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"The idea that art can't be something the viewer enjoys is just one of these ideas that is hanging around out there. Art must whirr and whine like the dentist's drill, skipping off the enamel to bury itself in the gum. Something that was created in joy, with the purpose of creating joy in others, well, we've got a term for that ."
"Happy people make for boring television."
"Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?"
"It's partly an expression of my teenage angst. But mostly it's a moo-cow!."
— Chris Griffin, "A Picture's Worth A Thousand Bucks," Family Guy
The experts have spoken! Only the grimmest of tragedies can effectively explore the fragility of human life, the crushing agony of love and regret, and other life-defining themes, such as why mommy never really loved you.
Naturally, nobody's really the good guy in these stories, but if there is a sympathetic viewpoint character, don't expect their suffering to be the prelude to an ultimate triumph. No, they've got to be traumatized for life, or even killed off, along with their friends. Heck, and if there is a bad guy, why not let 'em get away with it scot-free while we're at it? That ought to drive home the message that life is suffering.
At its worst, angst-art parades suffering and loss as a fashionable (and profitable) affectation. Furthermore, it has often been noted that a correlation can be detected between how angsty a work is and how many awards it picks up. On the bright side, audiences have a limit of how much angst they're willing to take from people who don't exist. Among some, paint-by-numbers angst has led to such a Three Chords And The Truth-style backlash that any work on the cynical end of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism is disregarded, and any character who shows signs of depression is immediately labeled " emo" and "angsty." Whilst this response might itself be fairly cynical, given the truly absurd lengths that some creators go in pursuit of this ideal, can you blame them?
One justification offered for this trope is that life really is suffering, or, at the very least, that the purpose of art is to confront suffering. But only the absurdly cynical or pretentious would claim that moments of joy don't exist and are unworthy of being represented in art. This trope is reserved for those who somehow find happy moments less respectable than angsty ones.
Relatedly, fans of some works will go out of their way to insist that a given work had a downer ending, despite the available evidence to the contrary in order to make their favorite book/movie/game seem more artsy. The more ambiguous the ending, the more likely fans will decry that the world was screwed after the end credits, even if those end credits are filled with hopeful music, smiling pictures of the protagonists, and all the obligatory life symbolism you can muster.
See also: Angst Aversion, Darkness Induced Audience Apathy.
Related to Maturity Is Serious Business.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Neon Genesis Evangelion. Nuff' said.
- Zeta Gundam... Oh God, Zeta Gundam.
- Victory Gundam is worse.
- Yoshiyuki Tomino, who directed both of the above, appears to have been in love with this trope as part of his Kill Em All tendencies. Space Runaway Ideon, Aura Battler Dunbine, and The Wings Of Rean also directed by Tomino, all feature events that can only be explained via this trope.
- While Yoshiyuki Tomino is the man whom is named Kill Em All for good reason, Tomino idea of art being angsty is sometimes had a bit of silver lining, trying to show the beauty of humanity in spite of the blood and carnage. While writers like Whedon and Kitoh would gladly just give you a totally dark angsty tale to show only the worst parts about almost everything, Tomino surprisingly gave Be Invoked a somewhat optimistic epilogue as the now deceased spirits prepares to celebrate the rebirth of the universe.
- Let's not forget Gundam ZZ and Turn A Gundam, which had more or less happy endings. And how the Zeta Gundam compilation movies actually have an alternate Bittersweet Ending, instead of the downer one of the original series.
- Hayao Miyazaki almost always consistently proves this trope to be false. There IS angst present, but not by much.
- Mohiro Kitoh of Bokurano and Narutaru fame bathes in this trope and then some.
- Clamp, Clamp, Clamp, Clamp, CLAMP. Oh God, CLAMP. Their still unfinished series X is particularly known for this, and every single other series they've written (even the adorably sparkly shoujo ones) have some form of soul-tearing angst in them to some degree.
- Code Geass is also stuffed with Woobies, Fallen Heroes, a Trauma Conga Line, Break The Cutie, and Tearjerkers, with one or two Star Crossed Lovers thrown in for good measure. And it comes complete with a Bittersweet Ending!
- Oddly subverted with Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. While several fan opinions have noted it "takes your heartstrings, tugs them out, and then runs over them with a bus", the series itself tends towards very happy, optimistic endings. The characters are often put through hell(especially in A's), but the endings are always cheery and upbeat. Hayate standing up and running in the conclusion of A's makes one want to cheer. Thus proving that art can be angsty without devolving into Wangst or Diabolus Ex Machina.
- Mai Hime is, oddly, bashed for this trope. Not because it avoids angst(it doesn't, by a long shot), but because the end of series uses a careful Xanatos Gambit to enable Mashiro to press the Reset Button and restore all the Hi ME harmed by the Festival. Fan reaction was apparently intensely negative because they saw this as betraying the emotional intensity of rest of the series.
- Sai Kano, one giant angst parade.
- One complaint lodged against Overman King Gainer was that characters didn't angst enough, the anime itself shows that angsting is nothing more than closing yourself off from people, but who cares about that he should whine about everything because that's what True Art does.
- Invoked by Drosselmeyer in Princess Tutu. By his standards, you can't call any story decent unless everyone dies tragically and entirely in vain by the end. His characters beg to differ.
- Clannad. Some people complain that hitting the reset bottom and making it a happy ending ruined the the message of "accepting your loses and making the best of what you have" (basically that Tomoya learned to come to terms with Nagisa's death and decides that being there for their daughter is what he should be doing). Others feel that they were cheated out of their tears only to have it become a happy ending. The thing is, even if Key made it a bittersweet ending like they did with Air, many fans will still complain about how depressing it is.
- Fafner In The Azure Dead Aggressor was basically takes Evangelion and then makes it ultra angsty, anybody can and will die, those who die do not have a pleasant death (A Heroic Sacrifice winds up being treated like a pariah to name one). And the Prequel OVA, oh boy, what a depressing tale of Doomed By Canon.
Comics
- Watchmen. A dark, cynical cold war drama dealing with some the inherent flaws of leadership. All of the main characters are flawed. It is a deconstruction of the superhero genre, and often cited as one of the first instances of comic books growing up. It received unanimous praise from critics both inside and outside of the comics industry. It was the only graphic novel to be included in Time magazine's 100 Best Novels list. Not only do our heroes arrive too late to stop the "villain's" plans, but most of the main characters in the end agree with the "villain", including the godlike Dr. Manhattan. It's the "villain" of the novel who ends up "saving" the world. This however countered by Tales of the Black Freighter, a comic within the comic where the protagonist commits a deepening series of atrocities to save his family and hometown from the titular ship. By the time he reaches home, he's well down the road to madness and mistakenly kills his wife. He runs out of town, realizing the freighter was never headed to the town where his family lived, and the only person the ship wanted was himself.
- It should also be noted that the ending is left ambiguous as to whether or not the "villain's" plan to "saving" the world is even successful. The fact that he's named after a poem about how nothing ever lasts gives even more credence to the theory that we're all doomed anyway.
- The So Bad Its Horrible Batman comic Fortunate Son seems to espouse this attitude as a rock musician complains that his music isn't "real" because he came from a normal household and had a normal upbringing, compared to an Elvis Expy who grew up in a shack and "knew real pain". Linkara mocks the attitude as moronic and unrealistic.
Film
- The Dark Knight. A noble, even heroic, man is twisted via Deus Angst Machina into a psychotic murderer, while the Big Bad systematically sets about proving that all morality is a joke. The ambiguous Downer Ending suggests that he may have ultimately succeeded. Critical praise? Near-unanimous, to the point of Oscar speculation.
- When the trope is finally subverted, and two boatloads of convicted criminals and fleeing civilians choose to die rather than kill each other, the Mood Whiplash is almost tangible. Where were these people during the rest of the movie?
- In prison and cowering in their homes from the psychotic clown, respectively.
- The ending isn't particularly a downer or proof that the Joker is correct, rather the opposite actually. Batman's choice proves his own philosophy rather than the Joker's. The fact that the police and the Batman respectively are playing up a secret that hurts them but supports the people is an uplifting sort of thing, actually. Essentially proving that there are good people who do good things because they are the right thing to do even if it hurts them.
- It looks like producers and creators of Spider-Man movies think that way. Movies are full of angst, especially if you compare them with comics (there were few attempts to add more angst into Spider-Man comics, most of them are now deep in Dork Age). Spider-Man dosn't even make his trademark jokes in the movies.
- Brian Bendis, writer of Ultimate Spider-Man and New Avengers told once in interview an anecdote about how he and Stan Lee were asked to write some lines for first movie. He agreed and was wondering why Stan didn't. He found out when he wrote few jokes about Green Goblin's costume and one of the producers looked at him like he should be burned alive at the stake. None of his lines were made into the movie, of course.
- Pixar Animation Studios tends to avert this.
- Casablanca makes a point of having a main character who grapples with angst... then does the right thing, inspires another character to find a hidden reserve of human decency, and gets away with shooting the bad guy. Proponents of True Art Is Angsty would have shot all of them, or at least have forced Blaine to sacrifice his life.
- Singin' in the Rain. The Wizard Of Oz. To a lesser degree, even Lawrence of Arabia averts this trope, in spite of beginning with the protagonist's funeral. And, like Casablanca, all three are on the American Film Institute's top ten list. (However, note that Singin' in the Rain wasn't even nominated for Best Picture of 1952.)
- No Country For Old Men.
- Really, anything by Cormac McCarthy can be put in here to some extent.
- A common complaint about WALL-E was that the second half was somehow inferior to the first. This quickly becomes a bit of a misnomer when everyone refers to their favorite scene as either "Define Dancing" or the art history credits, which both occur in the final third of the film. But you see, there is an obvious reason for this hypocritical set of circumstances. These people aren't allowed to admit they liked the second half of the film because it is *gasp* colorful, and it has a *gasp* happy ending. Pixar just didn't keep up the angst level enough for the True Art Is Angsty crowd.
- There have also been complaints specifically about the ending. Some people think WALL-E should've lost his memory for good, which would of course subvert the entire message of the film.
- Many, many And Then There Were None fans feel this way about Agatha Christie's revised ending for the play, which was subsequently used for all adaptations except one. Both the first adaptation (which used the play's ending) and the Russian adaptation (which used the novel's ending) are very well-made movies in their own right, but fans who admit to liking the former's ending even a little bit are not kindly regarded by the purists.
- Many of the professional critical reviews for the latter Harry Potter films praise them for being "darker" as though this were an automatic virtue. Roger Ebert is a notable holdout, rating the earlier films higher and questioning this view
 . Aside from him, very few critics seem to be able to wrap their minds around the idea that just maybe the early installments were light-hearted children's adventures for any reason beyond making lots of money. What's that, you say? It's supposed to get darker as it goes along? No way! It should have been grim and mature from the start! The early ones only weren't because they were directed by that hack Chris Columbus. How dare he make kids' films which appeal to kids! He should have skipped that whole wondrous new world thing and divided straight into the deep, meaningful angst! The quality of the earlier movies versus the latter ones is a legitimate issue which has divided by fans, but it's a lot more complicated than the critics are willing to make it.
- Having four directors, three during the development and introduction of the magical world to the characters and audience, making for inconsistent art direction and narrative, haven't helped.
Literature
- Death By Newbery Medal qualifies as a case of "it must involve tragedy and pain to be praised".
- The first line of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." — says something similar to Whedon's quote, with the observation that conflict equals drama, and that unhappiness tends to breed conflict. Of course, Anna Karenina, like much of Tolstoy's work, is not entirely a happy work itself.
- Parodied oddly in C. S. Lewis' The Pilgrim's Regress: Victoriana's poetry is not particularly angsty, except perhaps in a "the good times are over" nostalgic way. Victoriana, however, is; she assumes everyone is persecuting her (which therefore makes her a great artist, because all great artists are persecuted) and slaps, then whines at, anyone who isn't effusively complimentary about her work.
- The final chapter of A Clockwork Orange (the original Anthony Burgess novel) ends with Alex contemplating how he has outgrown the urge to be a delinquent, but he worries that if he has a child in the future, the child will be like he was at that age. Burgess' American publisher insisted the final chapter be left out, because the book would be better if ended "on a note of bleak despair".
- Some fans of Darker And Edgier High Fantasy series like A Song Of Ice And Fire and The Malazan Book Of The Fallen will use some form of this argument to lambaste The Lord Of The Rings. Richard K. Morgan marketed The Steel Remains in this exact way.
- This idea seems to be the basis for A Series Of Unfortunate Events, though in this case it's played for laughs.
- Paradise Lost manages an upbeat ending, and it ends with Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden! Of course, a lot of people consider the first third, crammed with Satan angst, to be the best part.
- Played straight by Alan Dean Foster (even as he subverts Most Writers Are Human), each time his pre-Amalgamation thranx poets, Wuuzelansem of Nor Crystal Tears and Desvendapur of Phylogenesis, seek out contact with the "alien monsters" — i.e. humans — because such a disturbing encounter will provide morbid inspiration for their poems. Writing about day-to-day life doesn't do it for either: they want to creep their audiences out, with accounts of freakish soft-skinned mammals. The Downer Ending in one of these two novels suggests the author is subject to True Art Is Angsty, too.
- Most recently, all you have to do is look at the various web forums for the Wheel Of Time. In the wake of the release of The Gathering Storm, you will see a sizable minority who insist the book is now juvenile and childish because after about five books of spiralling angst by Rand and in the most recent book him turning into an outright sociopath, the end shows him reintegrating his personality and laughing and crying on Dragonmount as he realizes there are things to live for. Only pain and angst and darkness are adult, you see.
- Les Miserables. It's right there in the title.
Live Action TV
Music
- Paul McCartney in some ways is a perfect reflection of this trope. As an artist, he is for the most part a notably optimistic, light-hearted performer who writes cheerful, good-natured love songs (see "Silly Love Songs" for what is essentially McCartney's mission statement with these songs). A lot of these songs get dismissed as light-hearted fluff, enjoyable maybe but nothing special. However, every so often, he'll have a Creator Breakdown, such as his first solo album McCartney (written after the break-up of The Beatles) or Chaos And Creation In The Back Yard (written during his bitter break-up and divorce from Heather Mills). These albums get critically lauded.
- Averted hard, however, by The Beatles; almost universally highly praised and held in high critical regard, the list of their most popular and highly regarded albums and songs contain just as many (if not more) optimistic and life-affirming love songs and ballads as dark, brooding and / or angsty songs.
- Conversely, John Lennon generally gets a great deal more critical regard than McCartney, generally due to the wide-held perception that Lennon wrote all the angsty 'deep' songs and McCartney wrote all the light and fluffy ones. Which is something of a myth; whilst Lennon did frequently mine his not-untortured psyche for inspiration, he was just as capable of writing sweet love songs as McCartney was; similarly, not everything McCartney wrote for the Beatles was smiles and sunshine.
- Hell, McCartney is responsible for the heaviest and hardest Beatles song ever, "Helter Skelter". He wrote "Birthday" too.
- Oh right, "Birthday," extremely angsty. Wait, what?
- "Eleanor Rigby", y'know, the one about a lonely old woman who sits alone in her house and then dies alone and is buried in an empty graveyard after a funeral which nobody but the priest attends, was a McCartney composition. So was "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", the one about a psychotic, serial murdering medical student. The notion that all Sir Paul ever wrote were fluffy pop songs is therefore pretty strange. Also, Lennon's edgier, more critically lauded work occasionally crosses the line into wangst.
- This could be said to be the reason for the popularity of Grunge and Post-Grunge/Emo in the '90s and 2000s, respectively, along with the appearance of a cyclic various three chords.
- Kareeminal, a high school Welsh rap artist, invokes this trope for the under-18s. His music highlights the insecurities and troubles of the average teenage boy as can be seem here.
Newspaper Comics
- The comic strip Funky Winkerbean won several awards over the years for dealing with a character's battle with cancer (which eventually resulted in her death), although it seems a lot of people didn't enjoy actually reading these strips. The long, drawn-out, angsty nature of the whole thing was parodied in the webcomic Shortpacked! with Funky Cancercancer.
- Tom Batiuk was really annoyed with the insinuation that people weren't exactly enjoying watching him slowly torture his fictional characters to death and expressed this in his other strip, Crankshaft, while the cancer plot was winding down. He did it again in Funky Winkerbean with Les actually echoing the same sentiment and contrasting his words with the image of his dying wife in the hospice bed next to him.
- September 2009 brought a story arc in which Les and Susan have to defend the choice of Wit (which is about a woman dying of cancer) as the School Play against parents who wanted to see something upbeat and fun instead of True Art. The apparent Take That Critics got the strip further mocking at the Comics Curmudgeon and Stuck Funky blogs.
Theater
- Many musical theatre fans are still annoyed today over The Music Man winning the Tony award for Best Musical over West Side Story. West Side Story has scenes of deadly violence, juvenile-delinquent angst and a Downer Ending, so it has earned the (dubious) reputation as having been "ahead of its time." Never mind that The Music Man is also a great show in its own way. (Both shows, incidentally, were faithfully adapted into excellent movie versions.)
- Ironic that they'd call a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet "ahead of its time."
- A remake of a musical adaption of Romeo and Juliet, no less. Apparently, anything that resembles Shakespeare's works gets immediate approval.
- And while we're on the subject of musicals: There are some people who snobbily look down on musicals as being nothing more than "light-hearted" singing and dancing, while praising non-musicals as true works of art. Such people have obviously never seen Sweeney Todd...
- Shakespeare's tragedies tend to be elevated higher than his comedies. Of the comedies, The Tempest is treated as particularly artistic, and it's one step from tragicomedy.
- As is Measure For Measure, the bleakest and most unfunny of all his comedies.
- Measure For Measure was a comedy?
- The main characters don't die at the end so it can't be a tragedy.
- The above comment may sound like a joke, but that is actually a part of the traditional definition of tragedy. For most of human history, there were only two genres of theatrical fiction, comedy and tragedy — and if it wasn't the latter, it had to be the former, as in the Divine Comedy, which certainly isn't particularly funny.
- Also the comedy The Merchant of Venice which typically comes off as far more tragic today than it did in Shakespeare's time, due to the widespread Alternate Character Interpretation of Shylock.
- One thing that may factor into this is that modern audiences are much better acquainted with Sit Com than with Shakespearean drama, to the point where the comedies seem hackneyed (Older Than They Think). Also, much of the puns and double language is lost on modern ears, something the dramas suffer less from.
- To be fair, Titus Andronicus is easily the most tragic of his plays, as well as the most trashy; Shakespeare's bizarre infatuation with puns ran unchecked in his comedies; the seriously funny 'A Comedy Of Errors' is also seriously fluffy; Shakespeare's most legendary character is the hilarious lovable drunkard Falstaff; and... well... Hamlet and King Lear are staggering works of pure uncut genius.
- Of all of the Gilbert And Sullivan operas, guess which one got the most critical praise for the composer? The Yeomen of the Guard.
- More or less averted by the works of Cirque Du Soleil. At worst (Alegria, Quidam, etc.), the world is a place where you can and must Earn Your Happy Ending, but there's still lots to marvel at if you look. Life has a lot of suffering in it, but it is possible to make things better if you try. At best (Saltimbanco, Dralion, etc.), life is full of hope, beauty, and love. A tagline for Alegria might say it best about the worst cases: "If you have no voice, scream. If you have no legs, run. If you have no hope, invent."
Video Games
- Video games with ambitions to the epic approach this, making plot points out of tragedies.
- Of course not going over the top with the story helps. There is a difference between making a good tragic story and a excessively dark tale that forces one bad thing after another just for laughs
- Square cannot win on this - when their games aren't being accused of following this trope to a T, the supporters of this trope criticize them for not following this trope to a T.
- For one example, Final Fantasy VII ends rather ambiguously. This led to an interpretation that the world was destroyed and everyone died, leading some to applaud Square for their gutsy storytelling and others to deride it for being too depressing. Meanwhile, the group of people who pointed out that the world was not destroyed were derided for being unable to face "reality" by people who both loved and hated it. So when Square got around to announcing the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, showing two projects set after the game with a perfectly intact world? They were criticized for "retconning" their game.
- The same thing happened with Final Fantasy X - while Tidus and Yuna certainly *believe* he sacrificed his life, a scene after the credits shows him landing in the ocean in Besaid. Again, the same factions popped up - those who loved the tragedy, those who hated the melodrama, and those who pointed out that it was more likely that he wasn't dead at all and were once again derided for not being "realistic" Fast-forward to the sequel and once again, Square following their own plot points is accused of being a retcon because they used the same scene again and simply placed it within the context of X 2 - thus conclusively showing Tidus alive and reuniting with Yuna.
- This is one of the major points of contention between fans of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Fans who criticize Chrono Cross for implying the deaths of Crono, Marle, and Lucca are told to "grow up" and accept these characters' fates, while praising the game for its "gutsy" and original storyline. Chrono Trigger fans have mostly responded by roundly trashing Chrono Cross and its fans. Oh, and you're not allowed to like them both.
- Final Fantasy Tactics is already a dark game, filled with murder, betrayal, and all those niceties you find in war. But some fans seem to want to make it even darker and more pointless by insisting that, canonically, Delita ripped a spy's tongue out after sparing her life and Ramza and his whole party died, making his whole quest to safe his sister meaningless. The only evidence of the former case is that said character doesn't talk for all of the one minute she's on screen (during another character's monologue) after her supposed death. The latter case is admittedly a little ambiguous, as Ollan wonders whether he really saw Ramza and Alma, or if it was their ghosts, but you have to ask: Why would ghosts be riding Chocobos, and why would the credits show them stopping to get water at a stream if they were dead?
- Elsewhere in the series, Final Fantasy VI ends a very hopeful note, but there are a lot of fans that try to argue that the world was destroyed no matter what you did. Even though the ending shows plants growing again and the party flying around the reforming world.
- Final Fantasy VIII ends with what is, without a doubt, one of the most unabashedly positive endings in the series. The world is saved, the hero gets the girl, and the Garden sails off into the sunset. Naturally, the game got lambasted for being so upbeat and happy in its ending, and a substantial number of fans started developing the "Rinoa is Ultimecia" theory despite all the evidence to the contrary, up to and including Word Of God.
- Kill Zone 1 had a relatively decent ending but Kill Zone 2 just take this trope and chugs it down. A hopelessly failed invasion from the start made worse as everyone we knew and loved in the first one died horribly with only one survivor and a Downer Ending where now the ISA is going to definitely lose? Critics loved it, as quoted from another guy "What is the point of completing the single player campaign if you are going to get screwed over?"
- Similarly, there's a solid chunk of its fanbase that insist that ICO ends with both Ico and Yorda dead, despite Word Of God saying they got a happy ending.
- Punch Out for the Wii had quite the sad ending, joining the new gaming era of sad endings being the norm.
- Conkers Bad Fur Day, while primarily a comedy game, ended on a very dark, angsty note. Conker's girlfriend Berri was murdered, and now he's the King of the Land, surrounded by all the people he didn't like, and only wants her back.
Webcomics
- The author of the Webcomic Megatokyo is accused of this almost to the point where it's a running gag. He even has a shirt about it.
Western Animation
Other
- Tom Hanks Syndrome is largely a result of the lack of critical and industry respect for actors who specialize in comedy; a performer often finds he won't be considered awards-worthy for his best comic work, so instead he will choose dramatic (often Oscar Bait) roles to build his reputation up.
- Franz Kafka famously wrote "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
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