One of the things that young writers forget is that without eucatastrophe, catastrophe has no meaning and reduces everything to dust and ashes.
"This." That's what I mean when I say that a story is "going somewhere" with its darkness and drama. I just apparently lacked the word for it
It's the principle behind a Don Bluth movie, basically - you can get away with a lot of horror and darkness so long as your movie has a happy ending, in my opinion because that convinces your audience all the pain and suffering was worth it to get to where the movie is. If you can craft a story such that it ends up being more positive in the end BECAUSE of its dark elements than it ever would without them, that's a story that was "going somewhere" with its drama.
However, there is the other side of this, that you need to keep your audience until the end and the payoff. If I paid for a movie, I probably won't walk out of the theatre, but if I rented a DvD or got a book, then you bet I'll shut it down mid-way through if I think it's crap. That's why I've never managed to watch the End of Evangelion movie. It's gross, confusing and pointless so every time I try to watch it, I just shut it down by the time the flashbacks start. If you can't keep my ass in the seat long enough to see the eucatastrophe, then it might as well not be there, thus why it's important to pepper your story with either enough hints of it, or otherwise enough mini-eucatastrophes to keep people believing in the possibility of an ending that has a point.
The only trouble is that the more you egg people on with "No, really! It'll all be worth it in the end!" the higher the expectations that you set and the more spectacular the failure will be if the ending bombs. There have been very few movies that have actually caused me to get off my seat and yell "Bullshit!" but there are a few. Again we go back to the Legend of Korra. After half a season of failing miserably, Korra finally gets a shining moment of awesome when she takes a lot of beating but still utterly kicks triple-ponytail-guy's ass. It's awesome, it's spectacular, it's a great character moment! And then it turns out he's a bloodbender so he beats her anyway, ties her up and throws her into a box. That moment seriously caused me to punch my desk, and only so I could avoid punching my far more expensive electronics. If it weren't 4AM at the time, you bet I'd have been spewing obstinacies at the screen. All because the story seemed to be promising me that "No, really! All of this hardship will be worth it! See? See how awesome she is?" only to yoink that kind of closure out of my hands and replace it with even more shit.
Right at that point, I stopped caring what the story is "about," because it failed AS A STORY OF ANY KIND so spectacularly that it has become easily the worst piece of television I've seen in my entire life. Pretty much because of that one scene alone, and what it means in the context of the broader story. And by the time the happy ending at the end rolled around, I no longer gave a crap about any of the characters, any of the plot points or any of the ideas. I basically watched the latter half of the season just shaking my head and passing the time, not being able to believe the trainwreck that was happening before me in slow motion. Were I in my right mind, I'd have walked out, simple as that. Because past that point, the series basically lost me as audience. I could have been watching Twilight for all I cared. Because you can only tease people with eucatastrophe so many times before they start calling your bluffs and become psychic for how easy they can read ahead in your script. Once you know that NOTHING will ever turn out right, you basically don't need to see anything from that point on till the end, and you won't care about what happens AT the end.
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This cannot be said strongly enough: You NEED a eucatastrophe in order for a story to even have a point and in order for people to give a rat's ass about it. And yes, it's a common beginner's mistake to never deliver on that, thinking that drama itself is what makes a story good. I've been there, I've thought the same and I've produced horrible garbage, myself. I'm not too proud to admit when my own work sucks, and it does for the most part. But it kills me when I see beginner writers doing the same mistake on major commercial projects. You don't do that!
