Are season endings not fit for ending tropes? (This ain't my edit, just curious.)
They are under certain circumstances.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Could that be elaborated? The entry states that episodes are acceptable as an entry. Are season to be treated differently?
It was readded again. It's been discussed in a couple of places, but referring to here as the relevant Discussion Page. It does contain the reasons why above, but to summarise - even though a season finale can potentially meet the requirements, it's only if its unusual for the nature of the work it's in. RWBY has been building towards this climax since the beginning, and as the villain points out, it's actually just the beginning of her plans. The season finale is a cliffhanger, not this trope.
For the same reason, individual episodes don't count either. The growing darkness has been building since the beginning. We're not dealing with a light-hearted or mundane show that suddenly goes unusually dark and ends on an unusually sour note. This is a show that was kicked off with a promise of future darkness, has been getting steadily darker as time goes by and promises to continue getting darker in the future. The episodes don't meet the requirements for this trope.
Edited by Wyldchyld If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Even if it's technically a cliffhanger, I feel it still technically counts as a Downer Ending, due to being the end of a season. This also was the case with the second season finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender, where its season finale was technically a climax of the series.
Edited by TheNohrianDarkKnight
There's more to the issue than calling it a "cliffhanger", see the previous posts. While one or two protagonists are down and out (for a period of time), most of the protagonists are still in 'let's keep fighting' mode at the end of the show. That is not a Downer Ending.
Also, the darkness of the show has been steadily growing ever since the beginning, so the 'happy episode ends dark' or 'normally happy show has dark episode' variants of the trope also don't apply.
The protagonists ending the series in a somewhat worse position than the villains isn't this trope. There's more to Downer Ending than that.
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
The below example was removed for being trope misuse, but readded without any edit reason.
The trope is about a story ending without any true victory for the protagonists. On the rare occasions it's relevant to the end of an episode, it's because the episode is an unusually down ending in a normally happy work.
RWBY is still a work in progress, the story has not ended, the villains' plans are only just beginning, and the show has been getting Darker and Edgier from the beginning, with a significant jump in darkness half-way through Volume 3.
RWBY not only doesn't meet the requirement for a work to have ended, but it's darkness quotient means that it doesn't meet the 'unusually down episode in a normally happy work' requirement either.
- RWBY gets one on Volume 3 due to a very bad case of Cerebus Syndrome. By the end of the Volume, Pyrrha, Penny and Torchwick are dead, with Ozpin MIA possibly dead too, has also The Bad Guy Wins due to Cinder fully getting the Fall Maiden's powers, Beacon is destroyed, the international communication Network destroyed, with every single kingdom in the word believing the other one is guilty, team RWBY is dismantled due to Blake running away, Weiss being taken back home and Yang having lost an arm. The end also shows the Big Bad, Salem, for the first time, estipulating her moment as the Hope Crusher. The last moments of the Volume show Ruby, Jaune, Ren and Nora grouping together to go to Haven and look for answers.
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