Ambiguous endings
 

I'm not sure where exactly to put this, but I decided on here since it mentions particular series and films. (EDIT: Dammit, General might have been better since it strays from being about any series themselves, but it's too late now.)

Some people just can't tolerate ambiguity, period. That's one thing. Personally, the execution makes a lot of difference. The main issue is always what you want your audience to take from the ending. To the extent that you achieve that goal, your ending is a success.

I don't mind the way Fight Club ended. Then there's the utter bullshit that is End of Evangelion. It's a testament to its ability to anger me that I still feel it couple of years later. I think what got me was the sheer amount of contempt it possessed toward the viewer. Even without knowing the events behind it, it was clearly more of an extended middle finger than an actual attempt to finish a story. (Yes, I hate you too, Hideaki Anno.) It wasn't the ambiguities.

My endings usually maintain some degree of ambiguity, for two reasons: 1) it seems like the more natural course, and 2) it may stick with the read past the time it would take to say, "Oh, that's nice. ...I wonder what's for lunch?" Love it or hate it, it sticks with you, which is why I still recall EoE to be mad at it. When I left one of my old HS stories, the main character may or may not have sailed off the end of a cliff. It annoyed a lot of people (and I admit it was a little fun; I guess it's not so much from the other side). That wasn't really the point though. There was just no more to it. The story of her wild ride has been told. Her life, if it continues, will presumably go on to be a quaint existence that doesn't really make a story. I think I had wanted to do a Catch-22-ish thing, with Yossarian missing the knife by inches, which I always thought was a wonderful ending, but I'm not sure it worked.

Personally, I thought the ambiguity of the ending (which wasn't as ambiguous as people see, product of the mindfuck and vagina orgy fest which preceded it) heightened the meaning of the ending, which was Shinji's final acceptance that running away from hurting situations doesn't solve anything in the end.

For example, what I took from the final scene was that as Shinji finally coming to terms with the fact that only Asuka and himself were willing to come back from the LCL sea (look at the tombs before that happens: it seems that they have been in there for quite a while, and Misato's cross is already rusting). Shinji has to strangle Asuka to accept the physical contact between him and her, but, quite ironically, she reaffirms the same thing by gently touching his cheek and then spewing out the kimochi warui line. These two people have been very damaged by their loneliness, and when they finally accept they do not have to be burdened by it, they both are horrified by the realisation that they have each other. Character wise and given the circumstances, I thought it was the best way for them to end their rollercoaster character development.

What's my point with all of that? That knowing what happens after their self-discovery is irrelevant, because we already know what's important about them, and that is their birth as new humans, both physically and spiritually.

God, my brain hurts after writing that. Stupid Anno.

I think the problem people have with the ending is that they see it as grim and downbeating, when in fact it gives the opposite message about Shinji and Asuka. Then again, I've seen that movie around fifty times, so I may be a bit biased after dwelling its innards like a surgeon. For more information about my point of view about the ending, see this.

Exactly.

I guess when I refer to the end of the series, I mean the movie in general, or at least the second half of it. The characters spend the entire series being crippled by the impulse to merge with each other, and it seems like sort of a romantic ideal... When they get it, though, it looks so incredibly bleak. And Shinji ultimately seems to reject it, which in its way is optimistic. The message is there, it's just served with a heavy dose of "Oh, you want a 'real' ending, do you? I've got your ending right here." After this amount of time, I'm forced to admit that I do more or less like the series, I just got impatient with that. (The whole thing with Rei/Lilith falling to pieces, for example... I got the sense that they were trying to do it in the most graphic way possible; it did not need to take as long as it did or involve all the nice little details like having Unit 01 burst out specifically through her eye.)

FYI, you can always just request a move.

Granted the response will usually be "fuck you, no." But that doesn't mean we won't move the thread, we just enjoy telling you guys "fuck you, no."

I actually found the last two episodes of Evangelion to be generally more enjoyable and understandable than End of Evangelion.

In the movie, everything just got obscured by pointless symbolism and Shinji angst.

In that way I suppose the TV ending is more fitting to what you want, but half the amount of people shit over that because it was made by a bunch of guys with Parkinson on Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Though, to be fair, had Anno had enough money to continue the series the way he wanted, the last two episodes would have been pretty much the same as the movie.

I liked the postmodernism of showing how humanity was reborn quite literally by that bleak atmosphere -that the culmination of Shinji's character development came as a result of the angstiest of time, that he got hope to live amongst all that suffering he had provoked himself and decided to go on... that's some deep shit. Really deep shit.

I think this is something we will never agree upon.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned "The Sopranos..."

I think that the Sopranos way is how Seinfeld ought to have ended.

I just felt sorry for Shinji I mean living a life where Asuka is the last woman on earth. I wouldn't wish that on anyone

That crossed my mind, but I decided it wasn't that pressing.

The Sopranos might have been how this train of thought started. There are people who continue to express their hatred for that episode, but I never saw it, or the rest of the series, so I can't really match their emotional response. I may have already spent most of my "being angry about show endings" energy on Eva, though, anyway.

The problem with the Sopranos' ending wasn't so much the ending itself as that it was a transparent ploy to make you forget how unbelievably shitty the last season and a half (and a half) had been. The random anticlimax ending would have pissed me off like two seasons earlier, but after like 18 episodes of Phil's gay romance on the run and AJ being ever more cocknoxious it was like by all means, just be over.

Re: Evangelion's last two eps, I watched like five minutes of the first one and went like "okay so it's shinji talking to himself, fast forward to something happening?" and kept fast forwarding and then all of a sudden I was at the end of the next episode and it was like "okay, fuck that noise." Internal revelations just aren't meaningful unless they're validated by external actions. I mean for all we know Shinjers woke up from his crazy fever-dream and said "oh wait being happy and shit is hard, I'm gonna go snivel and cry some more."

Which based on anything I've heard of End of Eva, is basically what happens.

The Seinfeld ending was kind of the contra-stupidity to what this thread is about, in that it tried to establish a dramatic, concrete ending for a show that had up until then been eight seasons of glorious unadulterated Nothing. Well, six seasons of glorious unadulterated nothing, one reasonably good season and one season that just sucked, but you get the idea.

Let's see... Oh yeah, I refuse to believe that Spike died at the end of Cowboy Bebop. But secretly I know I'm just kidding myself. It's actually weird in that I honestly don't think he ever really seemed fatally wounded, presumably a guy who'd been through all manner of physical trauma over the course of the series could have recovered from like, a couple gunshot wounds, it's just that dramatically, every single element of the story said "this is Spike's time to go." He had fulfulled every purpose that his character could meaninfully serve, and so neither wanted nor needed to go on.