frenchlucy

I've clarified what I meant by the writer being manipulative with limegreensoda.

The manipulation isn't because she tried to make people think the couple would end up together. It's manipulative because she tried to make her ending more poignant by relying on emotional people.

Edit: I don't like how I've explained this, so I'll try again. Telling her story in this way undermined most of the drama by giving it an inappropriate end. You can also flip that and say she undermined the ending by needlessly telling a moot story. A breakup story does not require a romance story before it in order to be poignant. It was totally unnecessary, and that makes me wonder why she did it. I have to assume that she was trying to stir up the emotions of the viewers and in particular of emotional shippers.

If I 'ship' two characters in a drama that means I'm hoping they get together as a couple. Technically I was hoping they would get together, but shippers tend to be very emotionally invested. Rather than being heartbroken, I was more indignant about the end. I feel the same way about the end of Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Yes it was kind of a good twist, but to end with the main couple not properly together for the sake of a plot twist is an odd choice after all that. Why go so overboard? No pun intended. Sorry for the tangent.

I’m not a shipper, but you don’t end a romance story with a breakup. You end a breakup story with a breakup. This drama was a romance story, but then just as the ship came into dock it suddenly veered off into a breakup story. Fine, but there’s a reason it’s unorthodox. Romances don’t end with happy endings just to make shippers happy. They end that way because that’s how fictional narrative works- by capturing a specific part of reality in a way that is realistic to that particular part and maintaining it to the end. Do you know what realistically happens at the end of a budding romance? Two people get together as a couple. The end. The drama plays out as though it IS reality and not a limited story about a specific phenomenon. A story shouldn’t suddenly change tracks like that. Why? Because then it undermines itself. Suddenly making a romance story a breakup story right at the end is no way to complete the narrative. Reality is an ongoing narrative that hasn’t yet ended, so it gets to have hiccups like that. Dramas don’t.

Also, it seems at best unfair and at worst manipulative of the writer to try and make the ending more poignant by engaging and indulging shippers with the romance. The heartbreak should come from within and not projected onto it from the outside by heartbroken shippers. You don’t need the romance story to feel the tragedy of the breakup story. If you’re telling a breakup story then the tragedy is already built into it. Just pick one or the other. That way viewers are in no doubt of what they’re signing up to, but more importantly the narrative maintains integrity.