Aslaug's Axe Shed

For those of you who talk to me on Skype once in a while, this won’t come as a surprise.

But I am really sick of Hollywood Happy Endings.

The incredibly good looking male hero gets the equally incredibly good looking female main character, who plays the role of barely repressed teenage-sex-symbol while popping out eighteen kids without ever growing fat, old and cranky. Everything is White Picket Fences ™ and a beautiful House and Garden home in suburbia somewhere.

If you’ll pardon my Irish for a moment, but FECK that!!

I am sick to my back teeth of that kind of ending. It gives me roughly the same kind of feeling of being sated as your average McDonalds meal. Where in Hel’s name is the emotion? The sense of struggle. The realism?

If you read my stories and not just my blog, you’ll no doubt know this too. There are few picturebook endings in my stories. Even when everything looks honky-dory on the surface, you only have to think two steps back, to realize that someone lost almost everything to get to that point. Think of AVC, think of Transitions, think of Witchhammer … there are no real Hollywood endings there. But there is emotion.

I told a colleague of mine, Lia, on the way home from work today, that “I do not believe in happy endings. I believe in realistic ones”. Why can’t the hero ever die at the end? I think that is why a movie like “V for Vendetta” still rings such a clear bell with me, because that kind of dystopia speaks to me, and sits well with me.

Why this short rant? Because of a silly, stupid reason really.

I finally, finally, after years and years and years of being a devoted video-game player … at long last, I came across a game that did it -right-. I don’t give a damned if the haters out there will try to throw me off the train for saying this, but I just finished playing through Bioware’s Mass Effect series. All of it. To the complete ending of game number 3, and finally someone got it -right-.

I know not all of you play video games, and there’s no need to. And no, I’m not about to throw out oodles of spoilers here.

I just needed to get this off my chest, because for the longest time, it has been eating away at me. Nagging at me, that apparently, one can’t write a book, make a movie, throw together a narrative of ANY damned kind, without everything ending up being the most disgustingly sticky candyfloss pink in the end. Dammit, you practically expect the Easter Bunny and the Care Bears to come dancing in across the screen, throwing flowers left, right and center while singing a happy song about shoes and candy, whenever you leave a cinema these days and it makes me feel like I need a crowbar to open my jaws at times, in situations like that. I am so … disappointed and I bite down so hard it can give me a headache, when a perfect leadup does not lead to something perfect and shiny.

It is so damned rare to see these days. The cult TV-series “Firefly” did it in the best of ways. The far more recent “Game of Thrones” does it as well. And once in a rare while, apparently, someone makes a video-game that does it as well.

What can I say …

As my dear friend Erica always keeps telling me, my life consists of coming out of one closet after another. And I guess I am out of the closet as a wholehearted dystopia-fan now as well.

Not everything needs to be gruesome and horrible. But having everything end on a high note JUST for the sake of it ending there is, in my entirely personal and humble opinion, annoying and pointless.