Alleged Number1KirbyFan
Earn Your Bad Ending makes more sense for video games, because players are more likely to try to earn bad endings than fictional characters. The characters will probably want to avoid a bad ending, even if just for themselves.
Earn Your Bad Ending applied to more general media would likely attract complaining. My interpretation of the current definition would be something along the lines of "character made a lot of strange decisions to the point where they seem to want things to end badly".
The problem is that the name implies a closer relation to Earn Your Happy Ending than there actually is, but without evidence of something like misuse or a duplicate trope it's not enough of a reason to rename anything.
Is there any reason to think the names are causing misuse, though?
I guess the main thing, if you want to do a wick check - are people using Earn Your Bad Ending for non-videogame stuff, and if so, how? And if they are, is that usage something that ought to be misuse?
The page itself, at a glance, has some gamebook examples, but I'd classify gamebooks as "videogame-adjacent" to the extent that videogame tropes can apply to them. And the few other examples that aren't strictly videogames seem like mostly LitRPG works or ones with videogame mechanics (like Homestuck), where videogame tropes can likewise apply. "Story with videogame tropes" is part of the definition of LitRPG, after all.
(The one other thing that might have legit examples that don't seem to be listed is tabletop games - there's definitely some tabletop games with obscure or difficult to trigger bad-ending conditions.)
Edited by Aquillion on Jan 2nd 2025 at 8:36:58 AM

I just noticed that Earn Your Bad Ending and Earn Your Happy Ending are bad snowclones
They sound like they should be inverses of one another, but Earn Your Bad Ending is a video game specific trope about games where the player has to put significant effort into getting the bad ending, while Earn Your Happy Ending is a general trope about stories where the characters have to go through significant hardships before getting their happy ending