Happy Endings

I am pleased by the suggestions for comment-response that are coming in; so far the "mailbag" approach seems to be the most reasonable given my predilections, so I'm leaning that way, unless I can figure out some blogspot gadget that would allow me to do something a bit more precise.

Now to the point of this post. Someone over on 4chan (a wretched hive of scum and villainy, which is probably why I am over there so much) observed that my stories tend to be sort of boring because the villains always win. In fact, let me quote:
The biggest and really only problem with Tabico is that all his/her stories read the same.

People act deliberately stupid, X character never had a chance, and every ending is a bad end.

Why not a story where the characters are smart? Why not a story where the villains don't just pull out a surprise trick? Where they aren't just going to win all along?

Why not a happy ending?

Now, some other anon posted a very intelligent and reasonable response to the question, but I figured I would also dive into it myself. Obviously, the first thing to say is that, like most stereotypes, the claim isn't entirely true - Winter Flesh, for instance, has a classic 'good guys win' happy ending. I daresay some of my other stories do as well. And I try my best to write intelligent characters; they're usually just outgunned, or unprepared, but not stupid.

But, like most stereotypes, there is truth at the core of the statement; I do write stories where the Evil Mind Controllers win. It's true; it happens again and again. And it's going to keep happening, and I do wrestle with the fact that if the reader comes to expect the bad guys to win, the story might get boring.

And there's a simple reason for it - when I come from (yes, 'when'), stories where the mind controller won didn't exist. So I very purposefully set out to create them.

I came up on Saturday morning cartoons. (This dates me, by the way. Saturday morning cartoons no longer exist.) Over and over we'd watch characters get mind controlled - which, for budding fetishist like me, was so confusingly erotic - and then by the end of the episode it was all reversed and everyone was back to normal. It happened in movies, it happened in books, you name it. The heroes always won; the mind control was always defeated, although in adult-focused media such as films the specific individuals who were controlled would generally meet bad ends while the protagonists went on to defeat the evil forces.

(Aside: William Lee once had a 'Saturday Morning Mind Control' site that put together a fantastic list of these cartoon mind control moments. Is that still around? *googles* No, no... hmm, some other person wrote a book with that title. Unrelated. Darn, it appears to be gone. Maybe the Wayback machine... ha! God damn I'm good. Saturday Morning Mind Control, from 2005. Sadly none of the links work, but you can see the list. Good God, it even has a quote from me!)

So when I went to write Mind Control Porn, I wanted to redress that balance. The forces of Evil Mind Control win in my stories, by jingo, partly because IMO that's hotter, and partly because they never, ever did, when I was growing up. It was a balance that needed redressing.

What's interesting to me is that we're now getting a generation of readers who are being exposed to stories like mine (and a lot of other writers) and who don't share that assumption. Who are, in fact, experiencing our stories and wondering why the good guys never seem to win. Who may, ironically, go forth to write stories where the good guys do win because they want to redress the imbalance that I and my ilk have created.

Which is fine. And I will see if I can have the good guys win a little more, just to keep things interesting. Of course, I can also split the difference, e.g. 'Lens'. Did the good guys win? Did the bad guys? Sort of both.

In the end, what's important is that someone resurrects that Saturday Morning Mind Control site.