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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46309
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46309
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 6