#this reblog brought to you by the call my agent finale
I have this theory that I call my Golden Ratio Theory. The theory states that there is some golden ratio of angst to end-happiness that you must hit in order to have your audience truly believe in the happy ending and find it satisfying. I do not have any precise mathematical formula in mind, I just know that, proportionately, the more angst in the overall narrative, the longer the happy coda at the end has to be to convince the audience that the ending actually will stay happy.
Because, the more angst you’ve had through the length of your narrative, the more you’ve conditioned your audience not to trust happiness, to believe that it only lasts for fleeting moments before being yanked away again. If that’s the pattern you have established in your narrative, why would you expect your audience to accept a tacked-on happy ending? Your audience has been primed to mistrust that, to wait for the other shoe to drop. Knowing that it’s the ending doesn’t shift the subjective feeling of anxiety and nervousness at the happiness that’s reared its head.
This is why television series finales are so often so incredibly unsatisfying. Television series are very long-form angsty narratives. Because of the rules of television storytelling, no one is happy for anything more than a few breaths at a time, because more story must quickly be flung at them to keep the viewer engaged. Television writers tend to keep telling their angsty narrative up until the final five minutes of the whole show, and then they’ll slam a happy ending in there and be like, “Ta-da! They lived happily every after!”
But the thing is: You don’t feel that, and no wonder, because they never lived happily ever after before, so why should they live happily ever after now? I sometimes see people disdain happy endings as feeling fake or contrived, but this is often what the problem is: the writer not recognizing the Golden Ratio that governs how persuasive a happy ending is to the audience. A five-minute happy ending does feel fake and contrived, and then that gets understood somehow as “all happy endings are fake and contrived,” instead of recognizing that a happy ending is actually really hard to write correctly, not that happy endings are intrinsically bad forms of storytelling.
So. Golden Ratio theory. You know who violates this theory? Hallmark Christmas movies. You know how the couple never kisses until the last scene? You know how you never leave a Hallmark Christmas movie really shipping the couple? How could you? You know nothing about how they function as a couple. I have nothing against Hallmark Christmas movies – we watch a lot of them – but the happy ending of a romantic story is usually not the first kiss, or the moment when they get together. Think about Bridget Jones’s Diary, which is a book and movie I truly love, but like, hahaha, at the end of either, did you have great confidence that Bridget wasn’t going to mess everything up with Mark?????
Now, some stories are perfectly fine with a quick happy ending because there hasn’t been much angst beforehand, because you’ve already laid the foundation for the happy ending so thoroughly that it makes sense to the audience. I feel like maybe Pride & Prejudice is a story that ends fairly quickly after they get together but there is so much carefully laid-out character development that I think convinces you Elizabeth and Darcy will be okay (as opposed to Bridget Jones, which, although retelling P&P, is also telling a very different story).
I think about a story like, say, “You’re the Culmination of Everything I’ve Never Had.” I could have ended that story when Patrick shows up and sings “Deep Blue Love” to Pete. But they’d been through so much that I think it would have felt unsatisfying. How did you really know that they wouldn’t find more incredibly harsh words to shout at each other? So everything after that I considered fulfillment of the Golden Ratio: You needed to see them in a cozy Chicago apartment writing music together, you needed to see Pete cuddling a small, dark-haired boy. And then you hit the end and you’re hopefully smiling, thinking, They’ll be totally okay.
I am biased, because I love to write the Golden Ratio bits. That coda to “Culmination” is my favorite part of the whole fic. But I think also that those bits mean more than might be realized during first-read. Whenever I walk away from a story feeling dissatisfied, even though it had a theoretically happy ending, the problem is almost always one of Golden Ratio. And luckily, that is something many of us are primed to correct in fandom. Why so much curtainfic? We’re constantly trying to Golden-Ratio happiness out of our angsty canons. Sometimes, it takes hundreds of thousands of words to make you think, Okay, they’ll make it. And then you’re ready to hear The End.
