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If The Quest to find your lost love involves getting the wind to carry you over the sea — that's what it takes. "Seven long years I served for thee,
The glassy hill I clomb for thee,
Thy bloody clothes I wrang for thee;
And wilt thou not waken and turn to me?"
He heard, and turned to her
— The Black Bull of Norroway
Some series don't stick to one spot on the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism; rather, they end up somewhere in the middle by drawing from both extremes of the scale. Humans may act like bastards and the world may seem like it's half empty, but that doesn't mean that that the worst villain is beyond redemption, or that things can't be improved with hard work or even The Power Of Love. The forces of Good may have to go through Hell, but in the end they will Earn Their Happy Ending. May overlap with a Bittersweet Ending. (By its Golden Mean sort of nature, this is a rather Subjective Trope.)
Writing an ending like this is a balancing act: things have to be desperate enough to make it seem like the heroes could very possibly lose, but not so desperate that it seems there's no way the heroes can win. When pulled off poorly, it seems like the authors just Ass Pulled a Happy Ending. But when pulled off well...
Compare Throw The Dog A Bone.
As this is an ending trope, assume examples will be spoilertastic.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Now And Then Here And There is an extreme example. Extreme.
- Mai-HiME can be a pretty good example of this, or a good example of the attempt not working out, depending on who you talk to.
- The manga is a better example, ending with the Badass Normal Yuuichiro flying out into space and cutting a star in half with a BFS.
- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni. Thanks to its Groundhog Day Loop nature; everyone dies, repeatedly, but they ultimately make it thanks to the Power Of Friendship.
- Like wise in the sound novels, for both the player and in game characters.
- Blue Gender. Very dark, gritty, cynical, cold world after the Blue has taken over the Earth. Human life has lost all of its value and the only thing that matters is defeating the Blue, regardless of any and all cost. Even the idealistic Yugi goes insane for a few episodes before the formerly cold and cynical but now warm-hearted and caring Marlene saves him. It has a happy ending for Yugi and Marlene, as well as the other humans who live in harmony with nature.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann pits the Hot Blooded Spirals with Humongous Mecha powered by belief against against the near omnipotent Anti-Spirals whose sole purpose is to suppress Spirals by causing as much cynicism and despair as possible, since they believe (correctly) that the very existence of Spirals risks the destruction of the Universe. Guess which side wins?
- Welcome To The NHK seems to make this point. It even manages to approach it from a quasi-religious angle without seeming preachy—a rare feat, unfortunately.
- Don't know about a religious angle - the anime implies and the novel explicitly states that Misaki's quite religious (and very well-meaning) guardians didn't manage to help much with her chronic depression. The way the brief mentions of God are used are...unorthodox, to say the least.
- We're talking about a mostly non-Christian country here, so any God references are just for kicks. And Shinto's beliefs regarding gods are real different form the West, so...
- Surprisingly, Code Geass ends like this. It takes a lot of planning, however, including the protagonist taking over the entire world as an evil dictator, and his best friend, at the protagonist's insistence, publicly assassinating him. OK, the hero's ending wasn't so happy, but he did achieve his goal of breaking the cycle of international conflict and creating a gentler world for his little sister.
- Given that Lelouch's motivations all along were (a) revenge and (b) making a better world for Nunnally, never wanting anything for himself and given that he achieved both this can be considered a happy ending even for Lelouch himself.
- One wonders if Nunnally would consider it a happy ending, though...
- Macross Frontier did this as well, after
three at least five episodes of utter bleakness, kicked off with a Big Damn Heroes moment from SMS, and culminating in a nuclear disarming-of-giant-robot-via-shanking, one multi-kilometer high robot gut-punching another multi-kilometer robot, songs Saving The Day, the Vajra turning good and protecting the Frontier fleet, The Rival teaming up to take down the Big Bad, Alto blowing off the Big Bad's head with Mikael's sniper rifle, and everybody being happy happy love love on the Vajra home planet. Oh, and Everybody Lives. Even the character with the terminal disease.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha does this every season. Mood Whiplash is used like a weapon by the writers, turning some of the darkest, most painful depths of despair into happy endings where almost everyone gets a Good End. A's has the darkest ending of the entire series, and it's merely a Bittersweet Ending. The sole exceptions to this are Precia Testarossa in Season 1 and the overarching conspiracy within the TSAB and Jail Scaglietti in StrikerS. Arguably, this prevents any case of Karma Houdini that even the series' heavily grounded idealism couldn't excuse.
- The ending to the Rurouni Kenshin manga has Kenshin Happily Married to Kaoru, and having given away his sword. Kaoru has restored her school to a lot of students and is the happy mother of Kenshin's kid Kenji at the same time, Sanosuke is off to see the world, Yahiko is a famous swordsman, and Megumi goes to Aizu to practice medicine while trying to find the rest of her family. The anime on the other hand is a Downer Ending that wasn't even close to the manga's ending: Kenshin and Karou are deathly ill, he ends up amnesiac in China and along with Sano he has to go through Hell and back to return to Japan, Kaoru is barely hanging on thanks to her desire to see Kenshin one last time, and in the end Kenshin goes back home and dies in her arms, only to have her dying soon afterwards. The only bits of hope are these: Yahiko succesfully disuades Kenji from taking up the Hiten-Mitsurugi fighting style and helps him to stop hating his Disappeared Dad. Soon after, Kenji takes off with his girlfriend (who looks like a younger Kaoru) to build a new life away from Tokyo.
- Planetes waffles a bit at the beginning, then nosedives into increasingly cynical or even pessimistic territory... but idealism wins in the end, even with the terrorist characters.
- While not in full use in the series itself (since, y'know, it hasn't ended yet), Mahou Sensei Negima plays this in regards to Setsuna, a warrior who having lived her life as an outcast half-demon, found happiness in protecting Konoka as a simple bodyguard. In their childhood she failed to protect Konoka, causing her to distance herself from the girl in order to train harder and become colder, feeling that emotion was the weakness that caused her to fail. This distant relationship with Konoka was later resolved, and she become calmer and more cheerful, like her younger self. Later, in a pseudo Secret Test Of Character, Evangeline forced her to choose between which was more important: becoming a cold-hearted swordsman without limits to better serve Konoka, or remain as she was in her current happy state, while losing her sword to Evangeline in doing so. With the two ideas conflicting with one another, only being able to lose with available options, she chose to have both. Whether she'd actually be able to do this or have a happy ending at all has been a running plot-line for her ever since.
- Wolfs Rain: Everyone dies, but thanks to the good guys' sacrifices the world
doesn't end doesn't permanently end. And at least some of them get reincarnated.
- Mars has this in escalating spades, culminating in a white-knuckled, tear-jerking Grand Finale when Rei gets stabbed in the gut by recurring Depraved Bisexual Masao Kirishima, while he's on his way to the party celebrating his marriage to the girlfriend he's been through hell and resolved all of their respective Backstory trauma with. They still get to live happily ever after.
- Video Girl Ai. Multiple times.
- Saji Crossroad. Full. Bloody. Stop. The poor guy had everyone he loved taken from him, spent most of a season finding out just how much he lost, wound up as the hostage of the very people he thought were responsible for it, then nearly died at the hands of the person (and also his love rival) he was trying to return to multiple times. And only barely succeeds in getting said person ( Louise) back to sanity. If anyone in recent fiction earned the right to a happy ending, it's him.
- The Kyo Ani adaptation of Clannad had Tomoya die, so that he would be reborn as the Garbage Doll in the Illusionary World. Only then could he be given the opportunity to save Nagisa and by extension, Ushio, when the Girl in the Illusionary World/Ushio sent him back in time, prepared to prevent Nagisa's Death By Childbirth.
- Monster. Need I say more?
- Juri Katou from Digimon Tamers. Starting as a Genki Girl, then seeing her Digimon partner die, being captured by the D-Reaper and suffering through what may be weeks of Mind Rape where the viewer learns that her apparent persona was just a facade... even series creator Chiaki Konaka himself implies in his character notes that he struggled to give Juri her happy ending.
- Excel Saga ends on a very happy note. Although you could interpret that Everyone died in the explosion. But other than that chances are high that both Watanabe and Excel got their crushes and that everyone ends up friends. Oh and Pedro gets his wife and son back.
- Rah Xephon. After episode 19, tragedies keep racking up until the world is saturated in an apocalyptic crescendo... then the Power Of Love sings out. Cue symbolic surrealism followed by warm fuzzy feeling.
- The ending of Ayu's route in Kanon implies that Ayu gets better (as opposed to being dead, which was what it seemed like even to Yuuichi) precisely because he had the strength to face and accept what happened seven years ago after admitting he loved her and always would.
- Mirai Nikki: Yuno's "Yukiteru Diary" predicts that she and Yukiteru will "become one" on July 28, 20XX and get a HAPPY END. Said ending is threatened on multple occasions; it goes away when Yukiteru discovers the corpses in the sealed-off room in her hourse (but comes back after the 6th is defeated), and after the defeat of the 10th (during which Yuno tries to snatch Yukiteru away from his friends), Yukiteru warns that if she wants to win his heart and earn her happy ending, she will need to accept his friends.
- Liar Game seems to be heading this way - yes, most of the titular game's players are deceitful and desperate to come out of the game with a profit, but Nao's attempts to persuade them to unite against the LGT and share their money to keep everyone out of debt seem to be having some effect. Of course, it's too early to know to what extent this will work...
- The ending of the Maya subplot in Azumanga Daioh. Suffer the animosity of a thousand cats so you can actually own one, happy ending definitely earned.
- Princess Tutu ends with the heroine not getting the guy she spent the entire series trying to help and forced to give up the ability to be a girl forever on top of it, but in the end it's still shown that she's happy and with someone that cares for her. In fact, all of the characters are put through a lot of extreme emotional torture throughout the series (to the point that three of them threaten suicide at one point), but they all end up with a happy ending, although for some it's more bittersweet than for others.
- While the anime version of Chrono Crusade has a pretty notorious Downer Ending, the manga version fits squarely within this trope. After the end, it's shown that almost all of the characters go on to live happy, normal lives, and those that don't are working towards their own chances to earn a happy ending. Even several of the villains get an Alas Poor Villain moment at their deaths.
- Princess Mononoke.
Comic Books
- Transmetropolitan is set in a crapsack future that's not too different from our world, just more futuristic and more screwed up. When Gary Callahan becomes President of the USA, he starts to turn it into an authoritarian state. Over the course of trying to bring him down, Spider Jerusalem, the main character, starts to suffer from a seemingly incurable brain condition. In the end, however, he manages to take down Callahan, survives and ends up being among the one percent that doesn't suffer from major long-term effects of his condition, but lets everyone else believe that his brain is a mess so he can live in peace. The world is still a mess, but not really worse than it was at the beginning of the series.
Fairy Tales
- Many a fairy tale hero or heroine has found that violating the prohibition requires a long, arduous quest to reach their wife or husband again. But it's worth it.
- Heroine versions include The Black Bull of Norroway
 , The Enchanted Pig, The Brown Bear of Norway, The White Wolf, Grimms' The Singing, Springing Lark, and East of the Sun & West of the Moon
- Hero versions include The Blue Mountains, The Three Princesses of Whiteland, The Golden Apple Tree and the Nine Peahens, The Swan Maiden, and Soria Moria Castle.
Film
- The Dark Knight: Yes, there are criminals who will do almost anything for money, and unapologetic evil that cannot be bargained with, and even the Knight In Shining Armor can fall, hard. But in the end, Batman is able to apprehend the Joker without becoming the monster Joker wants him to be. And the citizens of Gotham pass Joker's "social experiment" (if only barely) by not turning on each other like he predicted.
- Enchanted. So the world isn't perfect... but hey, maybe there still is something to The Power Of Love.
- Its A Wonderful Life. The movie begins with George Bailey on the verge of suicide, and then shows everything that drove him to despair. But by the end, even though his economic situation hasn't changed (at least until the end) the realization that he is appreciated makes all the difference.
- This is one of the big draws of The Crow, other than seeing Brandon Lee give his final performance and watching him carry out his Roaring Rampage Of Revenge.
- Serenity ends with the people of Miranda avenged, River somewhere closer to sanity, and Mal having put some of his demons to rest... but only at the cost of two of his crewmembers and a lot of innocents.
- Saving Private Ryan ends its War Is Hell theme with this quite explicitly, with Captain Miller telling the eponymous private to earn it when he returns to the 'States.
- The Epilogue show him as an old man at Captain Miller's grave in France with his wife, children and grandchildren, and has him breaking down and asking his wife if he was a good man. Manly Tears were shed at the viewings This Troper attended, especially by battle hardened old men in the audience.
- The Shawshank Redemption IS this trope.
- The world of Quantum Of Solace may be a Crapsack World, with the official stances of the CIA and MI6 to let Quantum, the Nebulous Evil Organisation, do what they want in the name of oil, but at the end of the film, James Bond has torn open a huge hole in Quantum, earned his solace over Vesper's betrayal and death, helped Camille get revenge and remove a would-be dictator, and given the Bolivian people their resources back. Leiter also gets promoted to his corrupt chief's position.
- Wall E. The Earth had fallen into decay and waste. After 700 years life finally sprouts again. Despite having lived lives doing almost nothing, the people of the Axiom are happy to set foot back on Earth and try to fix it. In the credits, we see society develop back to its former glory, and lush green fields and lakes are once again alive. Mankind has grown fit and thin again as they start doing things again. The real trick to it all? This is the SECOND happy ending, and this all happens in the credits.
- The part in the credits was actually added after a test screening because about half the audience walked away making the rather realistic assumption that humanity died in about a week.
- Slumdog Millionaire, applies this literally- almost every horrific thing that happens to the characters contributes to Jamal's win.
- The Two Towers:
Sam: "It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something."
Frodo: "What are we holding onto, Sam?"
Sam: "That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for."
- David Mamet's Redbelt. Through a veritable Deus Angst Machina noble jujitsu instructor Mike Terry loses his business, his reputation, and his best friend, and is forced to fight in a PPV match. Once there he not only discovers the matches are fixed, but that it was his own wife who caused his downfall. After a brief Heroic BSOD he becomes determined to make it to the ring and reveal the truth about the fixes. On the way there, he defeats the arrogant jujitsu guy, is awarded the championship belt, has a moment with the woman whose life he probably saved, and when he reaches the ring is embraced by his life-long mentor, who gives him the highest honor in jujitsu - the titular red belt.
- Sky Blue follows Shua as he desperately tries to bring down Ecoban in order to mitigate the environmental damage it has caused to his home. Dr. Noah notes that most of its inhabitants will survive and be able to forge a better world, but it will take a lot of work.
- The 1924 version of The Theif Of Bagdad. It's written in the stars...
Literature
- Ciaphas Cain series can fit into this trope, ok, Cain sometimes gets really lucky, but we must recognize luck usually works as many times against him as in his favour, he still has to fight and figure out a way to save his life most of the time, but in the end, when he has managed to save the day (and usually the entire sector), he and his friends can go to a nice place to enjoy some amasec and tanna while tasting some delicacies.
- K.A. Applegate's Everworld series. It's set in a world where all the gods and creatures from mythology exist, and as anyone who's read their mythology can tell you, that means horrible deaths and fates worse than death abound. And that's before Everworld is invaded by psychotic, heavily armed Neo-Nazis and an alien horde with their own god that eats other gods. For most of the series, the four teenagers who make up the main cast are barely able to keep themselves from killing each other, let alone staying alive, yet in the last book they actually manage to forge an alliance among the squabbling gods, start an industrial revolution in Everworld, and (while the series ends before the aforementioned Nazis and aliens can be defeated) the prospects for obtaining something close to peace are actually looking up.
- Dan Simmon's Hyperion cantos. In the first book, the enemies are everywhere, none of our protagonists, despite having an uber badass soldier and numerous secret weapons, have anywhere near the power to defeat the Shrike, who seems to be everywhere and can kill them off easier than Jason in the Friday the 13th movies. Yet it ends with our heros singing "We're off to see the Wizard." Though to tell the truth, it worked for this troper.
- Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles: Taran becomes the King of Prydain and marries the girl of his dreams, but only after losing several friends and having his idealistic image of a 'hero' shattered. Even then his ending isn't that happy.
- Robin Hobb's later fantasy trilogies The Liveship Traders and The Tawny Man go through an incredibly dark journey and emerge to a more or less happy ending.
- Characters in the Discworld books frequently have to earn their happy endings.
- The Gormenghast series practically defines this trope. Titus goes through Hell and back, losing almost everybody he cares about to take down Steerpike, but in the end, he has a world to explore, a world to win.
- Paradise Lost may seem like a Downer Ending at first, but read it again:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, & Providence their guide
They hand in hand, with wadding steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitarie way.
- I think I've got something in my eye...
- World War Z chronicles the entirety of a Zombie Apocalypse, from the dark portents of danger, the manic reaction of humanity, the soulless survival techniques that many resorted to, and the horrors of the living dead. Despite this, it manages to have an undercurrent of hope that gets stronger, running side by side with the cynicism and blackness. After all, Humanity did win the war, in the end. Ironically due to the fact that the author knows jack about the military a real life situation with the book's factory presets would have ended quite happily.
- This is presumably the rationale behind New Jedi Order and Legacy Of The Force, but for some fans (this editor, for instance) the excess of doom and gloom (not to mention main character deaths) just make it (and, by extent, the franchise as a whole) a Downer Ending.
- New Jedi Order worked as this, in this Troper's opinion, but LOTF definitely failed. Fortunately, they seem to be at least trying to correct their mess with Fate Of The Jedi.
- Until I see at least three resurrections, it won't be enough. Not nearly.
- Both Sabriel and Touchstone in the first book of The Abhorsen Trilogy are put through the metaphysical wringer. By the end, they've both lost their entire families and a lot of their friends to Kerrigor's undead minions. In the end, though Sabriel is saved from death by relatives in the beyond telling her it's not her time, and she and Touchstone are well on their way to a happily ever after. They even managed to save Mogget.
- Stephen R. Donaldson's books are invariably like this.
- Catch-22 is a Only Sane Man story in a Crapsack World featuring Kill Em All, but still has one of the most uplifting endings I've ever read.
- As uplifting as the ending sequence was, I was still expecting it to end in tune with the tone of the last third of the book - for instance, Yossarian would fall and break his neck after jumping out the window or something. But the very last two sentences reveal that Heller hadn't forgotten the determined humor of the first bit:
Nately's whore was waiting for him with the long bread knife. She swung and missed, her knife striking the stones near Yossarian's feet, and he ran.
- Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is a pretty straight example, made Word Of God when Tad Williams confessed in his commentary to going through Creator Breakdown while writing it and therefore seriously considering using a Kill Em All ending instead. The heroes do win, but at the cost of half of the main characters and nearly everything they've fought for, and this is made quite clear in the story. Even the main protagonist comes to realize that "some hurts cannot be mended."
- Compared to some of John Brunner's other works (particularly The Sheep Look Up), The Shockwave Rider might have an ending that qualifies. "Well— how did you vote?"
- Averted, Subverted and Justified at the same time in Stephen King's The Dark Tower Series. After a journeying for untold years to reach the Dark Tower (and consequently losing the greater number of his friends, lovers, and followers along the way) Roland FINALLY reaches the Dark Tower. However, upon reaching it he finds out that his existence is a cycle; he has made the journey to the tower an unknown number of times before this one. He is made to repeat his journey again and again until he finally learns his lesson (which is up to the reader to decide). He is, literally, sent back to the beginning of the series with no memory of what just happened. The trope is abided to, however, by the fact that Roland may well be able to FINALLY complete his quest this time round.
- Stephen King even warns readers who have reached the last chapter to stop reading if they want to have a conventional happy ending. The real ending divided fan opinion...just a little bit...
- Harry Potter goes through hell and loses several friends along the way, but in the end, he is able to defeat Voldemort through The Power of Love.
- Well maybe. It's not like they didn't think he was dead the last time the "power of [Lily's] love" killed him. Nor is there any evidence that the society that caused the problem in the first place has changed at all. Not to mention that most of Voldemort's supporters are still alive and free, while Umbridge killed most of the muggle-borns.
- Those are all valid points, but I think that the epilogue was meant to show that everything turns out amazingly well, at least for Harry and his Nakama.
- Mistborn- both the first and third books, actually. The second is more of a Downer Ending, since the Big Bad just escaped its imprisonment thanks to the heroine.
- Drizzt from Forgotten Realms is this trope incarnate
- Melina Marchetta's spectacular On the Jellicoe Road (just Jellicoe Road in the US and UK) is an example of Earn Your Bittersweet Ending. The main character and those she loves goes through love, and the the ending is still incredibly sad. And unbelievably heartwarming.
- "Reader, I married him."
- Honor Harrington really has to do this in one case especially. Over the course of "In Enemy Hands" and "Echoes of Honor" she is forced to surrender a ship captained by one of her oldest friends, with that friends' birthday party on board, captured, put into the hands of someone who is basically Himmler without the intelligence to not believe the propoganda, has her empathic and emotion - sharing treecat permanently crippled (found out later - he can no longer speak to other treecats), has her artificial eye and half her face electrocuted, is sentenced to death, sees her sworn retainers die in the (barely) successful escape attempt, loses an arm, lands on a prison planet, takes over said prison planet, builds a navy from all the ships stopping by at the prison planet, steals transports for all the people on the prison planet, and finally arrives back in the nearest friendly system to discover everyone thought her dead - and they'd held the funeral, and named ships after her, and she had a brother and sister that were planned to inherit her title. And somehow the whole thing is worthwhile in the simple sentence: "She was taking them home, and they were taking her home, and that was all in the universe that mattered." Yes, all that happens in between her leaving on an escort mission and getting home again.
Live Action TV
- Happy NEVER comes cheap in Star Trek. Voyager had seven rough years before making it home. The folks of DS 9 went through war and hell before putting down the Dominion once and for all, and both the Enterprise and her captain got beat up pretty good before they defeated the Xindi.
- In Voyager, specifically, the end episode begins with a Bittersweet Ending, but then Janeway travels back in time and we get a REALLY happy ending.
- Until you realize Janeway has to in the future sacrifice herself so that there's no time paradox.
- How is bloody SPOILER earning your happy ending? That's Battle Royale with Cheese.
- Steven Moffat's episodes of Doctor Who (with the possible exception of "The Girl in the Fireplace") tend to go this way.
- Arguably, this is how most of the episodes of House MD turn out, although occasionally, the writers throw in a Downer Ending.
- With the way the story has turned out, Battlestar Galactica has a 50/50 shot of ending with either this, or a downer ending that will rival End of Evangelion.
- The ending decides to be a blend of the Bittersweet Ending and this. Also, this trope is completely played straight with Helo and Athena, who, after going through more crap than any other couple on the show, finally get to live the rest of their lives in peace with their daughter.
- Stargate SG 1. Applies to the series as a whole, but most particularly in season nine and ten. World after world bows down to the Ori, SG team members getting killed left and right (even a lot of normal people on earth thanks to the Prior plague), villains constantly getting away scot free and in two years, barely a dent is made in the Ori attack. Then The Ark Of Truth kicks down the Downer Ending's door, beats it up with some Crowning Moments of Awesome and proceeds to give the team the Happy Ending they deserve.
- NYPD Blue: Andy Sipowicz went through one murdered wife, one murdered son, two dead partners (and a third quitting in disgrace), and two cancer scares (His own and his toddler son's), all while trying trying to clean up his act after spending much of his career being an alcoholic Rabid Cop. He ends the show's run as squad commander, with a beautiful wife and newborn daughter at home.
Myth And Legend
Tabletop Games
- Promethean The Created is the only game in the New World Of Darkness to have anything approaching a "happy ending"... but as this is the World of Darkness, it's a long road to hoe. Prometheans get some of the worst Blessed With Suck of all supernatural types — they come into existence in adult bodies with undeveloped minds, their very nature makes humans flip out and want to kill them over time, the very earth rejects them, and since they're so rare (for obvious reasons), it's hard for them to band together in groups. But as they're unfinished works, they can undertake a long and arduous Pilgrimage to figure out what humanity is... and, in doing so, become human themselves.
Theater
- Any Sondheim show that has a happy ending — especially Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods — falls under this.
- Wicked. Sometimes everything that you try isn't enough to change the world. Sometimes your greatest triumphs lead directly to your downfall. But when you open your heart to someone else, and you change each other, then whatever may come, you are unlimited.
- Man of La Mancha, both the Show Within A Show and the show itself.
"And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered in scars
Still strove, with his last ounce of courage,
To reach - the unreachable star!"
- The more seriously themed Cirque Du Soleil shows invoke this trope.
- Alegria - Power is too often in the wrong hands, but the forces of good can and must fight and (re)claim it. The movie inspired by this show takes this trope much further: the world it takes place in seems to be a World Half Empty where (as a song puts it) "children suffer and then want to die", but beauty and love have the power to change someone from despairing to hopeful - and to change everyone around them in the process. And every person has the power to be that source of beauty and love to someone else.
- Quidam - The modern world is an alienating place, but people can still connect with each other, and every person deserves to be seen as an individual with needs and wants.
- Varekai - Just because you fell doesn't mean you can't fly again.
- KA - Things that can be used to destroy can also be used to create, and even the most evil hearts can be turned by all the manifestations of The Power Of Love and The Power Of Friendship.
- Dog Sees God - This incredibly dark Peanuts parody pulls one of these. Snoopy contracted rabies and was put down, Woodstock was killed by Snoopy, Schroeder deliberately overdosed and died, Lucy is in an insane asylum for setting the Little Red-Head Girl on fire, Linus is a pothead, Marcy and Peppermint Patty are alcoholics, Freida is bullemic, and Pig Pen is a psychopath — but Charlie Brown finally got a response from his pencil-pal, and that gives him the strength to keep going.
- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is a good example. The end of the play sees the African-American Younger family moving into a house in a white neighborhood so hostile that they sent a representative to offer to buy their house out from under them. Walter, the family patriarch, having blown the bulk of his father's life insurance payout, including money earmarked for his sister's education, nearly accepts the offer, but finally realizes that the family's pride is more important than money. Despite the looming challenge of being the first black family to live in their new community, and knowing that they will all have to work harder than ever to maintain their suburban life financially, the tone of the final scene in which they are moving out of their run-down apartment is one of hope.
Video Games
- Kingdom Hearts' ending forces Sora, Riku and Kairi to get through the series up to near the end of Kingdom Hearts II (That's nearly 3 different video games) before they can joyously reunite with each other. Then they have to finish off the Big Bad before they can return home.
- Final Fantasy VI has this, though they could have emphasized it a lot more with more programming freedom.
- Metal Gear Solid has the situation getting worse and worse in the last three chronological games (MGS 1, 2, and 4), with MGS4 revealing the one happy part of MGS2's ending went horribly wrong shortly after. This persists right up to the very last scenes, promising Downer Ending after Downer Ending yet averting each one at the last moment for a genuinely uplifting finale.
- This is a truly bizarre but awesome example, since the series properly establishes that Anyone Can Die, and in the end, a lot of people manage to live.
- Ever 17 has five different endings, with the fifth achieved by earning the other four. Two of said endings end with the death of at least one of the main characters, and the other two are stacked full of Tomato In The Mirror and tragic Break The Cutie. The fifth ending keeps up with the Tomatos, throwing The Mole, Luke You Are My Father and even a Soap Opera Disease… before giving you one of the most gloriously happy (if really improbable) endings ever. Considering the Diabolus Ex Machina Visual Novels love to throw at you this was a genuine (and very welcome) surprise.
- Fallout does this too, many routes can go horribly wrong for a town. But choose the right choices and avoid genocide too much and NCR will have a well earned happy ending. On second thought, some of the best options for society is genocide, for example New Reno becomes a place for society's future after you killed every criminal family in town.
- Well, you only have to kill the bosses of each of the criminal families.
- What? Killing every family will cause New Reno to become a desolate, lifeless city. The best way it can turn out is if you kill every family but the Wrights without giving them access to a weapon cache.
- If you go for the goodguy path, Fallout 3 combines this with Heroic Sacrifice. The world may be a crapsack, but it's getting better, even if it is slow, and even if there is a cost.
- Ar Tonelico does this in two ways: the game has multiple endings, in some of which you can redeem the Big Bad instead of killing it off; Also, in the visual novel-like adventure within the "soulsphere" of Lady Shurelia, which plays like a Magical Girl TV show, you get a surprising Bittersweet Ending, unless you go back again- then you find out that it was actually due to tampering by the Big Bad itself, and you get the chance to earn a happy ending instead.
- The Suikoden series actually makes this into a game mechanic: the characters will suffer through all the tragedies and losses of war and then some, but if you recruit all 108 Stars of Destiny, everyone gets a truly happy ending. Keep in mind that this is not at all easy, and neglecting to get even one of them will result in a much more bittersweet, or even downright tragic ending.
- The Silent Hill games have an incredibly literal example of this; in each of the games, there is a potential good ending, but the player has to earn it through his actions while playing the game with the exception of Silent Hill 3 and Origins, which actually force a good ending on the player the first time through. But, well, the characters still literally go through Hell to get it, so...
- The Baldurs Gate series leans heavily towards this, though the vagaries of being a somewhat open-ended RPG with a great deal of choice as to the nature of the protagonist keep it from being blatant. That said, the player does go to hell. Twice. Among other things.
- The newest incarnation of the Spyro the Dragon series by Sierra ended its trilogy based on this trope. The world literally cracks apart after the Dark Master has seemingly won and accomplished destroying the world. But Spyro uses his powers to save the world at the last moment with Cynder at his side. All their friends are okay and Ignitus, thought dead, is now the new chronicler. The bittersweet part is that Spyro and Cynder are now dead... until its revealed they miraculously survived and after all the crap they've went through they've earned the happy ending they both deserved after all those scenes of angst. Oh and apparently Cynder loves Spyro so they're more then likely in love now. Only took the end of the world for the relationship to become canon.
- Persona 4 features a literal incarnation of this trope, as most players will unexpectedly receive a bad ending after picking the wrong choices of dialogue in two different scenes. Achieving the good ending is such a Guide Dang It that beating the game actually makes you feel like you accomplished something. All of this is doubly true for the True Ending.
- Especially since the game actively tries to steer you away from it.
- Valkyrie Profile is this trope embodied. Not only does the player have to go through endless frustration to get to it, but in order to achieve the happy ending, the main character herself must become the Lord of Creation in order to remake the worlds.
- Fate/stay night. Any ending that can remotely be considered "happy" is earned in gallons of blood, sweat, and tears. Mostly blood and tears, actually.
- MaxPayne 2 has the player literally earn the happy ending. Only by beating the game on the hardest difficulty level do you see the ending where Mona Sax lives.
- Drakengard 2, surprisingly enough, pulls this off in its third ending. After grueling fights against Cosmic Horror, a lot of sacrifice, and torrents of blood having been spilled, the game ends with both the dragons and the Gods fading away, and leaving mankind free to pursue their own destiny. Meaning that Nowe and Manah will get the normal lives they longed for, Eris won't have to sacrifice her future and become the new Barrier Maiden, and the world finally regaining a semblance of peace. Also, a literal use of this trope since, to achieve this ending, the player must complete the game twice at the lower difficulty settings, and then finish the game in Extreme difficulty.
- In the game version of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, if the main characters manage to overcome their flaws and face their past (Gorrison deal with his guilt about his wife, Benny being able to show compassion for others, Ellen conquering her fears, Ted proving his love for Ellen and Nimdok atoning for his Nazi Warcrimes), this initiates a Logic Bomb for the mad AI, who cannot fathom why the humans are not complete bastards. The players can then proceed to take down AM and revive the human population hibernating on the Moon.
- The Shadow Hearts trilogy pretty much DEMANDS this in all three games, playing through normally, with no, or few, side trips, nets you the bad end. in fact the first games Bad End is established as canon in the second. However, if you put the effort in, you can and WILL Earn Your Happy Ending. The second game's Good End even implies that the main character, Yuri, gets transported back in time to just shortly before the events of the first game, memories intact, meaning it's quite possible he went through those events again, and that canonically, he got his Happy Ending.
- Actually, this is canon. In Shadow Hearts 2, which doesn't happen if Shadow Hearts 1 has a good ending, Bacon performs the Emigre Manuscript's ceremony to raise the dead. In Shadow Hearts 3, upon seeing the Emigre Manuscript's ceremony performed, Roger comments that he's never seen it done before. Since, in Shadow Hearts 2, he does it himself... it means that the only way this makes sense is that Shadow Hearts 2 never had to happen. Yuri got his happy ending in the end.
- In Oddworld Abe's Oddysee, if you don't save more than half your coworkers (who you don't even know you're meant to save until halfway through, and over half of whom are in secret areas), you get dropped into a meat grinder at the end by the Big Bad. You get to see the bits go flying, too.
- If you choose the Neutral (Freedom) Ending in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, you more or less fulfill this trope. You see your teacher end the world, deal with no longer being fully human, see your best friends being tortured and responding to that by twisting themselves into cruel and monstrous parodies of their character flaws, see said teacher - the only one who still somehow remained sympathetic - murdered before your eyes, perhaps almost destroy time and all worlds, and finish by striking down the master of the Vortex dimension in the name of freedom. In the end, despite everything, you end up with your friends again, your teacher's got a positive outlook on life, and even the World's Most Epic Widow's Peak gets to go around still being The World's Most Epic Widow's Peak. Believe this troper, though; you have to earn it.
- Perhaps not as happy, but... The True Demon ending is at least an awesome example. After going through all the above and a Bonus Level Of Hell where Metatron himself tries to kill you, you unlock the last of your demonic potential and become a true demon, and strike down the master of the Vortex dimension for an apertizer. This destroys all of Creation, and your character then duels Lucifer himself to become his The Dragon and a general of the Legions Of Hell so you can get at the true cause of why the world was destroyed and the Vortex dimension created (before you blew it all up)... God.
- Eversion's endings. The bad ending is a horrifying subversion. After spending half the game in a world that you've turned from bright and colorful to dark and hellish, you find yourself in a World X-1-styled room with the princess. Happily ever after? NOPE! After a few seconds, the entire room everts to World X-8, the princess reveals herself to be an Eldritch Abomination, and eats you. The good ending may or may not be a double subversion; shortly after the room goes X-8, you turn into an Eldritch Abomination yourself and become united with the also-monstrous princess.
- In Tsukihime, Hisui's Good End, which is still rather bittersweet, and Kohaku's end. Kohaku's end gets the benefit of looking like not only did this path's heroine just die, but you'll have to kill Akiha because Roa is corrupting her. But neither happens.
- In Clannad, to obtain the True End, where Nagisa and Ushio do not die, you must obtain literally every other Light Orb in the game, a.k.a. near Hundred Percent Completion of each other route. Misae's light orb took this troper a few tries to obtain, when she discovered that it could only be obtained when you play Tomoyo's route IMMEDIATELY after Misae's route. It's the scene at the Founders Festival, where Misae is looking for her cat, a.k.a. Shima Katsuki.
- Mega Man Zero 4 finally featured the human side of the Robot War's story (showing the humans' perspective of the Reploids, which border on Fantastic Racism). However, over the course of the game, the humans and Reploids finally learn to put aside their differences, creating true peace that lasted for almost two centuries. Tragically subverted, since the ones who fought so hard and so long for this peace gave their lives in the process just so the war could finally end.
- The ending for Advance Wars:Days of Ruin is hopeful, light and upbeat in a Darker And Edgier game set After The End. You just have to go through Sunrise to get it.
- The ending of Okami. Amaterasu and Waka finally get to return to the Celestial Plain, but not before Ammy's died once and had to be reincarneted in a statue, kick the ever-loving crap out of Orochi three times, make most of Nippon believe in her and give her 'praise', regain all of her Celestial Brush Techniques and power, create a Stable Time Loop, involving a double of dose of Help Yourself In The Past/Future, do various jobs here and there, beat up several dragons twice, but more if you're Orochi and then finally destroy Yami, God of technology, but not before he's stolen all of Ammy's powers, and knocked Waka out for the count, leaving Ammy literally having to beat her power out of him, and kill him for good. It's worth it.
- This is more or less how the Celestial Bureaucracy in Grim Fandango works: Upon arrival at the Land of the Dead, each soul has to take a four-year-journey through the land to reach the Land of Eternal Rest, and how saintly they were in life determines how comfortably they can get there. The saintliest souls are eligible for a ticket on the Number 9 express train that shoots through the Land of the Dead in four minutes, while the biggest schmucks and sinners may have to just walk the whole trip, or even get sent in by parcel post.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl has one of these, about 2/3s of the way through the game you get a brief text prompt telling you to backtrack to the first map. If you don't notice this, then it is impossible to get an ending where the player survives, you never learn who or where Strelok is, and the game ends without closure of any sort. Backtracking will wrap up most of the storyline's threads kind of. Hope you were checking your journal.
- Ico. Ico has to lose everything first. There's a superb essay about it here.
- Family Project. Seriously, for a game where a Dysfunction Junction is the premise, things turn out pretty well in the end.
- Xenogears. The game starts with an unending war between two countries, and it just gets worse from there. The unbelievable bastardry of humans towards each other and the sheer power and cruelty of Deus provide a soul-crushing and emotionally draining atmosphere, where if anything good ever happens, it is because something unimaginably bad is sure to follow. Most people die horribly or are grotesquely mutated into biological parts for Deus, resulting in a Class 2 Apocalypse. The dismal nature of the game makes the ending all the more satisfying- Fei slays Deus and the Urobolus factor that binds humanity to it, and even rescues his lover of 10,000 years after many lifetimes of being Star Crossed Lovers.
- The Burning Crusade expansion of World Of Warcraft definatly ended this way for the Blood Elves. [[spoiler:After having their homeland ravaged by the Scourge, becoming addicted to magic due to the Sunwell's loss, abandoned by the Alliance and betrayed by their own Prince, they finally manage to redeem themselves and cure their addiction through the combined efforts of Velen, Lady Liadren, the Shattered Sun Offensive and, of course, the player. The fact that they managed to banish Kil'Jaeden from Azeroth was icing on the cake.
- In American McGee's Grimm, Grimm seems to be a believer in this. A main reason of his hatred for Lighter And Softer Fairy Tales other than being disgustingly saccarine is the fact that he believes that none of the protagonists truly deserve the happy endings since they're all either Too Dumb To Live or because he sees them as Karma Houdinis. He Grimmifies the stories so that the hypocrisy becomes much more clear or that the characters get a more "proper" ending (which in some cases allows female protagonists who go through plenty of crap like Cinderella or Mulan a chance at brutal revenge).
- Cave Story. The story is dark enough, with cute NP Cs dying or being transformed into monsters, and the Big Bad threatening to unleash said monsters on the world. But, by making the right choices, it's possible to not just defeat the apparent Big Bad, but to avert the Bittersweet Ending by saving two main characters (who would otherwise die), preventing the island from crashing, and killing The Man Behind The Man so this threat will never arise again. This requires the protagonist to storm Hell, the hardest level in the game—so both the characters and the player have to earn the good ending.
Webcomics
- Gunnerkrigg Court, so far at least. There's lots of grim details in the background, particularly the details of Annie's Parental Abandonment, and her extensive prior experience with The Grim Reapers, as well as poor Robot's misfortunes. The main characters remain well-balanced and optimistic in spite of these, and there's nothing to suggest that this is naivety on their part.
Web Original
- Broken Saints: despite all the suffering they have had to go through, each of our "broken" heroes is healed in the end, the men by the power of Shandala's love, Shandala by the power of theirs, and the world is saved.
- The two main characters in There She Is go through a number of tribulations before they get to their happy ending.
- Ditto with Ruby Quest, where the characters have much bigger problems: Mutations, monstrous abominations, unspeakable evils from the beginning of time, and trying to escape from a mysterious facility where they have been trapped for over a year already, with several dozen failed escape attempts. The main characters get the happy ending they deserve, some of the others don't.
- In addition, how the happy ending is earned in Ruby Quest is quite possibly one of the most literal and unintentional examples around (think of it as having been a point-and-click adventure game, except by virtue of being roleplayed by post on an Imageboard, it was very open-ended). Ruby and Tom come across a medical cabinet with a small lock, which the players have Tom bash open with the crowbar. Some tranquilizer is found inside, which they take in a syringe. A little later, they encounter, have a fight with, and eventually subdue with the tranquilizer a psychotic and suicidal Stitches. Immediately after, it is discovered that Stiches actually had the key they were supposed to open the medical cabinet with. Then, instead of killing him and being done with it, the players stuff him into a revival locker and leave him, but not before also slipping him a portrait with himself, Ruby, Tom, and all the other patients and staff in the facility before things went to hell. Cut to the endgame of the story. Ruby, Tom, and an also unintentionally-rescued Jay, have unlocked the escape hatch to the facility, but Ace is in close pursuit. Tom realizes that Ace will catch them if all three of them try to go up the hatch, as they won't be able to close it in time. Someone has to stay behind and delay Ace. After much wailing and gnashing from the players and cry of foul play, it is somehow painfully decided that Tom be the one to stay behind. Ruby and Jay make their way up the ladder, just as Ace appears in the doorway. Tom prepares himself for the inevitable outcome, but then...guess who? Stitches suddenly tackles Ace out of nowhere, and gives Tom enough time to scamble up the ladder and slam the hatch (and also causing quite a few players to fervently thank the "Deus Ex Machina"). By a combination of breaking something they weren't supposed to and being incredibly merciful, the players literally earned their happy ending.
- The last chapter of Sailor Nothing, especially the part where the background fades to white, is this trope distilled.
- Summed up spectacularly with Nostalgia Chick's review of Don Bluth's Thumbelina, where the despairing heroine is surprised to find her prince Cornelius alive and well - "Things are impossible! Things are... oh! Hi dead boyfriend! Thanks for coming along and proving my pessimism wrong and not making me work for that happy ending!"
- Evangelion R (Prime ending)
Western Animation
- Moral Orel ends in this way, where despite the fact that the main character lives in a Crapsack World of hypocrisy and zealotry and having one of the worst father figures imaginable, Orel ends up growing up to raise a genuinely happy family, with his brothers becoming a fireman and a policeman, though his parents are seemingly doomed forever to misery and hatred. That and throughout the final season it's been shown that there's a few residents of Moralton that have a chance at happiness.
- Avatar The Last Airbender: Century-long war? Check. Implacable foe, impossible odds? Check. Last, best hope for
peace victory is twelve? Check. Multiple heroes dead already? Check. Countdown to utter, utter defeat? ..oh, guess. Sounds like the sort of situation very few people walk away from alive, right? Wrong. At the end of the Finale, all of the good guys alive at the start of the finale are still here, there are three romantic pairs among them, the war ended without either side getting reduced to paste, Zuko gets to be king, and Iroh gets his tea shop back. Win, win, win.
- After over seventy whole episodes (over hundred and thirty, if you count the 11-minute segments as separate episodes) of various defeats, setbacks and humiliations, Ed Edd N Eddy ends with the titular characters being actually liked and respected by the neighborhood kids who previously detested them.
- And yes, they finally got those jawbreakers.
Real Life
- Lots of people feel this way about the real world. If you're one of them, congratulations.
- From the viewpoint of one such Troper with this viewpoint, it's mainly a case of seeing the world as stuck firmly between cynicism and idealism; it tends towards neither extreme of the scale, instead falling in the middle. (Thusly, why people can claim the extremes- because examples of both are present in the world.) You are given nothing in life but your brains, your beliefs, and yourself... and you'd be surprised how often that is all you really need.
- Economics is often called "the Dismal Science", mainly because economists keep telling everybody that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In spite of this, and in spite of their basic assumption that people are rational self-interested utility maximizers (aka selfish bastards) economists need to be a rather optimistic bunch, believing that the future will improve compared to the present.
- Adam Smith's famous Invisible Hand comment is the perfect example of this Economist attitude: An individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole, as if guided by an invisible hand. Whether or not the Invisible Hand Theory actually works is another matter.
- This is pretty much the premise of Christianity, especially the Passion story. Think about it: Jesus is rejected by his own people, tried for an extremely vaguely defined crime, condemned to death, tortured, forced to carry the instrument of his own execution while he's still bleeding from the torture, and then executed in a notoriously horrible way. But that's not the end of the story...
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