I definitely have NOT figured out what the right "dosage" is of success and failure for me to enjoy a show.
Horror seems to frequently be at one end of the spectrum. The hero is presumably an underdog (if the hero seems TOO COMPETENT at the start of the movie, then he's probably a bait-and-switch protagonist, or else the REAL opposition hasn't yet revealed itself), any victories are hard-fought, and thanks to the wide range of outcomes in the genre, there's no guarantee the protagonist has any hope of prevailing.
(I have special contempt, however, for the '80s trope of having a hard-fought victory where the PCs finally find the weakness of the Big Bad, and utterly obliterate him ... yet, right before the credits roll, and "THE END" appears on the screen, suddenly -- BOOGA-BOOGA! -- the bad guy pops out, and it becomes "THE END ... ?" Argh! So cheap.)
On the flip side, there seems to be just so much anime (I'd say "lately," but there have been examples of this for a LONG time) where the protagonist is a cock-sure, smarmy, smirking over-powered sort who simply WILL NEVER fail on any level that matters, because he somehow is playing this game with all the cheat codes turned on. (And these days, that may very well be literal, if it's an Isekai where he gets transported to a JRPG universe.) And there obviously are plenty of people who LOVE this, who don't even WANT there to ever be a chance of a sad outcome that might spoil their fun ... but as for me, sorry, I just can't root for the guy. It feels too cheap.
There's got to be some sort of decent medium, somewhere between those extremes. I think it gets more difficult for long-run stories. If you have an entire series where the hero keeps getting his hopes ground into the dirt (or where, repeatedly, your protagonist DIES, and another hapless would-be hero has to take up the torch), eventually it's going to get tiresome ... and if, suddenly, things turn around in the last episode (or perhaps second-to-last), it feels cheap. Like, "Well, of COURSE you're going to clean house now that the series is wrapping up!" Even if that wasn't a sure thing -- I mean, it COULD have been on a downer note throughout, even at the end, for all I know -- it somehow seems to cheapen it.
Here, I think of Higurashi, AKA "When the Cicadas Cry." At first it's a bewildering cycle of "light-hearted fun" that keeps spiraling into horror, with lots of "What the HECK?!?" moments, until on the meta level I start to feel that there's some sort of pattern here ... and then some of the pieces start fitting into place, and maybe there's some sort of hope for resolution after all ... but then the ending comes along and the tone so totally changes that it feels like this can't even be the same universe. The ending is TOO "perfect," too CHEESY, a total break in tone, where the very "rules" of the universe that have prevailed so far are utterly thrown out the window and suddenly it feels like a kids' show -- which this series, as a whole, most certainly SHOULD NOT BE.
As a result, it feels utterly *wrong*, and I find myself mentally rebelling, expecting some sort of "gotcha" at the end -- that this "happy ending" was just someone's deluded fantasy, and that really things ended horribly after all. It was still a fascinatingly horrible ride to get there, but I still can't understand what the heck happened with that ending. I wish I could edit it!
Maybe the better medium is some kind of mix of triumphs and failures -- y'know, kind of more like real life. Minor accomplishments here and there, that may or may not tie directly to the main challenge, but at least it establishes that not EVERYTHING in this story is pity-porn. ;)
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Horror seems to frequently be at one end of the spectrum. The hero is presumably an underdog (if the hero seems TOO COMPETENT at the start of the movie, then he's probably a bait-and-switch protagonist, or else the REAL opposition hasn't yet revealed itself), any victories are hard-fought, and thanks to the wide range of outcomes in the genre, there's no guarantee the protagonist has any hope of prevailing.
(I have special contempt, however, for the '80s trope of having a hard-fought victory where the PCs finally find the weakness of the Big Bad, and utterly obliterate him ... yet, right before the credits roll, and "THE END" appears on the screen, suddenly -- BOOGA-BOOGA! -- the bad guy pops out, and it becomes "THE END ... ?" Argh! So cheap.)
On the flip side, there seems to be just so much anime (I'd say "lately," but there have been examples of this for a LONG time) where the protagonist is a cock-sure, smarmy, smirking over-powered sort who simply WILL NEVER fail on any level that matters, because he somehow is playing this game with all the cheat codes turned on. (And these days, that may very well be literal, if it's an Isekai where he gets transported to a JRPG universe.) And there obviously are plenty of people who LOVE this, who don't even WANT there to ever be a chance of a sad outcome that might spoil their fun ... but as for me, sorry, I just can't root for the guy. It feels too cheap.
There's got to be some sort of decent medium, somewhere between those extremes. I think it gets more difficult for long-run stories. If you have an entire series where the hero keeps getting his hopes ground into the dirt (or where, repeatedly, your protagonist DIES, and another hapless would-be hero has to take up the torch), eventually it's going to get tiresome ... and if, suddenly, things turn around in the last episode (or perhaps second-to-last), it feels cheap. Like, "Well, of COURSE you're going to clean house now that the series is wrapping up!" Even if that wasn't a sure thing -- I mean, it COULD have been on a downer note throughout, even at the end, for all I know -- it somehow seems to cheapen it.
Here, I think of Higurashi, AKA "When the Cicadas Cry." At first it's a bewildering cycle of "light-hearted fun" that keeps spiraling into horror, with lots of "What the HECK?!?" moments, until on the meta level I start to feel that there's some sort of pattern here ... and then some of the pieces start fitting into place, and maybe there's some sort of hope for resolution after all ... but then the ending comes along and the tone so totally changes that it feels like this can't even be the same universe. The ending is TOO "perfect," too CHEESY, a total break in tone, where the very "rules" of the universe that have prevailed so far are utterly thrown out the window and suddenly it feels like a kids' show -- which this series, as a whole, most certainly SHOULD NOT BE.
As a result, it feels utterly *wrong*, and I find myself mentally rebelling, expecting some sort of "gotcha" at the end -- that this "happy ending" was just someone's deluded fantasy, and that really things ended horribly after all. It was still a fascinatingly horrible ride to get there, but I still can't understand what the heck happened with that ending. I wish I could edit it!
Maybe the better medium is some kind of mix of triumphs and failures -- y'know, kind of more like real life. Minor accomplishments here and there, that may or may not tie directly to the main challenge, but at least it establishes that not EVERYTHING in this story is pity-porn. ;)