I remember reading a long time ago that in Professional Wrestling (which is just a group of stories, basically) in a true good-guy vs bad-guy fight (where both characters had similar levels of importance), the bad guys would win about 70%. I guess it kept the crowd coming in regularly - if you KNOW the good guy will win, why bother?
I suspect that has probably changed by now (Cena wins! Again…) as the marketing of wrestling has changed. It looks like the Good Guys win more often - particularly in the big matches.
The Honky Tonk man was the classic example - he was Intercontintal champion for years. That’s a medium-level title. He was always on tour. He would go into town, and have the Big Title Match against the local hero (the match having been advertised for weeks to get the crowd). For about half-an-hour, the local hero would beat up HTM, and then just when he was about to win, HTM would pull out a dirty cheat (or his manager would), and retain the title. Next night - next town. Repeat.
It’s one major flaw in romantic comedies for me. The plot tends to go like this: Jack and Jill (one or both of them) are stuck in unsatisfying relationships, so they have an affair with each other, then refuse to talk about their feelings until a wedding-chapel expression of devotion, at which point they run off into the sunset to be happily ever after.
Sure, why not? That’s a solid foundation on which to build a relationship. What could possibly go wrong?
Great example and counter/example of this, spoilered because I’ve already been chided once in this thread.
(George R.R. Martin spoilers follow)
[spoiler]At the end of A Game of Thrones (the book), where Eddard Stark gets beheaded, I fully expected some kind of rescue to happen. Right up to the instant where it happened, I was thinking “There’s no way they’ll kill this guy off here. He’s totally being set up to be the main good guy for the series.” Then Ilyn Payne chops his head off.
It lent instant credibility to any perilous situation from then on: Martin had shown you that nobody is safe, that if someone’s in a situation that looks unsurvivable, they probably aren’t going to survive, and that (with the one notable exception of Daenerys) characters who repeatedly make poor decisions end up dead. Because of that, I found the series completely absorbing, at least through the first four books.
The counter-example is actually Martin as well: the series started to lose its edge for me in the most recent book, where Tyrion fell to his apparent death, and turned up alive afterwards. All of a sudden I felt as though one character was bigger than the plot. (Given that Tyrion has become easily the most popular character in the franchise thanks in part to Peter Dinklage’s amazing performance in the series, I can see why he might become untouchable. A Tyrion-less Season 6 would probably plummet in the ratings.)
Unfortunately, that now leads to the same kind of Harry Potter-style meta-thinking I mentioned upthread.[/spoiler]
I prefer to know the good guys will survive. And in games, I absolutely hate it when the developer resorts to sequel baiting bullshit instead of giving me my hard-earned victory. I’m looking at you, Alien: Isolation.
I prefer the familiar conventions, even if they are a bit straitjacketing to the author. I’m not comfortable with “experimental” fiction, or avant-garde stuff.
For instance, the very first Agatha Christie I ever read turned out to be one where the narrator dunnit. I was outraged. I didn’t read another Christie for fifteen years.
(Would you believe, the second Christie I ever read turned out to be another where the narrator dunnit! Holy Muck!)
Generally, life is sucky enough, and enough utter bastards prosper IRL, enough mas murderers die in their beds of old age, that I prefer my fiction to feature the good guys winning - how is where my entertainment value comes in. I’m also OK with cliffhangers like Empire strikes Back, but absolute victory by evil just turns me off.
This is one reason I’m not a huge fan of horror as a genre, as it seems the bad guys never truly get their comeuppance nowadays.
That’s what I meant by commercial considerations dictating endings.
Freddie Krueger can’t ever get what he deserves. Neither can Jason, or Michael Myers, or Hannibal Lecter. They have to win so there can be more profitable sequels.
