In Praise of Tragedy
Dec. 19th, 2004 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakDisclaimer 1: contrary to rumour, I am not a complete angst addict. I do get happy endings. Truly I do. It all depends on the show/book/film/narrative in question. I thought the ending of ST: TNG was perfect for the optimistic show it was, for example. And I liked it.
Disclaimer 2: I don't think "dark" or "tragic" is always the better option, either. Or inherently superior in quality. There are a lot of crappy tragedies around (although most are only known to theatre historians), and in fannish terms, there is just as much bad darkfic as there is bad fluff.
Disclaimer 3: As some lj friends are currently watching/reading several stories referenced here, I hid the most glaring spoilers behind cuts.
This being said, let's embark on…..
I never promised you a rose garden: In Defense of Tragic Endings
Discussions with various lj friends - some of which take very different positions on the matter - about various endings of storylines or entire shows have me assemble some thoughts on just why, while crying my heart out, I love Londo's storyarc culminating in season 5 with The Fall of Centauri Prime, instead of waving him off having a comfortable drink (and who knows what else) with G'Kar in season 4's Rising Star; why I adore the infamous bloody finale of Blake's 7 and would not have wanted the show to end with the dark but somewhat more optimistic Terminal of season 3; why I'm never even tempted to go into denial about Morpheus' fate in The Sandman, and thought that the Cardassia storyarc on DS9, with Damar dying and Garak being left with a desolate and bitter homecoming, presiding over his beloved planet in ruins, was an excellent idea.
It all comes down to expectations we have of fiction. Which of course differ from person to person. The famous exchange between Giles and Buffy in early season 2 about the good always being good and getting happy endings, while the bad are total black hats and getting punished (a principle Giles gently parodies and Buffy rejects along with her earlier optimism through her final word, "Liar"), sums up what is certainly a widespread attitude. (Today, not necessarily in the past. While villains got duly punished in Elizabethan theatre, for example, the good guys usually ended up bereft or dead as well if it was a tragedy.) But hardly the only attitude around, at least not in genre circles; any given rant about "the fake happy endings" of movie X or show Y is proof of that.
In my own case, I suppose I want an ending appropriate to the logic, both emotional and rational, of the narrative, and to the impact the characters' earlier actions had on me. Not to go again into what I explained at length in my Londo essay, but Londo Mollari is a tragic character precisely because he knew what he was doing and because he had a choice about doing it. If B5 had ended with season 4, we would have been left with the impression that he got away with his past crimes without even a real apology to G'Kar. (The heartfelt monologue in No Surrender, No Retreat is pointedly not quite an apology.) And without the self-realization that was to come, or an active act of penance. That might happen a lot in real life, but it does not make for satisfying fiction.
Moving over to my other space station, we have the Cardassians and Cardassia. Now as opposed to Londo (or Dukat), we don't know exactly what Garak did - that is a part of his mystery that never remains solved - but we do know something. He was a spy, and not one living in a James Bond world (one of the reasons for Our Man Bashir being so witty). He worked for what was clearly a fascist state. He committed assassinations for this state. He interrogated and tortured people on a regular basis. (Yes, you can take hints from the scenes with Tain and go the fanfic route of blaming it all on Daddy, but he still did it.) He also tried to comitt genocide during the course of the show. As for Cardassia in general, the sixty years of occupation of Bajor looms as large over the DS9 narrative as the century of the Centauri occupation of Narn looms over the B5 one. We even have the somewhat similar irony of Kira, ex-Bajoran resistance fighter, becoming crucial for the liberation of Cardassia and (her last scenes excepted) ending her storyline there with Garak and Damar, as G'Kar, ex-Narn resistance fighter, his last scenes excepted ends his storyline on Centauri Prime with Londo.
If Garak and Damar had managed to liberate Cardassia at the cost of some dead resistance fighters and Jem'Ha'Dar, but in essentially the same shape it was before the Dominion arrived; if Garak had gotten an triumphant return after his years of exile and Damar the job as whatever the next head of state on Cardassia will be called, I would have been happy for them, and for Cardassia. The Cardassians are my second favorite race on DS9, and I love them more than I love the Bajorans, just for the record. But I still would not have felt that this was the "right" ending. The ending we did get, with Cardassia free but in ruins and millions of Cardassians dead, Damar having died in battle and Garak being left with it all, was bitter, sad and tragic. But fitting for his character, and the story. (Though I do hope that Bashir decides that a running a hospital on Cardassia is clearly the thing to do and hurries to help with its reconstruction soon after the show is over; I don't see the novels as canon.) It had an emotional impact on me that the happy ending would not have had.
Now, a tragic ending does not have to mean a bloody one. Obviously, Londo and Garak do not die (though in Londo's case we know how and when he eventually will die). As they weren't the leading men of their particular shows, their individual storyarcs were also accompied with other storylines that did end happily (more or less). So you can say that the overall sagas of Babylon 5 or DS9 are not tragedies; individual aspects of them are. How about Blake's 7, though, aka The One Where Everyone Dies?
B7 is very interesting for many reasons, not least because the ending, in retrospect, seems inevitable (imo, as always), yet this definitely wasn't a show with long-term planning. You have personal arcs there, but they developed as a work-in-progress. So many factors could have given us a different story - if Gareth Thomas had not left as a regular after the second season, for example. If there had not been a fourth season. Heck, if there had not been a third, or even a second. I doubt the fanfic written after a hypothetical B7 got cancelled early on would have predicted Blake. It certainly wouldn't have predicted Orbit. (One of the more famous B7 fanfics written during the second season, The Haunting of Haderon, has Avon act exactly the other way he will in Orbit and go to great lengths to save Vila's life instead of ditching Vila which could have saved his own.) Yet I think what was clear about B7 even from the start was that this was a dystopia. This wasn't a Star Wars kind of narrative, where of course the rebels would defeat the Empire for good one day. It was more optimistic than Orwell's 1984 since it positions - and that remains constant even in the final episode - that the human impulse to strive for freedom, to rebel will never die. But a B7 ending with a victory celebration of the rebels would have rung impossible from the start.
A B7 ending with them all escaping with their lives and little else is viable; I like Terminal as an episode. But then it would have felt unfinished; with dangling threads everywhere. Cancelled, in a word. The Blake ending, otoh, was not just finite because they all died, but because it pushed several themes that had developed during the course of the show to their logical and ultimate extreme. Avon's obsession with Blake. Avon's paranoia. Blake's paranoia and increasing willingness to be ruthless for the cause. The way the two circled around each other. The totalitarian society finally managing to get Our Heroes not because some evil mastermind is on the case - Servalan is absent for this final episode - but because it is so all-encompassing, which goes right back to the pilot of the show. (I remember how shocked I was back then at the casual execution of Blake's lawyer and his wife.) And says something about totalitarianism that a hero vs villain showdown would not have. So - Blake feels like the perfect B7 ending to me.
In Neil Gaiman's Sandman, as with B5 and DS9, you have multiple storyarcs going on, but as opposed to the other two examples, here it's the arc of the leading character which is, to my mind, yet another example of tragic inevitability. Summed up, in a way, by Lucien in reply to Matthew's "Why?" question in The Wake: life is change, and there was a limit to which Morpheus would let himself change. But it's more than that. Any tragic hero has to be partly responsible for his ending through his own flaws, and Morpheus certainly was. It's his vengefulness and pride - established in the very first volume of the saga - that caused him to sent Nada to hell for thousands of years, which in turn caused the effort to retrieve her later (with all results that brought with it, including Loki). It's said fatal combination that made him turn his back, literary, on his son Orpheus when he still could have helped him, and having to grant Orpheus wish at last, again millennia later, was what broke him emotionally. Pride and lack of pity caused the treatment of Lyta Hall, though at that point presumably it might already have been too late for Morpheus, which set Lyta on her path. It was, finally, the inability to let go. Throughout the story, we get presented with alternatives, notably in the form of Lucifer and Destruction, both of whom can do what Morpheus never manages - they quit. But Morpheus is Dream, and unable to define himself in any other way. (As opposed to both of these gentlemen, err, antromorphic personifications, who try constantly to reinvent themselves.) Given all of this, is was inevitable that Morpheus' story would end in a tragedy.
Not Dream's story, though, and here Gaiman can use the nature of the Endless he created to tell both a tragedy and an epic culminating in renewal and rebirth. Lyta as the personification of the Furies, of fate finally catching up without pity or mercy is the instrument galvanizing Morpheus' death, but she's also the mother of Daniel, and when Daniel becomes Dream upon Morpheus' passing, he is able to do what tragic heroes can't - to break the cycle of fate. He can forgive Lyta, he can forgive Alex Burgess, and he can allow himself to change. Of all the tragic endings I'm in love with, the one of Sandman is paradoxically enough the one that exudes more persuasive hope and peace than many a happy ending of other stories. As Aristotle put it so many years ago - tragedy achieves a catharsis.
And in the right story, a catharsis is good to have.
Disclaimer 2: I don't think "dark" or "tragic" is always the better option, either. Or inherently superior in quality. There are a lot of crappy tragedies around (although most are only known to theatre historians), and in fannish terms, there is just as much bad darkfic as there is bad fluff.
Disclaimer 3: As some lj friends are currently watching/reading several stories referenced here, I hid the most glaring spoilers behind cuts.
This being said, let's embark on…..
I never promised you a rose garden: In Defense of Tragic Endings
Discussions with various lj friends - some of which take very different positions on the matter - about various endings of storylines or entire shows have me assemble some thoughts on just why, while crying my heart out, I love Londo's storyarc culminating in season 5 with The Fall of Centauri Prime, instead of waving him off having a comfortable drink (and who knows what else) with G'Kar in season 4's Rising Star; why I adore the infamous bloody finale of Blake's 7 and would not have wanted the show to end with the dark but somewhat more optimistic Terminal of season 3; why I'm never even tempted to go into denial about Morpheus' fate in The Sandman, and thought that the Cardassia storyarc on DS9, with Damar dying and Garak being left with a desolate and bitter homecoming, presiding over his beloved planet in ruins, was an excellent idea.
It all comes down to expectations we have of fiction. Which of course differ from person to person. The famous exchange between Giles and Buffy in early season 2 about the good always being good and getting happy endings, while the bad are total black hats and getting punished (a principle Giles gently parodies and Buffy rejects along with her earlier optimism through her final word, "Liar"), sums up what is certainly a widespread attitude. (Today, not necessarily in the past. While villains got duly punished in Elizabethan theatre, for example, the good guys usually ended up bereft or dead as well if it was a tragedy.) But hardly the only attitude around, at least not in genre circles; any given rant about "the fake happy endings" of movie X or show Y is proof of that.
In my own case, I suppose I want an ending appropriate to the logic, both emotional and rational, of the narrative, and to the impact the characters' earlier actions had on me. Not to go again into what I explained at length in my Londo essay, but Londo Mollari is a tragic character precisely because he knew what he was doing and because he had a choice about doing it. If B5 had ended with season 4, we would have been left with the impression that he got away with his past crimes without even a real apology to G'Kar. (The heartfelt monologue in No Surrender, No Retreat is pointedly not quite an apology.) And without the self-realization that was to come, or an active act of penance. That might happen a lot in real life, but it does not make for satisfying fiction.
Moving over to my other space station, we have the Cardassians and Cardassia. Now as opposed to Londo (or Dukat), we don't know exactly what Garak did - that is a part of his mystery that never remains solved - but we do know something. He was a spy, and not one living in a James Bond world (one of the reasons for Our Man Bashir being so witty). He worked for what was clearly a fascist state. He committed assassinations for this state. He interrogated and tortured people on a regular basis. (Yes, you can take hints from the scenes with Tain and go the fanfic route of blaming it all on Daddy, but he still did it.) He also tried to comitt genocide during the course of the show. As for Cardassia in general, the sixty years of occupation of Bajor looms as large over the DS9 narrative as the century of the Centauri occupation of Narn looms over the B5 one. We even have the somewhat similar irony of Kira, ex-Bajoran resistance fighter, becoming crucial for the liberation of Cardassia and (her last scenes excepted) ending her storyline there with Garak and Damar, as G'Kar, ex-Narn resistance fighter, his last scenes excepted ends his storyline on Centauri Prime with Londo.
If Garak and Damar had managed to liberate Cardassia at the cost of some dead resistance fighters and Jem'Ha'Dar, but in essentially the same shape it was before the Dominion arrived; if Garak had gotten an triumphant return after his years of exile and Damar the job as whatever the next head of state on Cardassia will be called, I would have been happy for them, and for Cardassia. The Cardassians are my second favorite race on DS9, and I love them more than I love the Bajorans, just for the record. But I still would not have felt that this was the "right" ending. The ending we did get, with Cardassia free but in ruins and millions of Cardassians dead, Damar having died in battle and Garak being left with it all, was bitter, sad and tragic. But fitting for his character, and the story. (Though I do hope that Bashir decides that a running a hospital on Cardassia is clearly the thing to do and hurries to help with its reconstruction soon after the show is over; I don't see the novels as canon.) It had an emotional impact on me that the happy ending would not have had.
Now, a tragic ending does not have to mean a bloody one. Obviously, Londo and Garak do not die (though in Londo's case we know how and when he eventually will die). As they weren't the leading men of their particular shows, their individual storyarcs were also accompied with other storylines that did end happily (more or less). So you can say that the overall sagas of Babylon 5 or DS9 are not tragedies; individual aspects of them are. How about Blake's 7, though, aka The One Where Everyone Dies?
B7 is very interesting for many reasons, not least because the ending, in retrospect, seems inevitable (imo, as always), yet this definitely wasn't a show with long-term planning. You have personal arcs there, but they developed as a work-in-progress. So many factors could have given us a different story - if Gareth Thomas had not left as a regular after the second season, for example. If there had not been a fourth season. Heck, if there had not been a third, or even a second. I doubt the fanfic written after a hypothetical B7 got cancelled early on would have predicted Blake. It certainly wouldn't have predicted Orbit. (One of the more famous B7 fanfics written during the second season, The Haunting of Haderon, has Avon act exactly the other way he will in Orbit and go to great lengths to save Vila's life instead of ditching Vila which could have saved his own.) Yet I think what was clear about B7 even from the start was that this was a dystopia. This wasn't a Star Wars kind of narrative, where of course the rebels would defeat the Empire for good one day. It was more optimistic than Orwell's 1984 since it positions - and that remains constant even in the final episode - that the human impulse to strive for freedom, to rebel will never die. But a B7 ending with a victory celebration of the rebels would have rung impossible from the start.
A B7 ending with them all escaping with their lives and little else is viable; I like Terminal as an episode. But then it would have felt unfinished; with dangling threads everywhere. Cancelled, in a word. The Blake ending, otoh, was not just finite because they all died, but because it pushed several themes that had developed during the course of the show to their logical and ultimate extreme. Avon's obsession with Blake. Avon's paranoia. Blake's paranoia and increasing willingness to be ruthless for the cause. The way the two circled around each other. The totalitarian society finally managing to get Our Heroes not because some evil mastermind is on the case - Servalan is absent for this final episode - but because it is so all-encompassing, which goes right back to the pilot of the show. (I remember how shocked I was back then at the casual execution of Blake's lawyer and his wife.) And says something about totalitarianism that a hero vs villain showdown would not have. So - Blake feels like the perfect B7 ending to me.
In Neil Gaiman's Sandman, as with B5 and DS9, you have multiple storyarcs going on, but as opposed to the other two examples, here it's the arc of the leading character which is, to my mind, yet another example of tragic inevitability. Summed up, in a way, by Lucien in reply to Matthew's "Why?" question in The Wake: life is change, and there was a limit to which Morpheus would let himself change. But it's more than that. Any tragic hero has to be partly responsible for his ending through his own flaws, and Morpheus certainly was. It's his vengefulness and pride - established in the very first volume of the saga - that caused him to sent Nada to hell for thousands of years, which in turn caused the effort to retrieve her later (with all results that brought with it, including Loki). It's said fatal combination that made him turn his back, literary, on his son Orpheus when he still could have helped him, and having to grant Orpheus wish at last, again millennia later, was what broke him emotionally. Pride and lack of pity caused the treatment of Lyta Hall, though at that point presumably it might already have been too late for Morpheus, which set Lyta on her path. It was, finally, the inability to let go. Throughout the story, we get presented with alternatives, notably in the form of Lucifer and Destruction, both of whom can do what Morpheus never manages - they quit. But Morpheus is Dream, and unable to define himself in any other way. (As opposed to both of these gentlemen, err, antromorphic personifications, who try constantly to reinvent themselves.) Given all of this, is was inevitable that Morpheus' story would end in a tragedy.
Not Dream's story, though, and here Gaiman can use the nature of the Endless he created to tell both a tragedy and an epic culminating in renewal and rebirth. Lyta as the personification of the Furies, of fate finally catching up without pity or mercy is the instrument galvanizing Morpheus' death, but she's also the mother of Daniel, and when Daniel becomes Dream upon Morpheus' passing, he is able to do what tragic heroes can't - to break the cycle of fate. He can forgive Lyta, he can forgive Alex Burgess, and he can allow himself to change. Of all the tragic endings I'm in love with, the one of Sandman is paradoxically enough the one that exudes more persuasive hope and peace than many a happy ending of other stories. As Aristotle put it so many years ago - tragedy achieves a catharsis.
And in the right story, a catharsis is good to have.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 01:08 pm (UTC)He. We're easy to spot, it's true.*g* Do tell, though, what you think ought to have happened at teh end of DS9. My only big problem with the finale are the fisticuffs between Sisko and Dukat. Otherwise, I'm dandy with it - Cardassia, Winn's tragedy, and the Odo/Kira parting which paid off the relationship.
And then if the author suddenly manages to turn on what we used to call a sixpence and retrieve it - the happy catastrophe - well, that can be pretty impressive too, as long as she avoids subverting the significance of what happened in that build-up.
I think the Farscape miniseries actually pulled that one off.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 02:13 pm (UTC)Basically, it doesn't deliver on the "sorrow" the Prophets promised to Sisko if he married Kassidy. I understand the original plan was that they would lose each other for ever, but Avery Brooks refused to have an African-American appear to desert his pregnant wife. Hey, Avery, you'd spent seven seasons establishing that Sisko was the devoted family man who adored babies, and losing his wife (again) and child-to-be would be a terrible punishment for him! OK, it's sad he's going to miss the birth, but it's hardly sufficient pay-off for the build-up.
My plan is that Kassidy is possessed by a Pagh Wraith, like Keiko, but this time there's no way to exorcise it; Sisko is placed in a position where the only way to stop it and thus save the universe is to kill his pregnant wife. So he does, as it's his duty, but goes mad, and then we jump back to the 20th-century Ben in the asylum - possibly he's killed his woman too - and all is misery, insanity, and possibly the electric chair. There is a short story I've never written in which his colleagues at the SF mag sit around and discuss the situation...
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 02:21 pm (UTC)Of course, ending the show with 20th century Benny in the asylum would probably have pissed off the fans for good. The majority not having the B7 training and all.*g*
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 03:39 pm (UTC)small note about Damar and happy ends
Date: 2004-12-19 12:12 pm (UTC)Re: small note about Damar and happy ends
Date: 2004-12-19 01:04 pm (UTC)Re: small note about Damar and happy ends
Date: 2004-12-20 08:51 am (UTC)Re: small note about Damar and happy ends
Date: 2004-12-20 09:08 pm (UTC)looks at
Re: small note about Damar and happy ends
Date: 2004-12-21 04:58 pm (UTC)Re: small note about Damar and happy ends
Date: 2004-12-21 05:33 pm (UTC)yeah... be sure!
*lol*
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 12:23 pm (UTC)Meanwhile, I admit that the Odo/Kira ending, as I grow older, is certainly growing on me with time and wisdom. Hm. Whereas the end of the Cardassian arc has always been exactly how it should have been.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 01:14 pm (UTC)Sighing along in admiration with you...
Meanwhile, I admit that the Odo/Kira ending, as I grow older, is certainly growing on me with time and wisdom. Hm.
As a firm defender of the Odo/Kira ending, I'm very gratified to hear it.*g*
Whereas the end of the Cardassian arc has always been exactly how it should have been.
Yep. It adds much to the emotional power of the story.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 01:19 pm (UTC)Morpheus' ending is my favorite so far - and there's a good chance that it will stay this way. It combines tragedy and hope in such a beautiful way...makes me all speechless everytime I think of it...and I really finally need to write my review *ashamed*.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 01:27 pm (UTC)And I'd really love to read that overall Sandman review...
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 06:26 pm (UTC)And I'd really love to read that overall Sandman review...
I'll write down my thoughts on American Gods first. It's not that I didn't love it but it didn't leave me nearly as speechless as Sandman did, so coherent thinking has been enabled again ;-).
Oh sweet holidays, only 23 hours away...
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 01:59 pm (UTC)New souls for the faith!
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 02:16 pm (UTC)I mean, my pal
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 08:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 09:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 09:06 pm (UTC)A B7 ending with them all escaping with their lives and little else is viable
I'd have accepted that. I wish they'd given me that. I like Terminal. I plan to give my survivors a relatively happy ending in my PGP, IOW somewhere safe to live, but they don't win their war.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 06:36 pm (UTC)Granted, I don't know you that well so far... but since when are you scrupulous about your fandoms and luring people into them ?
And besides, lately I've watched B5, Angel, read Sandman and am now watching Farscape...who'd notice one more trauma, anyway ?
Too true, and...
Date: 2004-12-20 06:49 pm (UTC)Excellent point.*g*
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 06:30 pm (UTC)assimilatedinterested...no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 10:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 11:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 01:09 am (UTC)Neil was very very happy with what he had done - 'I've absolutely killed Morpheus,' he chortled. 'Even if I need the money in ten or twenty years time, there is no way I can bring him back.'
'Actually,' I said,'that's not quite true.'
Neil gave me one of those looks over a fork of lamb tikka.
'The whole story is about how Morpheus, without admitting it to himself, brings about his own death and replacement, isn't it? And while Daniel is probably a better Dream, Morpheus would be bound to create an insurance policy. In case things go wrong. And you set him up with one. Obviously, since that's how you work, by the same process of not admitting what you were doing.'
Neil looked glum, because he knows me only too well.
'There is a copy of Morpheus,' I said. 'In the dreams of Hob Gadling. An Immortal. Whom Morpheus created.'
'Oh Bugger,' Neil said.
'That's what you wrote,' I said.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 06:58 am (UTC)Beyond that question, I really don't have much to add- you're pretty much preaching to the converted over here. ;)
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:19 am (UTC)No. Can't imagine what's happened to it.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 08:10 am (UTC)I'll stop rambling now, because that was one of the themes I structured my Angel/Sandman crossover (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1962559/1/) around.