasting scene I ever had to endure. Five minutes later— only five minutes later— a military rescue team appears. All this could have been avoided if the protagonist and his group had waited only a few minutes before making that decision. 

On first watch, I was going insane, I was screaming at my screen, pulling my hair out, yelling "WHYYYYY" while burrying my hands in my face. And yet... I couldn't hate the ending. Something about it didn't let me hate it. Although it burned every fiber in my being, something about it was just... done right, done exactly right to pierce through your soul while maintaining reality. The absolute hopelessness the situation offered, the brief second where you thought there was no way out, followed by the glimmer of hope that arrived just too late, hope that has turned into a living memory of everything that could have been. What I particularly like about "bad endings" is how you feel everything with the characters, you are betrayed, humiliated, stripped from all hope like they were. And that emotional cord is what pulls me. 

One of my favourite (yet most hated in the past) tropes is the “time loop” trope. And while it can be a little overused and underwhelming, I feel like in the right build-up it hits the “bad ending” sweet spot with ease. The two examples I want to talk about are Little Nightmares 2 and Cronos: A New Dawn.

In Little Nightmares 2, the game follows the main characters, Mono and Six, as they navigate the twisted world they have to survive in. Mono finds himself in control of TV and weirdly attracted to it, seeing visions of a long corridor and a door at the end, yet remaining unable to open it. But, once he did, he unknowingly unleashes a threat, the Thin Man. We later find out that the Thin Man is Mono himself, his future, what he becomes, and that all the Thin Man was trying to do is stop the chain of events that has caused this. 

What I absolutely adore about the time loop narrative is that it loops because they're trying to stop it. The act of actively working to destroy the loop is what keeps it alive. It loops, they suffer undlessly, they try to stop the suffering, it ends up repeating itself, over and over and over again. There's no stopping the loop because they keep taking the same actions, making the same mistakes, all while unaware they've been here before, which all leads back to what we were trying to avoid. All roads lead to Rome, and all those roads are a single, big circle. It's tragic and devastating, but it's real, and while it's horrible, you can't deny that it moves you, albeit for a bad reason, but it still strikes a strong chord that a “good ending” wouldn't have. 

As for Cronos, I'm not going to talk about the "true" ending, frankly I don't like it very much and I'll elaborate on that later.

The game follows a character navigating through timelines to try and save humanity from an unknown disease that has turned everyone into mutant zombies. At the end of the game, we discover that one of the major causes for this outbreak is one of the Pathfinders (those who bend time) and that the reason for the tearing of time and the (sort of) extinction of humanity was his obsession with a woman whom he refused to let die, thus tearing apart the world (and tearing her apart as well) in order to keep her with him. We also discover that the protagonist is a recreated version of the woman he loves. The protagonist, discovering what was done with her and humanity, wants to put an end to it. At the end of the game, you are left with two choices; kill him or don't. But, in the end, both choices will lead to the protagonist's demise, and both will lead for the time loop to continue, and there will be no truly breaking free. 

Now, as for why I didn't like the true ending, where the protagonist realises the time loop, and works with the real version of her against the Pathfinder to actually restore humanity, it seems unrealistic that a man who has been tearing apart the world, himself and the woman he loves for his obsession would suddenly allow to go through with their plan and give up, and why the woman, who has complete blind faith in the Pathfinder, would also change her mind. 

The ending I liked is where we choose to kill the Pathfinder, putting an "end" to this cycle. The protagonist vanishes, as without the Pathfinder she would have never been created. And before she disappears, she opens a time portal for the woman to escape out of. Once there, she meets with someone, after all this mess she needed company, but we realise that she had been carrying the disease. Then, it spreads, and then the cycle continues. The protagonist had died doing something to stop the cycle, to make a change, to fix things, but that very act is what insures that everything will repeat itself, and everything will remain the same. This seems like the more realistic outcome I'd say, and it is my guilty pleasure of trying to break the cycle ending up repeating it. 

An honourable mention is Bendy and the Ink Machine. While I personally love the Dark Revival, I'm going to be mentioning the original game for the time loop.

While I think many people didn't like the time loop ending, the fact that this was all a cycle, I feel like it was fine, maybe not as earned as other examples I've mentioned, but good nonetheless. Why I prefer the Dark Revival though, is because it plays in a "paused" time loop, things that should have been moving are now static, and how things have changed and twisted and deformed all from sitting still too long, how the Ink Demon has grew a conscious, how Wilson has built an intire army inside the studio, how there are now more conscious people, like Heidi and Porter. As a fan of the franchise, it is so interesting— and ironic— seeing how everything changes once it stopped moving. Another thing to quickly mention is that how I have said I disliked breaking the loop (I'm not a hater for good endings I swear) because it often feels cheap, but one of the few exceptions I'm going to make is for Boris: the Lone Wolf, and how Buddy fixes up the original Ink Machine and manages to escape. It is interesting how freezing the time loop has opened ways to leave it. And so while I enjoy seeing devastating time loops like the one in LN2, I do truly think that the perspective BATDR gives us is rich in storytelling and I enjoy it very much (or I'm biased because I love bendy sue me.) 

Now, I'm going to be talking about a book written by the legend himself, Ahmed Khalid Tawfik. Highly HIGHLY recommend checking out his books if you can.

The book I'm going to be talking about is (في ممر الفئران)

The story takes place in an expanded story from one of his worlds written in a different series (ما وراء الطبيعة) The Main protagonist falls into a coma, and gets teleported to this different world. In that world, an astroid/comet struck the Earth, creating a thick, black smoke that has completely covered the sun, depriving the world of any kind of light, ever. The residents of the world now live in pitch black, in their own shit, in systems they have created to manage living without seeing anything, such as using folds in money to know its worth. The lack of sunlight has made everyone ill, and people are barely holding up. The elite, however, have colonised this issue, have built their own world above that black cloud, in the light, and convinced everyone that the darkness they live in is sacred, and anyone that tries to defy it should be eliminated. The characters see the protagonist as a glimmer of hope, someone from the outside, someone that will help them put and end to this system, so they create a plan, to break into the elite government and take it down.

At the last second... the protagonist betrays them. He betrays his allies, giving them in to the government, and joining the elite in the end, to rule this world that he doesn't belong in, all while in the real world— his world— he remains in a coma, lying on the hospital bed. Dead in his world, but a king in the other.

I got opinions that the book had left the reader thinking "really? Is that how it ends?" But personally, I like it very much. The protagonist hated his life in the real world, or grew bored of it, and had no real motive to help the allies in talking down the government, thus not making it too out of character of him to do. It's not the typical "we win," it's a dirty victory, one that came from the lives of hundreds, inoccent and allies. My mouth was agape, I was genuinely wondering why, what would make him do such a crime?! It was so filthy! And yet— storytelling wise— it was amazing. It stuck with me, and endings like these will stick out amongst the hundreds of "wins."

There was something about this victory, that it wasn't truly a victory, that it was so abrupt we were shocked alongside the allies, that in the end our hope— and the allies' hopes— were shattered in a few lines. We felt the betrayal with them, felt the loss with them, felt the overwhelming helplessness, felt how there was no real victory in a system that rewards power, how we can dream and fight and hope and rebel but in the end... we're powerless. It reflects the real world, and how, no matter how hard we try, real victory will never come clean. 

The readers were betrayed, like the allies, and we had a moment to feel for what they truly felt. 

Another book by the same author I'd like to mention is (يوتوبيا)

This story is interesting because the main character is just a really shitty person in general. 

The story takes place in a dystopian world where the rich have sealed themselves off from the rest of the world, living in luxury, in utopia, while the rest of the population suffered from a lack of— well, everything. (Do we see a pattern?)

The teenagers of those rich grow bored, indulging in drugs and sex and anything they can entertain themselves with. Eventually, the act of "hunting" the poor has become a sort of underground activity, basically escaping the walls of their comfort to hunt another human, and they return back and toy with the human until they're done, then the human is killed and a body part is taken as a trophy. The main character decides to try doing this as well, but fails, and gets stuck in the gutter and has to survive living amongst the poor.

One of the poor characters, although begrudgingly, decides to help him. Call it fear, call it nobility, call it holding on to whatever is left of his humanity, call it whatever you want, the poor character helps them survive and return to their utopia. 

In the end, the main character (who doesnt deserve the title of the protagonist) assaults the sister of the man that was helping him, and in the end, kills him, chopping off his hand and taking it as a trophy. This scandal, the assault of the sister and murder of the man, was what broke the camel's back. The poor had had enough, and they create a plan to revolt. The main character does not care, does not feel remorse, does not regret his decision. There is no victory, no redemption arc, no room for change, no clarity. Just the reader, sitting in the shock of watching the man that has offered help to someone who doesn't deserve an ounce of compassion, die a humiliating death. It's tragic, but it's real, in a world like this, a man had to pay the price of choosing the right decision. This book was the first book I read for this author, and it immediately made me fall in love with his works. I remember the devastation I felt when I read the ending, when I witnessed how horrible the main character is, when I had to discover that the man was killed, how the main character will still choose to defend his decision, humiliate the poor, and do anything to make sure everything stays how it is. It's sick, but it's painfully what truly does happen. And that's why it stuck with me. 

And I guess, overall, my love for bad endings comes from how much it makes me feel the characters and experience the story alongside them. Not all of us get a good ending, not everyone gets a happily ever after, and sometimes, that's all we get, sitting in our own suffocating silence and pool of blood. Realising that while there is hope, everything always comes at a cost, and not all of us win. The ones that couldn't make it, the ones that never had a chance, that ones that have payed the price of simply existing. 

Sometimes, that is all we get.