So there’s this story.
This work of fanfiction (though I mean that in the loosest sense, because it’s AU and the characters it’s based on serve more as purely physical models than they do personality templates), and it’s massive and epic and has taken nearly a year to be completely posted.
But as of a couple weeks ago, completely posted it was.
I am not going to name it here, but some readers may know or figure out what I’m talking about, and how do you warn for spoilers when you’re not even naming a particular fanwork?
Oh well… weird pseudo-spoiler warning provided… sort of.
Still with me?
Right, so this story, which is basically an evocative, sexy, glorious historical novel in its own right, is beautifully written and made me love and care about these characters and—sometimes rather obsessively—check to see if new chapters were up.
And then the ending came along and soured my enjoyment to a painful degree.
Now, I can be as satisfyingly heart-wrenched by an unhappy ending as anyone else. I’ve written a few unhappily ever afters myself, and the story in question is the tale of a gay male couple in love at a time and place where gay male couples couldn’t really be openly in love, so the makings of tragedy were there from the get-go. But this ending tragedy (in which… here are the spoilers… our heroes never get to live their lives together and one of them dies unexpectedly, leaving the other old and alone without a chance to say goodbye) was the worst kind of disappointment, and is making me think about how tragic endings (or perhaps even Tragick Endings) are a knife-edge type deal.
Just the right amount of tragedy or a set of convincing and well-thought-out reasons why things come out badly in the end, and you’ve got a story that sticks in the reader’s mind and tugs just right at the heartstrings. But too much and/or needless tragedy, and you leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth.
The kicker with this story is that it seemed to be leading to a satisfying happy end. It had plot devices cleverly in place that were foreshadowing a happier eventuality (the one I really honestly thought was going to happen) and it’s written in the style of novels like Georgette Heyer’s or Jane Austen’s, in which, to borrow an apt quote from Becoming Jane, the ‘characters will have, after a little bit of trouble, all that they desire’. And instead, in the very last chapters posted, in one fell swoop, the story turned into a bald, cruel look at how people in similar situations were indeed forced to live and die without happiness, or with only snatched bits of happiness amid lives of subterfuge and deceit.
I know at least one other fannish friend gave up on this story a good long while back out of sadness at this state of affairs. I, caught up in the romance and the beautiful writing and the obvious labor of love that this story was, blithely read on, convinced that I was reading toward a happy (or, at least, a happy-as-is-possible) ending. And some may see the ending as it is as just that.
I, however, cried. Not in a stoic, Single Perfect Tear kind of way. And not in a hyperbolic OMG YR STORY MADE ME CRYYYYYY!!!!!!1 kind of way. No, like tears pouring down my cheeks in shock and sorrow for the death of one fictional character and the loneliness of the other.
And now, whenever I think about the story, despite the 150,000 + words of delightfully twisting plot and nuanced emotional scenes and juicy encounters, I will think about the horrible sadness of the ending and be unable to enjoy earlier bits without remembering what is to come.
In the end, though I freely admit this is one of the more impressive, amazing fanworks I’ve ever seen, I won’t read this story again. And that, to me, is the mark of an Unsuccessful Tragick Ending.
Anyone want to come to the defence of Tragedy? Or of this particular tragedy? Or join in on what I’m hoping will be a sort of catharsis to dispel my blues? As always, feel free.
