How the Sacrificial Ending Ended a Relationship
Sort of.
I just finished up season eleven of hit
television show, Supernatural. If
you’ve followed me up until this point, you’d know that I haven’t been that
impressed with it.
“Then why the hell are you watching it?” you, if you’re anything like my brother, might be wondering.
I don’t know. I sit on Facebook a lot, and I
don’t particularly enjoy that either.
But my past reflections on the series were
definitely based around the low point I had found myself in while I attempted
to get through it. It was good enough, at least, to be better than the gaping
void that filled me, but the negativity and T.V. formulas bothered me to a deep
level.
Now that I’m in a better place, my confusion of
the show’s popularity had waned. I see the humor more, am less put off by
philandering, and don’t struggle to concentrate nearly as much as I used to. I
take things in as they come, and can appreciate the “escape from reality”
storytelling of daytime television.
So while I do appreciate the show’s qualities
more, I stand by my irritation at the vast majority of their endings. Not just
seasons, but each episode. Do the writers know how to tie things up if they
couldn’t just murder everyone? Hell, the main characters die just about as
often as the minors (I was about to say minorities. Apt.) except usually
they’re brought back to life.
In any case, as I get to the final episode of
the season, yet once again they are trying to taunt the audience into worrying
about the brothers’ safety. Of course each
brother wants to be the one who sacrifices himself. Of course he offers to do it without the remotest of fear, despite
that these self-sacrifices have caused a lot more problems for the whole of
humanity than anything else.
I mean, to give credit where credit is due, the
writers never back down from a shit storm their last solution caused, which is
one of the greater qualities of the series. They have no problem hurting their
protagonists, and it’s not like they’re going to get off scot free, even when
you know their noble volunteering won’t actually be the catastrophe otherwise
suggested.
I’ve always hated the self-sacrificing trope,
honestly, long before I even realized it was common enough to be a trope.
It’s really easy for people to say they’ll do
the right thing from the safety of our own homes, but most of us have sat
around at one point thinking, “I would never cheat/do drugs/steal/backstab!”
before reality struck us with a ton of bricks and we very much fucked it up via
poor decision making, selfishness, or unpredictable factors beyond our control.
I always thought I would stand up for people in
need if confrontation happened in front of me, but I didn’t factor in how
something unexpected can hobble you, or how little nuances can make your
planned reaction look over the top and emotional.
For instance, some time ago I watched a video featuring a man
striking his girlfriend in the middle of the street. The “Candid Camera”
situation saw people of all sorts coming to her aid. When the roles were
reversed and the girl was beating the crap of her boyfriend, no one said
anything.
Well, I’m
not going to do that, I thought.
Lo and behold, it’s New Year’s Eve in New York
City. The sidewalk around Central Park is crowded and people are shoving to get
through. One man is shouting loudly—obnoxious, but somewhat comical—about the
stupidity of people trying to get a glimpse of Times Square from 59th
street. His girlfriend (I presume), right behind him, smacked him upside the
back of the head.
“Shut up!” she said. “You’re being a jerk.”
It happened quickly. She hit him twice and kept
moving. Neither of them were angry—irritated, but not hostile. It didn’t sound
hard, but I bet it stung a little. It was certainly bad enough that I might
have said something if the genders had been reversed, but as it was, I didn’t exactly
think about it, I wasn’t involved in the conversation, both of them were bigger
than me, and honestly what would I have said, in New York City, to a couple I
don’t know, when neither of them seemed to be bothered by what had occurred?
I’m not saying it wouldn’t have had an effect;
a great deal of abuse or just toxicity occurs because it has been normalized.
Pointing out that I don’t think it’s appropriate to strike your partner would
have at least caused them to question it. But it probably would have also
gotten me yelled at.
My point?
It’s easy to say that you’d do the right thing
theoretically, that you’d sacrifice yourself for the greater good if came to
that. It’s even easier to have a character do it. And there are people who
really would die for a cause. But I, for one, have never felt tension or
admiration at a character’s offer to make the leap. In fact, not making the decision hard on them
trivializes it in a way. Truly touching in on the smaller sacrifices can be far
more effective than screaming, “I WILL LOSE MY SOUL FOR YOU!” It’s unrelatable.
This exact argument was a straw in the camel’s
back of a break up. I mean, it wasn’t just that, and it didn’t even end it at
the time, but my staunch philosophy and refusal to budge on this subject brought into light for
the first time my biggest flaw in that (and subsequent) relationships.
I can be a surprisingly good doormat when I
want to be. I suppose that one of the reasons I don’t like black and white
mortality or the bluff of self-sacrifice is how important doing the right thing
is to me. How, despite constantly reflecting on my beliefs and appropriate
behavior, I can still do the wrong thing from time to time, sometimes that
being too accommodating.
In any case, five years ago my boyfriend at the
time was a director for a repertory group. He needed a play to fit the cast,
and I offered to co-write it with him. He’d never really written a play before,
but that didn’t concern me. He was a good oral story teller and honest about
his tastes which are pretty good foundations for being a talented writer.
The problem? He really didn’t have a lot of
artistic respect for me.
My first lesson from all this mess is to value
yourself and what you’re contributing. I felt because he was taking a chance on
me—an unpublished unknown—I needed to suck up and attempt to make the play he
wanted.
He was indecisive, passively critical, and
surprisingly closed-minded about anything out of his comfort-zone. To be clear,
I consider him a kind-hearted person, a giver himself, none of his actions
malicious. But he was easily influenced by reputation and I had none.
So we rewrote the entire plot about three
times. If he had had his way, we could have had an upwards of 12 totally
different plays. He couldn’t focus on one concept or incorporate those into
each other. Everything he read or watched inspired him, and I struggled to lead
him away from overt plagiarism. It wasn’t until I took charge and stuck with one
idea (of his) that I liked that we got rolling. I put a little of all his
concepts together, none of them fleshed out enough to be a story alone, and
added characteristics and details that made the piece interested and inspired
me. He wanted to write it together, but also wanted to procrastinate. When we
did eventually sit down, we tried him dictating it to me, but his dialogue was
far too on the nose and insincere to pass. Any criticism shut him down
immediately, even if it was a mere idea.
As we went through, I bent over backwards in
order to make it the play that he wanted, and I will say this: It is one of my
better pieces. He was a plot guy while I’m a character girl. By writing for him
instead of for myself, it forced me to think outside the box, care about areas
I normally ignore, and really flesh it out before starting. I’d say the
concept, the base idea, is mostly his/Stephen King’s, but everything else—from
character to style to events to how the plot actually pieced together—was me.
Despite the enormous amount of frustration and feelings of disrespect, working
on that piece really pushed me into different areas of my abilities.
But the real kicker? The ending.
See, I was more frustrated than he was.
Spending most of my time thinking about what he would like and getting him to
have fun, I allowed for a great deal of dissention and criticism that I did not
supply out. I chose my arguments very carefully and tried to compromise to
write something we’d both like. He did not recognize my efforts.
In fact, the opening night, we were walking to
the theatre and got into an argument:
“You know that I factored in all your ideas? I
wrote the play that you wanted to write!” I said.
“What did you
want to write?”
I reminded him of the concept I pitched on our
first meeting, to which he replied, (and I quote) “Well that’s because your
idea was stupid!”
He did apologize after the show did very well
and thanked me, but the damage had already been done.
I had suspected that he didn’t see eye to eye
with my perception of my compromise when it came down to the few things I put
my foot down on, things I had a staunch artistic reason not to do: plagiarize,
write contemporary, and have the main character falsely go to sacrifice himself
at the end before he is miraculously saved.
Plagiarism was a morality issue, writing contemporary was more of a knowing myself—I really, uniquely struggle to be inspired to write about modern day Earth—but as for the ending? That was the idea I thought was stupid.
A good ending has tension or meaning. It’s
relatable. It’s an analogy. It teaches us. It excites us. It brings out
emotions we struggle to experience on our own. It doesn’t need to do everything,
but it needs to do more than just have a quasi-stakes that induce meta-thinking
and showcase two-dimensional morals. It can’t just be a cliché bang that does
it’s perfunctory job of “and now it looks like the hero might fail!”
I might end up being a hypocrite here depending
on your interpretation. The play did end with a character sacrificing himself,
just not the protagonist. He achieves redemption in his death, to the
heartbreak of the other characters. Some didn’t like the “unhappy” ending, but
I believe it worked.
I have another manuscript in which the love
interest goes to sacrifice himself for the world until the heroine doses him. Then
there’s the one in which the hero throws himself into the arms of his slavers
in order to get vengeance on the man who hurt someone he love. I don't count these because, well of course I don't! But also because I believe the characters have agency. They know what they're in for they find their way out of it. There's tension outside of "Will he die?!" Perhaps one of
these days I’ll end a book with the full blown cliché itself, in which case,
feel free—please—to tear me a new
one.
But I’m not actually
saying that a sacrificial ending is always a bad thing, something to be criticized
or avoid. Just to always remember that most people don’t expect you to go
through with it, and there’s much better ways to show what a good person your
protagonist is then him giving his word for a plan that everyone knows won’t
come to fruition.
There were several
occasions that led me to believe my ex was not going to be the one. I cared
about him deeply. He was good to me on many non-artistic levels. Most of our
issues could be attributed to both of our immaturity. But there were signs
that my opinion and needs weren’t as important as some others’, that we didn’t
see eye to eye on our plans for life. This wasn’t necessarily the moment that I
started to realize we wouldn’t last, but it was the moment that I knew if he
couldn’t at least be open to the validity of my philosophies as a long-term
writer, I wasn’t going to be able to stand him for the next 50 years.
As Buffy the Vampire
Slayer says before she goes to sacrifice her life to save the world, “The
hardest thing in this world is to live in it,” and the hardest sacrifice to
make is the one you have to keep making over and over again. Sacrifice is not always
the best way to solve a problem, and killing your characters might just kill your relationship instead.
