Saturday, July 5, 2008

Speaking About Tragedy...

As you all know by now, I'm a huge fan of tragedies. Unfortunately, not many story writers are willing go that route.

Take the most recent example, Da Capo II Second Season. It is a series that has huge potential to end tragically. In fact, it had "tragedy" written all over it. But it didn't end it that way. As I predicted in an earlier post, something is going to happen for no reason to turn this tragic ending around just enough to end in the happy side.

I don't like that. But that's what most story writers tend to do. This is a typical happiness chart for a typical drama anime:

Happy
|
| _......_
| / \
| __/ \ _ The End
|__/ \ /
+--------......----\---------/--------------Time
| \ /
| \ /
| \___/
Sad

When the story have tragedy potential, they usually don't end the story on the tragedies. Instead, they use it as the event prior to the last one, and always manage to do something afterwards to "correct" it so the whole story ends on the "happy" side.

However, there are exceptions. Most notable ones are the stories written by Visual Arts/Key and some works done by Gonzo. They end up with a happiness chart like this:


Happy
|
| _......_
| / \
| __/ \
|__/ \
+--------......----\------------------Time
| \
| \ _The End
| \___/
Sad


Even though sometimes they still have a slight happiness recovery, the key is that they never cross the threshold and always end up on the sad side of the neutral line. This is what I prefer.

In fact, the story I would really like to see is something with a happiness chart like this:


Happy
|
| _......_
| / |
| __/ |
|__/ \
+--------......--\--------------------Time
| \
| |
| \
| \
| \
| \
| \_The End
Sad


Not only there is a high contrast between happiness and sadness, the sadness should also outweight the happiness. That is my ideal tragedy story.

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