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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47844
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47844
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

## A happy ending is about the emotional response the work as a whole evokes in the reader (or viewer).

A sad ending or any other type would be the same. It's the state you've reduced the audience to at the end.

There are no quantitative measures because no one's journey involves ticking boxes. Every story, no matter how simplified, will have good and bad in it. Taking your example of _Cinderella_, Disney and other mainstream versions are pretty much the definition of a movie with a happy ending. Yet even children can see the sad parts.

- Cinderella has to leave the home she grew up in, with her memories of her deceased parents. While most girls of that era expected that to happen upon marriage, in her case she can't go back and visit.
- She must give up on any hope of winning the love of her stepmother and stepsisters on her own merit (any positive gesture they make she will assume (usually correctly) comes from their motivation to please her now that she is a princess destined to be their Queen).
- In some versions (not Disney), the stepsisters are badly mutilated (by their own choice, but it's still sad and awful). In Disney's version, their end may be unsatisfying because they're shown up but not punished for their and their mother's wicked deeds.
- The cat dies. He may have been stuck up and naughty, but murder (arranging for him to fall to his death) is a pretty gruesome end.

Yet we the viewers don't think about any of that. At the forefront is the joy of Cinderella "winning" and finding her true love and getting the hell out of there. Our joy is what makes it a happy ending. Not every viewer will feel the same way, but enough will consider this ending happy that we can safely call it that.

In cases where the work is more complex, with both happy and sad outcomes, we refer to the ending as mixed as well. Your quintessential happy ending usually comes in works for children or families, genres where that's expected (like Romance), or anything aiming for a "feel good" style. While the work can be nuanced or simplistic, it's generally the latter.

Audiences might say such a work "had a happy ending, but it was so sad" or something like that. Sometimes the happy ending style doesn't fit, even if the characters accomplished their goals and/or saved the world.

Original score: 12