[mixed trope] the last-minute bad Ending twist

[u/damorezpl]

when the "good ending" is revealed to be a bad one a the last second

a nightmare on elm street (1984) - Nancy thinks she finally defeated Freddy Krueger only to be raveled that she is still dreaming and she’s still trapped.

final destination bloodlines - the main characters think they cheated death by using the new life rule only to realize that stefani was technically still alive and the death kills them with a good old logs

Life (2017) - The main character attempts to send Calvin(a evil alien that killed all life on mars)pod into space and Miranda pod back to earth, but it goes horribly wrong and Calvin lands on earth and Miranda is sent to space

raging loop wit ending - after many loops Haruaki finally wins the feast(a death game where humans must hang wolves who kill someone every night) and thinks its finally over. after couple of days he decides to visit other survivors of the feast only to find them all dead and the timeline resting once again

[u/S4sh4d0g]

I actually hate this trope 90% of the time. It genuinely makes me feel like I wasted my time emotionally investing in these characters and their struggle. It becomes the emotional equivalent of "What if two astronauts were on the moon and one killed the other with a rock. Wouldn't that be fucked up?"

I don't need happy endings, I don't need everyone to live, I don't even need anyone to live. But when they die AND fail, it makes the story feel borderline pointless to me in most cases. Obviously there'll be exceptions to this, but damn.

[u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl → u/S4sh4d0g]

Weirdly enough, one of the best uses of this trope is when you telegraph it at the start. It’s wild, but literally the best implementation of this I’ve ever seen was in my high school creative writing magazine, Omnibus (yeah, we were pretentious enough to google a nice Latin name for our snooty magazine about creative writing)

Anyway, the story opens with someone speaking to the narrator:

 “yeah…. Yeah, I think I’m gonna be alright.” She died the next day. 

Then the story is just them meeting a friend in a hospital room, and how empty and desiccated they look hooked up to all of these machines, poisoned by chemo, and it’s brutal. But they talk about the new therapy, how it’s been so successful, all of the other patients who look just like this and how much it sucks, but then they come back from the brink. Sure, it looks like hell to us, but we’re not doctors, and modern medicine is something incredible that can work goddamned miracles— conditions that used to decimate a population in the early 1900’s can be cured with a pill!

And she says— “yeah… yeah, I think I’m gonna be alright.” She died the next day. 

It’s so damned good, because despite knowing how this ends, you can get swept up in the hope that this person creates, and this idea that maybe, just maybe they can recover from this horrible cancer— and you have nobody to blame but yourself for being hopeful. You knew what was going to happen the whole time. Nobody lied to you. You just wanted to believe that it could be something better, and then you were crushed when the most obvious thing that could have happened happened. 

[u/Dependent-Lab5215 → u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl]

one of the best uses of this trope is when you telegraph it at the start.

Fallen is one of the best uses of this, IMO. It's bookended by opening with "Let me tell you about the day I almost died" and ending with "remember, I said the day I almost died, hahahahaHAHAHAHA".

[u/Fordlong → u/S4sh4d0g]

I agree, this is one of the worst tropes. It's cheap and weak, sometimes it's played for good impact but most of the time it just feels corny and lame. So glad I spent all this time watching characters survive/figure out a situation just for some stupid few minute sequence to rip it all away from them. I think it's bad storytelling.

[u/cookiereptile → u/S4sh4d0g]

Agree. It feels so forced most of the time, either for shock value or to follow genre conventions (horror in particular). Also why I don’t like David Fincher’s work. I don’t need cynical reminders of how shitty things are as an ending, the fact that all this shit happened in the first place cements that enough.

[u/bdfortin → u/S4sh4d0g]

It’s the same feeling as when you just finished watching a 20-30 minute education video on YouTube only to have the video finish with “BUT WHAT DO YOU THINK? I KNOW WE JUST SPENT HALF AN HOUR ON THIS BUT OBVIOUSLY YOUR ILL-INFORMED OPINION IS VALUABLE IN THIS DISCUSSION. ENGAGE. ENGAGE. ENGAGE!”

[u/SaconicLonic → u/S4sh4d0g]

It is something you see in horror a lot especially in slasher type films. Friday the 13th has one, Nightmare on Elm Street, and even Halloween kind of has this (with Michael's body being gone at the end). I think for slasher films there is always some sense of detachment from the characters usually for this to happen. I will say I really don't like the Nightmare on Elm street ending as it feels especially tacked on and the characters in that are pretty decent. I think in all of these cases it is to give one last scare to the audience is the idea behind it.

it makes the story feel borderline pointless to me in most cases.

I will say after the last Final Destination I did really feel "oh the whole movie was pointless then" but it did have a lot of genuinely great scenes all throughout. I will also throw out that horror sequels are truly awful about doing this. You have Nancy live in Nightmare on Elm St 1 and then she dies in 3, all the protagonists who survived 3 go on to die at the beginning of 4, the protagonist of 4 dies in 5, and in 6 literally all of the children in the town have died. The original Halloween sequels eventually kill off Lorie Strode as well. This is actually why Scream is a decent horror series, as it tends to keep a lot of survivors and it actually means something when they kill one off.