Your girlfriend is correct that the bad guy winning at the end limits your audience, and will anger some readers. But it's important that you write your own book, not the book you think you should write. If you really connect with the material, and you execute it well, there are readers out there who will be as passionate about it as you are. A book aimed at please everyone will reach no one. Plenty of classics (and plenty surprise bestsellers as well) break rules that no one else would think of breaking, and it works because it resonates for that particular writer.

With that said, there are things that can make your book easier to swallow. (Strong medicine always goes down easier with a little bit of sugar --a bleak slog that ends in defeat isn't something most people will be up for.) First, foreshadow the ending, and foreshadow it early, so it doesn't come as a complete shock. Second, give your heroes some significant victories along the way --maybe ones that are moral, or emotional, or internal --so there's a sense that they've won, or at least gained something, even though they've lost. In other words, give them some story arc that reaches a satisfying conclusion --maybe the reluctant love interests finally admit their love for one another, just before the end, or something along those lines. Finally, make sure the books have at least a few funnier and happier moments along the way --some glints of light in the darkness.

Personally I'm a big fan of ambiguous endings, so I would end the book right before the bad guy wins, so that people can imagine a happier ending if they want one. But many people hate ambiguous endings even more than sad ones, so take that piece of advice with a grain of salt. (It might even be possible to have it both ways at once: The biopic Korczak juxtaposes a fantasy ending of the title character and his children escaping the Nazis with a heartbreaking voiceover detailing their actual deaths in the gas chambers. It's especially moving because your heart longs for the happy ending, even as your brain accepts that the true ending is the sad one.)

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Chris Sunami‭

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Consider giving a pyrrhic victory to the good guys in the end as an alternative.

A Pyrrhic victory is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. Someone who wins a Pyrrhic victory has also taken a heavy toll that negates any true sense of achievement. (source)

It still resembles a tragedy, it still makes the reader think whether having such an absolute black and white perception of the good guys vs the villains is worth it. I would happily accept a bad-guy-wins ending, if it was meant to make me think how the mistakes of the good guys led to that outcome, and see if I can try to avoid those in my daily life in a way that would prevent such outcome.

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Nikos Hidalgo‭

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You can do it. But the expectation has to be set that this is possible, and it should be written like a tragedy. The market for such a book may be small, but it isn't nonexistent.

Check out the grimdark genre (third law series is an example). People do buy into it and even like it. But it's unlikely to sell as wide as something that has a feel good ending.

Or, go see the musical Hamilton.

As a writer you'll have to be excellent to even have a chance. And putting "the tragedy of" in your title might not be a bad idea.

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Kirk‭

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Yes, provided that it were not inevitable from the outset

Suspense and uncertainty are vital ingredients to many a great novel. When it comes to making a good narrative, the outcome itself is less important than how we get there. Readers are often excited by outcomes which could have gone another way but for a few unlucky occurrences (for a classic case study, see Romeo and Juliet -- Friar Laurence's crucial message to Romeo fails to reach him owing to quarantine occasioned by plague, causing Romeo to think his wife had died... one almost wants to shout at Romeo "do not take the poison -- she is not actually dead!"... and then Juliet wakes just after Romeo had taken the poison... if only she had woken a bit earlier), or by an "underdog" triumphing against the odds (or coming close enough that he/she almost triumphed). However, the "underdog" need not be a "good guy". Many great authors, in fact, have managed to cast the main protagonist as an apparent "good guy" despite having done horrific things (a brilliant example is Tolstoy's novella Hadji Murad, whose eponymous character is undoubtedly a brutal and ruthless killer, but with whom we are made to sympathise, and whose death we are made to mourn).

We can maintain tension by one or more of:

• keeping the outcome unknown until the end (usually associated with a strictly chronological narrative); or
• making the outcome known, but inciting curiosity as to how it happened (usually associated with an epic narrative or with journalism); or
• disorienting the reader by bringing into question the reliability of the narrator(s) (usually associated with first-person narratives).

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w. aderoshoslav‭

5 reputation 0 1 1 0

Yes.

A sterling example is the "Parker" series of books by Donald Westlake, written under the pen name Ricard Stark. Parker is a "bad guy" but the protagonist of the series, and always wins in the end, usually against the odds. These books challenge the notion of what a "bad guy" is, which is what you must do in your books if your bad guy is going to win.

A ruthless career criminal, Parker has almost no traditional redeeming qualities, aside from efficiency and professionalism. Parker is callous, meticulous, and perfectly willing to commit murder if he deems it necessary. (wikipedia)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_(Stark_novels_character) or even better, read a couple of these books.

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Wastrel‭

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It is perfectly fine for your story to end with the "bad guy" winning. Consider for example George Orwell's 1984:

He loved Big Brother

Complete and utter defeat. 1984 is one of last century's masterpieces.

@Wetcircuit mentions tragedy in a comment, for good reason. Tragedy does not necessarily imply that the "bad guys" win, but it does imply the "good guys" lose, or at best earn a Pyrrhic victory. Consider Antigone or Hamlet, or For Whom the Bell Tolls. In fact, tragedy is often considered a "higher", more "literary" form.

Yes, your readers are going to be upset when your characters die or lose. At least, hopefully they will have come to care about your characters, so their death would sadden them. But that is not a bad thing. One feels sorrow when one finishes For Whom the Bell Tolls, but does one go "what a bad, disappointing book?" Never! On the contrary - one is profoundly touched by that sorrow, one appreciates more the fleeting beauty of life through it. @Amadeus apparently looks for entertainment in the books he reads. Me - I look for art. I look for that which would touch me, and take me out of my comfort zone, and make me think. Formulaic "good guys defeat bad guys, then live happily ever after" bores me out of my mind.

Now, there is a question of what you're trying to say with your story. Why does your "bad guy" win? What does it all imply? If all your story suggests is futility, for example, then your readers might well be disappointed. But if your story does have something else in it, like any of the examples I've mentioned above, or countless others, then go ahead.

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Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3

I think Amadeus hit on the core of the issue with doing this - "good" ultimately triumphing over "evil" is by far the more popular archetype, and for very good reasons.

Setting aside the idea of "good guys" and "bad guys" for a moment but thinking about it in terms of "protagonist" and "antagonist", the reader is (typically) intended to sympathize with the protagonist and is invested in them and psychologically shares in their triumphs and failures. When the protagonist wins so does the reader. It's the same mechanism as supporting sports teams, when "your" team wins you feel like a winner too.

That's not to say you can't have failures and losses along the way, if anything they are almost an essential - but ultimately we all want those we support to win.

That's not to say you can't have the antagonists win, but it all comes down to why you want that ending. You need a very strong reason for doing it and the outcome needs to be something that is crucial to the story you are trying to tell rather than a twist for twist's sake. You haven't said why you want the series to end that way but if it's nothing more than "because the good guys usually win" I would say that's unlikely to be enough.

1984 is, as others have mentioned, one of the more famous examples of the "Bad guy winning" formula. As with the other Orwell novel everyone knows (Animal Farm) this is the novel as a political and social commentary. Here it's crucial to Orwell's intent in writing the novel that the protagonist lose because he wants the reader to believe that were the dystopian world of 1984 to become a reality that they would lose too. 1984 doesn't aim to entertain, it aims to teach - the fact that it's wrapped up in a well written novel is just the delivery mechanism for Orwell's political message.

This is an area you need to be very careful operating in, especially in a series. The longer the reader spends with a group of characters the more invested in their "cause" they will become and the more personally they are going to take it's ultimate outcome and the more substantial reason you need to end it with them losing.

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motosubatsu‭

165 reputation 1 37 31 0

No, I don't think it would be okay for a bad guy to win in the end.

Readers don't like it. They read for fantasy fulfillment. Happy endings outsell unhappy endings ten to one; publishers and studios don't like unhappy endings. They want something positive in the end.

Especially from a writer that has no following; if you were already a best-selling author or script-writer they might trust you and publish it anyway, but not if you are starting out.

In a series you can have a mixed ending; basically a draw. The hero doesn't win, but doesn't lose. But even that might not be satisfying.

If you are unpublished, you probably should not be writing a series, unless you intend to write all of it before trying to sell it. Publishers do not want to publish book one with an ambiguous ending if there is no guarantee you will actually finish the rest of the series. And if you are a beginner, they don't want to buy three or five books at once. And if your series has an unhappy ending, they don't want to buy any of it.

I suggest you write a book, even a somewhat long book, that stands on its own, with a reasonably happy ending in which the hero prevails, perhaps at a cost but prevails. The villain is defeated, perhaps escaping with their life and bound to return, but defeated.

The problem here is psychological. Reading fiction is escapism. What are readers trying to escape? The real world, where the bad guys win pretty much all the time! In real life, crime pays. People get away with rape and murder and abuse of others. Drug kingpins, dictators, corrupt politicians destroy innocent lives and live high on the hog without a single regret.

The real world is what we are trying to get away from. We want you to make your story and setting believable, and the dangers feel real, but in the end we don't want the realism of the hero chickening out, or the bad guys prevailing and continuing to create pain, misery and hopelessness. In the end, we want the wish fulfillment fantasy that the good will prevail and the nightmare will end.

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Amadeus‭

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