Kids’ adventure stories have a problem. Every hero needs a good villain, right? And of course, our hero must ultimately defeat the villain. But... what happens then?
It’s a kids’ story, and chances are good the hero is a kid, or possibly a cute animal. We can’t have kids wantonly murdering villains like their grownup counterparts do. (Whether their grownup counterparts should be doing it either is a whole ‘nother question I’m not going to get into right now.) There are several tried and true (or maybe overused and hackneyed — you be the judge) solutions for this problem, which seem to come in and out of vogue over the years.
There’s always the Hug it Out solution, where our hero reforms the bad guy. All the villain ever really needed was a little love (or his teeth pulled out by an amateur elf dentist — you know, whichever).
Anime and manga have a fun variant on this wherein bad guys turn good after the hero defeats them in combat, for no other apparent reason besides getting pummeled (often going so far as to join the good guy team).
Sometimes redemption isn’t an option, though. In that case, some stories go for the Ironic Ending They Deserve, in which our villain meets his demise in a means that he brought about himself through his fatal character flaws. You know, sucked into a turbine by his own cape, trapped in a lamp due to his own lust for power, that sort of thing.
There’s also the fist-shaking ending, in which the villain would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those darned kids. This can end either with our villain thoroughly defeated — handed over to law enforcement, like all the fools who ever went up against the likes of Cam Jansen, or just all played out to the point of complete powerlessness and humiliation, like Cruella deVille in the wreckage of her car — or with the door open for them to try again later (next time, Gadget).
There is one solution that I feel is far more popular than it deserves. It’s been used, to be fair, in some very good movies and stories... but at its base, it’s a cop out. And that is the Cliff of Absolution. This is, naturally, when our hero doesn’t need to kill the villain, because the villain conveniently falls to his or her doom off a cliff.
Death by plummeting is, as it happens, a common enough fate for villains that if I were to launch a nefarious scheme to take over the world, I would make absolutely sure not to go near steep dropoffs of any kind on general principle.
This phenomenon has been well documented in other places, such as the classic website TV Tropes.
I’m sure you can also think of plenty of examples if you stop and think for a minute. Or even a few seconds, really.
The reason I’m not nuts about this method of villain cleanup is that it delivers death as the perfect solution while absolving the hero of any culpability. This might be OK once in a while, but watching guilt-free killing become one of the most prevalent problem-solving methods in popular stories for kids is a little... weird. And, frankly, it’s less satisfying storytelling. I’d rather see our heroes defeat the villain through their own efforts rather than have fate intervene with a convenient tumble off a handy precipice. And finally, villains are often cooler when there’s enough complexity to them that killing them is not the best and neatest solution to the problems they pose.
This is not to say that stories (be they movies, books, games, etc) for kids should never end with the villain getting killed. Sometimes that really is a highly appropriate ending to the story. I’d just like to see more thought put into it than “...and then he falls off a cliff to his death.”
Thus, whenever I’m tempted to wrap things up a little too neatly in my own writing, I just think of the Cliff of Absolution.
And what have we learned today?
No horseplay on the edge of a volcano!
* Note that Gollum wasn’t the villain, and his end was very much the result of character actions and decisions rather than an arbitrary twist of fate. But still, seriously, kids, no messing around up there. And Sauron? Safety railing next time. I’m lookin’ at you.
