I was a ten year old kid, reading the middle of the fourth book of the second series of Percy Jackson when I abruptly lost interest in the plot. Things were looking bleak for the protagonist. Some of them were stuck in the underworld. Others were battling for their lives. The forces of evil were looking pretty frickin' strong.
But I realized, with a jolt, that none of this really mattered. Percy and his friends were going to win, no matter how dire the odds seemed. This isn't a spoiler — I never read the final book of the series. But I'm certain that Rick Riordan was going to write a mostly happy ending because almost every YA fantasy novel like that has the heroes win in the end.
This tendency for heroes to always win annoys me. I would find these types of books much more compelling if I thought there was a chance it wouldn't end happily. If even just 10% of books like that ended with the heroes failing, the reader would never really be certain what was going to happen.
But of course, the proportion is lower than that because it's rarely in the writer's interest to write an unhappy ending to this type of action-y book. For one, it's harder to pull of the sad ending. The author needs to subvert the tropes somehow; otherwise the ending won't be satisfying. Who wants to be the jerk that lets the forces of darkness win forever in the world they've created?
Thus, at least in certain genres that depend on suspense,1 happy endings are a collective action problem.
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I don't think tragedies have this problem, interestingly. With a tragedy, knowing the ending makes it more powerful, rather than less, because of the overwhelming force of watching contingent, inevitable, forewarned doom play out. ↩