Poll of the Day > Do you like endings that have an ambiguous morality?

(+) Yeah! (+)

The idea that you could side with either view and not necessarily be wrong about the message of the story?

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Yeah. Theyre fine...
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absolutely, SMT is basically built on that

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Morality is incredibly subjective, so I view most endings as being at least somewhat morally ambiguous.

Unless you're dealing with a story where the villain is 100% cartoon evil with no redeeming features of any kind and is entirely motivated by the desire to make everything terrible and everyone miserable solely for shits and giggles, it's usually fairly easy to shift perspective and make the heroes the villains and the villains heroes. Or to at least blur the lines so that things are less "Black and White" and more "Grey and Gray".

Especially in stories that are trying to be at least somewhat realistic, because that's what real life IS. Very few people go around thinking of themselves as the villain of someone else's story - most people see themselves as the heroes of their own story. Even when they're kind of terrible.

We're mostly just fooled into accepting the protagonist of any given story's perspective on what is right or moral because they're the protagonist, and we constantly see events through their eyes, and tend to want to see them win (especially if they're presented as being sympathetic or cool), but their world-view isn't necessarily objectively correct (or correct at all).

If anything, most stories tend to have to give the villain "kick the dog" scenes specifically to prevent this sort of realization - that the "hero" has just done epic levels of property damage or helped cost innocent lives or otherwise made things so much worse in the process of stopping a villain who might not have been all that evil in the first place. And that in some cases, literally everything would have been much better off if the hero had just stayed home.

Plenty of stories where the heroes win and it seems like everyone's going to live happily ever after can be countered with "Yeah, but none of that would have been a problem in the first place if the hero hadn't been stupid/screwed up" or "If the villain had completely won the world probably would have been better off" or even "It's a short-term victory but in the long-term people are going to be just as miserable or outright dead for different reasons".
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I don't have a problem with them, but it depends on execution of course.

There are also games where every ending is bad is some regard so you're choosing which one you think is least bad.
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DarkKirby2500 posted...

There are also games where every ending is bad is some regard so you're choosing which one you think is least bad.

So Far Cry, then?
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