What are some happy endings that really wasn't all that happy?

“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”

Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.

I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.

Thinking back on that series, I'm still kind of amazed at what we witnessed with S8. Not the season itself, obviously, but the phenomenon of it.

GoT was a huge fandom. Everybody was talking about it, for years. People were fuckin' naming their kids after those characters.

And then S8 happened and the whole thing was just gone. That entire enormous fandom erased more or less overnight. A moment of confused outage and then... silence.

I've never seen or heard of anything like it.
- Well they went off piste! Until then they had been in or close to the track that George RR Martin had laid out.
So, working backwards, thirdly, the books are excellent. The first three are by far the best and cover up to season 3/4ish. The next two are good, but also different. The show also really starts to diverge so kinda up to season 6, but only in the broadest sense.

In either case if you're going to read the books, read them all for full background. If course we're still waiting on at least 2 more new books, sooooooo you might be waiting a while/forever.

Second. The House of the Dragon TV series. I was also hesitant to watch it, but it really is great. It's not perfect, but if all we ever got was this one good season, I'd be happy. If season two ends up sucking, bummer, but at least we had one good one.

And firstly. King Bran. The biggest issue with Season 8 is that it just rushes to the ending. Bran has the best story? He is a weird raven character now. What does that mean? Who understands what that means? What did he actually do? What about Meera?

But what if we knew more about this three eyed raven character? What if we understood their goals? What if they foresaw the events of the series? What if they caused, or guided them? Hodor's purpose was to eventually save Bran. To do that Bran would have to make Hodor, Hodor. What if he helped ensure other events also took place? What if Bran being "King" was a setup from the beginning?

If all that is properly explained, I don't really have an issue with King Bran.

Of course that only explains it for the viewer. To King's Landing Bran is just some weird kid.

So let's change Bran's role slightly. The White Walkers are going to attack. The only way to win is with a united Seven Kingdoms. By the time Dany arrives the kingdom is largely united. However Dany has dragons. Can Bran convince Dany to give everything up and focus on the White Walkers? We see hints of this in the show. If the White Walker threat isn't fixed in one episode, what happens?

There are multiple seasons of story, and that's just Bran.

They key points of the show can still work (some of them at least), but they need time. Think of the Red Wedding. Arya's seasons long journey is nearly at an end. Caitlyn and her negotiating is paying off. Robb is about to achieve victory. Three seasons of setup, executed perfectly.

Realistically, looking back, season 8 was never going to be able to wrap things up. Even less so with a reduced last season.

The show runners fucked up and they fucked up big time.
- Excellent analysis!
  
  I did read the books on the original series. I have but haven’t yet read some of the others (I have at least one audiobook that was free at the time). I absolutely loved them, after sitting in shock as one “main character” after another was killed in a horrible and tragic way. I had gone in cold, and did not realize that GRRM took the authorial advice to “kill your darlings” quite so literally.”
  
  I didn’t get into them until the pentology was finished, and I remember wondering to myself “Who the hell does he finish this? He’s introduced a major new plot line on the third book (maybe it was the Dorne subplot) and new, major characters kept popping up. I had no idea how he was going to start tying everything together, because even the last book had not started winding things down quite - the tensions were still building. It felt like he was painting himself into a corner while doing the floor like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Given the pace of subsequent development, I think I may have been just a bit right on that. I’ve done it to myself and recognize the symptoms.
  
  I appreciate House of the Dragon being good. The problem is that S1 was also good. The problem is in the prequel-ness itself. I know that it all ends with Dany going inexplicably insane and Jamie’s arc goes from scoundrel to hero to … whatever the hell that was. I know the complex plot lines they’re setting up will never be closed. If GRRM ever finishes the book (I’m certainly not expecting two) and winds things down properly, I might again feel invested enough in the universe to try the other stories set in it, but right now it might have just ended with “and then Ned woke up and realized it was all a dream.”
  
  Lastly, you raise a good point and that would have at least maybe delivered some interest. I can’t see anything but civil war with Bran as the bored and incapable god-emperor facing a Stark-Lannister alliance or something. The problem is that the most central and intriguing plot lines were left hanging or ended in the fastest and worst way possible.
  
  “Dany forgot about the Black Fleet?” A queen capable of bringing her people from the literal point of extinction to conquering the known world, with a team of advisors and tacticians forgetting about a major armed force whose betrayal and push for conquest was well known? That’s like “The President of the United States forgot they were at war with China who had dispatched their fleet to attack Washington.” And then to have a ballista, fired from the pitching deck of a sailing ship, and hitting not only a moving target but a flying one? No one in history has ever shot a ballista at a moving flying target, to my knowledge, then pull in the wind and the waves.
  
  I really only picked on Bran in particular because that was the ending-ending. From top to bottom it was absolutely terrible with every authorial decision worse than the last.
  
  Like I said, I think GRRM painted himself into a corner. I think he gets some of the blame, because the show runners are obviously nowhere in the league of GRRM when it comes to story creation, and I don’t know how involved he was at that point. I don’t know if he skimmed a paragraph and signed off or what. Honestly, I don’t think even George knows how to finish his story because he kept adding one more thing. He’s a mature writer and gifted author, but I don’t have a competing hypothesis right now.
  
  I do blame the showrunners for deliberately turning out an absolute piece of crap just to finish the thing even after being offered additional seasons by HBO. It was the worst example of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen.
This. Exactly this.
If you watch, binge, all seasons se08 becomes more logical. There are small markers all over the series predicting it all. I didn't pickup those at first (weekly) watch.

I say more logical, not logical.

Se01-se06 are still TV magic. Se07 (dany's attack on the lannister convoy comes to mind) still is good and se08 just speed runs everything.

I still think that was their only true mistake: speed running the season. It gave us everything we wanted. But in such a way nobody could enjoy it all. Jaime finally becoming true good only to return to his true love? (some very powerful acting there) Check. The long night? Check. End of the night king? Check. Ice dragon? Check. Arya voyage finally given meaning? Check. Jorahs redemption? Check. Cleganebowl? Check. Cersei dies? Check. Return of the mad ~~king~~ queen? Check. Theon's redemption? Check. Destruction of kings landing? Check. Etc etc etc. It ticks all the boxes and more you didn't even know they existed. It's just that it ticks them in such an insane speed which results in gaps in the storytelling. Gaps of which some are filled if you binge it all but most will not.

Se08 had to be 2 seasons. Season 8, ending with the long night, se09, the fall of the red keep.

Yes, the 2nd dragon had to die for the sake of the story. Missandei had to die to cement Cersei being the baddest cruel bitch and complete dany's arc to insanity. But like this? That was stuff for an entire episode. Not the final three minutes of one.
- You listed a lot of things that were foreshadowed largely in the books. I felt that the dialogue just about immediately fell off as soon as they ran out of book. Everyone felt very much on their own "tracks" and did not veer past that starting immediately with how they dealt with Jon just...coming back at the start of the season. Characters started teleporting wherever they needed to be, and episodes started feeling a lot more like a poor combination of big budget action scenes and desperate attempts to connect those by having two characters talk at each other alone in a room.
  
  I feel like Jaime's failed redemption arc was missing something (maybe a couple books worth of further development and foreshadowing?) and the whole Bran debacle felt like it was really supposed to be something and they just "kind of forgot" to ever actually set it up.
  
  I think there are some good reasons GRRM has had such trouble finishing the series and the show runners just never even noticed and steamrolled straight to the end.
- It’s a beast to wrap up and hit all those notes and do it before the heat death of the universe. That’s why we haven’t gotten a book in a decade, and likely never will again.
  
  The hubris to think you can do it in eight episodes of television? Unimaginable.

Return Of The Jedi: All their optimism for restoring the republic, Luke restoring the Jedi, Han and Leia starting a family. All made pointless by the crappy sequels.

Like the victories of WW1 all made pointless by WW2.
- From what I've seen, the political landscape that precipitated the start of WWI didn't resolve when it ended. WWII was really just the continuation of WWI after a long pause.
- Damn, now if only we were talking about History instead of a fictional series about themes like sacrifice and character archetypes like "chosen ones."

The Land Before Time. They're still all going to get hit with a meteor

Well, yeah, but so are we. If we're lucky enough to last so long.

On a slight tangent, how come in the Mad Max movies (not the first one) the ‘societies’ he encounters seem to be the products of multi-generational effort, especially Fury Road.

In the first one, there’s a more or less functional world almost as we know it. Then he goes out into the deserts and it’s like 100 years passes.

Max is not just one guy. He is an amalgamation of road warriors remembered in legends by the post-apocalyptic societies they helped
- I feel like that's the official answer that they came up with to explain the differences in the settings between the films. It works, but only because there was a problem for it to fix.
- That's one way to interpret it, but I don't think the movies ever actually tell us that. The game certainly suggests something else entirely.
That bothered me too. I binged them all before Fury Road and it was a real whiplash to go from "All the houses are smashed up, there's bits of siding everywhere and everyone has guns" to "These people live their whole lives on stilts in a fetid swamp like some sort of crazy flamingo men, but that doesn't matter right now, keep driving". It seems like more time would have to pass.
Then he goes out into the deserts and it’s like 100 years passes.

It's like Arizona, only in reverse!
Two things here explain this for me. One someone already mentioned I don't believe Max is one person I think he is a legendary figure that gets merged into one person as people talk about their local heroes. The other is I always viewed the first movie as one of the holdouts of old civilization. For whatever reason that region had the resources to be in a more normal state for longer. When Max fucks off into the desert he's going deeper into areas that are more desperate and have been hit harder by everything. We don't know the full landscape of everything. The bat shit stuff we seen in later movies could be relatively isolated even but the society that does remain could be more like city states that dont have the power to go in and control the wild areas.
Max is a pseudo-mythological figure. It's never clear in the movies how much time has passed. Word of writers says that he's multiple people retold as one person in retrospective story, but the movies don't show that so you can take or leave it. The game has him as an immortal doomed soul.

Whatever is the case, I think it's pretty clear we're not supposed to take the story we're told about Max via the movies as told completely faithfully.
- Heh heh… I wasn’t suggesting it was a documentary.

Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Fallout 3

The "good" ending as a reward for doing everything right is basically suicide for the greater good.

Even if you have a specific NPC follower who can do the same thing unharmed, the epilogue text and voice-over basically calls you a coward for making the rational choice to have him do it and pretends that it killed him even though, as established, it doesn't harm him at all.

The DLCs take a little sting out of it.
- Yeah, those are a LOT better than the main campaign! There's some great quest mods too 🙂
I remember my mutant compagnion telling me it wasn't his destiny to do it
- Maybe that's one of the many things fixed in Tale of Two Wastelands.
  
  I remember ages ago when I first played it, there was no other benevolent option, but I didn't have Fawkes with me back then as I'd failed part of his quest.
  
  Earlier this year, I did a ToTW replay of 3 and NV where I brought him with me and was able to have him go in there, thus saving my character but being branded a coward in the epilogue lol

Title gore

Also fun fact! This is Lemmy! We can edit post titles!

Snowpiercer: Sure, there’s some evidence the world is warming, but at current there are two people, a bear, and no real shelter other than a rapidly cooling train. Just how long do they expect to survive?

The Graduate: Ends with the famous fading smile. Sure, you ran off together… now what?

Morbius: The central conflict of the movie is that the vampires who drink real blood go feral but are more powerful, and those who drink artificial blood are weaker but in control. Morbius is under time pressure because the artificial blood is becoming less and less effective, so he’ll eventually have to drink the red blood or die. He got a temporary victory killing Matt Smith, but due to the incompetence of the studio the actual real conflict of the movie is never actually resolved.

I always interpreted Snowpiercer (the movie) as being somewhat ambiguous about whether there were other people. We only have the word of people we already know are authoritarians that lie to keep order.
- And the presence of a large carnivore at the end implies the food chain is healthy all the way down.

The Good Place is one of the best shows ever but in the end they basically just re-invent mortality. In the real world you die and we don't know what happens, in the fiction at the end of the show you die and then spend some time aligning yourself to the standard the main characters set, and when you eventually align with their morals for long enough you either stick around and atrophy until you're a forgetful idiot or you....die, and we don't know what happens.

The viewers of the show see bits of Eleanor falling to Earth and inspiring people but the characters do not know what happens.

If you want to get deeper, Michael the demon is granted mortality which means it can be done, it is shown as a special exception but over the course of infinite time either all demons will earn special exceptions and humans will eventually die and be unable to progress through the afterlife because there are no demons left to guide them through, or that doesn't happen in which case humanity will die out first and the demons will be left with nothing to do for eternity because all humans will eventually work through the system and disappear.

Hard disagree. The ending for that show makes total sense.

In Small Soldiers, the whole problem starts when a corporation being lazy and and lacking any regulation puts military grade AI chips in a bunch of children's toys. In the end, the CEO flies in on a helicopter, writes everyone a check for their silence, and fucks off scot-free.

Starship Troopers. The bugs weren't actually aggressors, and the big one they caught at the end was just scared and sort of cute.

The main character started as a neutral, somewhat open minded guy and ended up a heartless war machine who drank the fascist kool aid and helped recruit new soldiers for their unjust causes.

Well, thats the point of the movie. To show how militarism and xenophobia lead to fascism and how it just destroys people and their lifes

The ending of 'Inception' is the big hol-up moment. It kind of happy, but we're not getting the answer how real it is.

The ending of 'The Sopranos' is very 'happy-not-happy'. Despite speculations

spoiler

did was Tony killed or not
:::. I mean, he is main character, and still he is a mafia boss, so could there be really good ending?

I also think that the happy ending of the 'E.T.' not happy at all. Even if federal government would be good to them, how would those children live their normal lives after all those events?

The ending of Makoto Shinkai's 'Weathering with you' is kinda happy but for real is definitely not. The main couple is together but the price of it is Tokyo drowned.

Inception: the end is real. His totem wasn’t the top like we were led to believe, it’s his wedding ring. He’s only wearing it in dreams and doesn’t have it on when he sees his kids.
Wasn't it in the end of Inception that the wheel or whatever wobbles which meant that they're still in a dream? I feel like I remember thinking that the ending isn't real due to it.
- It is delibirately left ambiguous/unclear whether it is still a dream I think.
- AFAIK it symbolises him choosing to live the dream and surrendering his token, instead of waking up to the harsh reality.
- No, if anything the way you can tell you are in a dream is because the top spins forever and never starts wobbling; the way he got his wife to eventually concede that she was in a dream was by setting the top in a perpetual spin so that she stumbled upon it still spinning.
  
  The significance of the ending is not that he is still in a dream but that he is so content with the situation that he stops caring whether he is in a dream or not. (Actually, in fairness that is not quite true either; I've heard that basically the ending is more Nolan trolling the audience than anything of narrative significance.)
- Exactly but I think it’s opposite. The top kept spinning, seemingly endlessly, which wouldn’t happen in real life.
- I've never heard that take before, cool! I've always loved the final cut in inception, because I felt that I just had to choose to believe that it was a happy ending. I also like the interpretation that by the end he no longer cares whether he is in a dream or not. But I just really want to believe that the top is actually about to fall when the last scene cuts.

The Cat from Outer Space.

Poor cat with superior intelligence now stuck on this planet with us humans.

It's been about 30 years, but didn't he get himself a nice dumb girlfriend cat? Maybe he was one of the idiots on his cat planet and now he's just happier not being low tier.
- I didn’t consider that maybe he was low tier and it was a status upgrade for him. I’ll take it.
The vast majority of Earther cats believe themselves to be stuck in this quandary.
- Probably, but at least they also believe they are gods here.

Children of Men.

It's implied that these scientists can cure the infertility crisis, but the best case scenario is the mother and baby are going to be experimented on invasively.

Worst case scenario is the mother, and all future offspring turn into full time baby-makers.

Fury Road isn't that bad an ending. Water flows, but we don't know how much of a shortage there is nor if will be that much of a problem. This can also be a political thing for Furiosa to gain the good will of the populace before instituting a better rationing system.

But yeah, the end of Logan's Run is far worse. You have a people who have lived in an authoritarian society where most things are provided for to being forced to requiring free agency in order to live in a frontier like setting they aren't used to. Most of the people are going to die.

Samurai Commando Mission 1549 (spoilers for an obscure movie follow)

The Japanese self defence force gets sent back in time to defend the future from the japanese self-defense force sent earlier back in time who is trying to derail history for... no reason really. This is apparently destroying time itself by altering history!

They stop them by blowing up a bunch of stuff and leaving tons of modern tech (including a nuclear weapon, helicopters, tanks, tons of automatic weapons, and an entire oil refinery) in feudal Japan. The movie suddenly ends on a freeze-frame with characters smiling, but none of these issues addressed, which I always understood to mean that they failed and time was destroyed, leaving them forever frozen in that moment.

The movie was unexpectedly hilarious overall. The guy that hosts Iron Chef is in that movie, and is the best character.

Japan has a word which I forget, but it means "Furry Bad End", which refers to any "Happy" ending where a cool animal character turns back into a boring human; e.g. Beauty and the Beast.