http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GainaxEnding

Patrick McGoohan on the intentionally confusing ending he created for on the intentionally confusing ending he created for The Prisoner (1967) "I wanted controversy, arguments, fights, discussions, people in anger waving fists in my face saying, 'how dare you?'"

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What do you mean, "The End"?!

A Gainax Ending is an ending that doesn't make any sense, or does make sense but is hidden under enough Mind Screw to not have an easy explanation. This is usually a deliberate form of Mind Screw or intended as a Sequel Hook to a sequel that was never made. If it's not done intentionally, it's often the result of the creators rushing to meet a Cosmic Deadline.

For whatever reason, after watching a Gainax Ending, you won't have any idea what happened. After rewatching it, rewatching the entire series, discussing it with other fans, looking up the meaning of the symbolism, and subjecting the entire thing to a comprehensive literary analysis, you still might not have any idea what happened. If you're lucky, then there will be some kind of emotional or symbolic resolution even if it doesn't actually explain what happened to the characters, and you'll be left with the sense that the series as a whole was more deeply thought out than it seemed before. If you're unlucky, then you'll be left with more questions than when you started and the sense that the series as a whole has been voided of the meaning you once read in it.

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A Gainax Ending frequently involves bizarre and nonsensical Genre Shifts, Fauxlosophic Narration, and/or Faux Symbolism, and may very well cause Ending Aversion. For an aborted Sequel Hook, you might encounter a Diabolus ex Nihilo (where a new villain appears from nowhere, does something villainous, and then disappears again) or No Ending in the form of an ambiguous Cliffhanger. Either way, it would have been addressed in the sequel... had there been one.

In many cases, a Gainax Ending is merely an attempt to Take a Third Option, rather than resolve a story with a Happy Ending or a Downer Ending; this ending steps out of the narrative entirely and implicates or invites the viewer to make sense of it. From a creator's standpoint, this makes the work, when done right, something that has far reaching consequences rather than merely something seen and consumed and discarded.

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The Trope Namer is Studio Gainax, who became associated with this trope after the infamous ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Compare No Ending and Ambiguous Ending, which also contain an at least partial lack of resolution, Trippy Finale Syndrome, which has similar imagery but actually makes sense (it's explicitly a Dream Sequence, a Battle in the Center of the Mind, takes place in Another Dimension, etc), Esoteric Happy Ending, an ending that is considered happy despite all the evidence to the contrary, and Mind Screw (and associated tropes), or a Widget Series, where it's not simply the ending but the work overall that evades explanation. For when the ending ends up changing the entire scenario, see The Ending Changes Everything. Not to be confused with Gainaxing.

And, as a last word for this entry, we'd just like to say that the parrot has been squawking for hours and it is annoying the neighbors, so please feed him his cracker and be done with.

As this is an Ending Trope, expect unmarked major spoilers from here on but don't expect them to make any sense!

Examples:

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Asian Animation

At least two episodes of Simple Samosa have endings that come off as surreal, even by the usual standards of the show. In "Comic Book", Dhokla, Jalebi, and Vada all laugh at the story about Samosa they worked on when, out of the blue, a warning is given to the town of Chatpata Nagar and the townspeople discover a samosa dinosaur who wants four people for some unexplained reason. The dino turns out to be Samosa himself, and just to reiterate, this isn't in Samosa's friends' story and isn't even real in-universe because it turns out to be the result of Samosa writing the episode. The scene ends with the show's theme song playing as if nothing weird just happened. "Kasturi Khushbu" ends with Samosa visiting a United Nations meeting where everyone gives him a ton of consecutive farts. This collection of toots turns out to be the scent Samosa was looking for throughout the episode. Suddenly, Samosa winds up almost completely naked on the grass, and his friends see him sniff his own fart before Jalebi says Samosa didn't need to spend so much effort looking for an aroma he had with him the whole time.



Blogs

Invisible Games is a rather straightforward presentation of various fictional games that have supposedly been created over the course of the last century or so. The final entry, however, is an abrupt departure in style. Presented as a follow-up to a non-existent previous entry, the last entry is a surreal first-person tale filled with tantalizing hints about a mysterious sect of women who appear at the homes of the terminally ill. The artifacts they bear are in fact the components of a seemingly supernatural virtual reality machine in which the patients immerse themselves completely in the days prior to their death. The author eagerly anticipates death for the chance to experience the wonders of such a machine and considers dying without access to one to be a tragic fate akin to martyrdom. But the author laments that there is still work to be done and that a storm that has gone on for years is now raging outside. No other updates were ever made.

Comic Books

Comic Strips

In one series of Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown watches the sun rise, and it looks like a baseball. Then the moon does too, and he starts seeing baseballs everywhere. Then he gets a rash on the back of his head that makes it look like a baseball. His pediatrician suggests going to summer camp to take his mind off baseball; because he's embarrassed by the rash, he puts a paper sack over his head. At camp, someone half-jokingly suggests nominating "the kid in the sack" for camp president, and before he knows it, Charlie Brown is practically running the place, everyone following his advice and looking up to him. Eventually, though, he decides to take off the sack - becoming his old self again - and watch the sun rise to see if he's back to normal... And it looks like Alfred E. Newman's head with the words "What me worry?" under it. "Good grief!" cries Charlie Brown at the ending that made no sense.

Fan Works

Higher Learning: Inverted. The prologue makes no sense after reading the story. Shinji, Asuka, Rei and Misato are gathered around a dying Kaoru, who reflects about each one of them and wonders if he has been successful and Shinji will not have to do the same thing he did. That scene feels like foreshadowing, but it is not foreshadowing anything. That scene never happens. Those characters never are together in the same scene, Kaoru does not die, and his thoughts make no sense given what happened .

. Darker and Edgier Disney fanfic Her Haunted Mansion: Emily's Journey (a prequel of sorts to a previous, completely mindscrew-less fanfic by the same author, Her Haunted Mansion) has four chapters be totally believable backstories for the character we met in Her Haunted Mansion. Our main character is Emily (the name commonly assigned to the Haunted Mansion Attic Bride ghost, although she doesn't become a bride until Chapter 5), who had all the characters in question as love ones before Master Mickey apparently took them away from her (although we know or are supposed to know from Her Haunted Mansion that he's actually saving them); she always tries to stop him, and always he enigmatically replies 'You're a little early, Emily' with a wide grin. When Chapter 5 came, everyone expected all these mysteries would be solved and Emily would understand her mistakes about Master Mickey. But no. Ooooh, no. Emily wakes up after having been murdered, and goes inside Mickey's mansion. In the attic, she meets a doppelgänger of herself, ready to be married, whom she brutally murders with an axe. She then climbs down into the ballroom where Minnie and Mickey's wedding is about to be celebrated. Everyone calls Narrator!Emily "Constance" (the name of another, axe-wielding ghost bride character in The Haunted Mansion). The whole chapter is told Through the Eyes of Madness (specifically, those of Constance), and she's getting battier and battier as the chapter progresses; from the mess of the last paragraphs, it appears Emily murdered everyone in the ballroom (even her best friends) because they wouldn't call her Emily. ''All that had been foreshadowed is never explained (Mickey flat-out denies having ever said 'You're a little early, Emily!' in the first place) and why Emily-going-mad/Constance-believing-herself-to-be-Emily/whatever-the-heck-happened happened is never explained. A Mind Screw Driver Retroactive Fanfic was luckily written, available here .

(a prequel of sorts to a previous, completely mindscrew-less fanfic by the same author, Her Haunted Mansion) has four chapters be totally believable backstories for the character we met in Her Haunted Mansion. Our main character is Emily (the name commonly assigned to the Haunted Mansion Attic Bride ghost, although she doesn't become a bride until Chapter 5), who had all the characters in question as love ones before Master Mickey apparently took them away from her (although we know or are supposed to know from Her Haunted Mansion that he's actually saving them); she always tries to stop him, and always he enigmatically replies 'You're a little early, Emily' with a wide grin. When Chapter 5 came, everyone expected all these mysteries would be solved and Emily would understand her mistakes about Master Mickey. But no. Ooooh, no. Emily wakes up after having been murdered, and goes inside Mickey's mansion. In the attic, she meets a doppelgänger of herself, ready to be married, whom she brutally murders with an axe. She then climbs down into the ballroom where Minnie and Mickey's wedding is about to be celebrated. Everyone calls Narrator!Emily "Constance" (the name of another, axe-wielding ghost bride character in The Haunted Mansion). The whole chapter is told Through the Eyes of Madness (specifically, those of Constance), and she's getting battier and battier as the chapter progresses; from the mess of the last paragraphs, it appears Emily murdered everyone in the ballroom (even her best friends) because they wouldn't call her Emily. ''All that had been foreshadowed is never explained (Mickey flat-out denies having ever said 'You're a little early, Emily!' in the first place) and why Emily-going-mad/Constance-believing-herself-to-be-Emily/whatever-the-heck-happened happened is never explained. The, admittedly already pretty weird, MLP fanfic The Many Secret Origins of Scootaloo at first seems to end on a relatively normal note that more or less raps up the story... then for no reason what so ever, we cut to an alternate universe where the whole story was a dream Nightmare Moon was having, she's married to Discord, Twilight is their infant daughter, and Scootaloo is Twilight's doll.

The Half Life 1 mod Half-Life: Residual Life has two endings as it may be, both of which are more than a bit confusing. No matter what route you choose to get to the ending, the game seems to restart right as player character Sora Kim is on the Black Mesa tram (complete with the first chapter title appearing, Impossibility Dream), implying that the whole game was All Just a Dream... until the tram takes a different route than before, taking Sora to a previously unseen location, and after it stops a guard appears out of nowhere and tells her (using audio of the G-Man's) that she's "not supposed to be here". After the credits, it opens back up to Sora in a some sort of abandoned building in the middle of nowhere devoid of anyone aside from a scant few monsters. Then she finds and boards a mysterious alien ship and leaves. The end.

Untitled Displaced Fanfiction has a Gainax Ending in both part one and part three. Part one suddenly transitions from the main character Jonah presumably dying because Fluttershy kicked him to a future in which the mane six all have human bodies. Fluttershy then beheads a man implied to be Jonah. The second entry tries to do a Mind Screwdriver but elements such as Rainbow Dash saying "What have you done?" and the place everyone meets in being called "Shibuya" are retconned. The third part of the trilogy also has a Gainax Ending were Jonah goes back in time using Discord's magic, fights Samson (the Biblical character) and then laughs at Delilah for being thin. The story then abruptly ends.

Films — Animated

The Twelve Tasks of Asterix delivers a pretty jarring example of this trope, considering the movie is based on a comic book series that's usually at least roughly historically accurate (it is a parodistic/satirical series after all). The movie ends with a group of Gauls from a small village ending up being considered gods, thereby overthrowing Caesar note who is actually both an anachronistic figure (there WASN'T yet an emperor during the time Caesar conquered Gaul) and a mashup of Caius Julius Caesar and his adoptive son Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus (short: Caesar Augustus) and gaining rulership over the entire Roman Empire. After his companion Obelix leans on the fourth wall by pointing out the historical inaccuracy of this turn of events, Asterix proceeds to break it, explaining to Obelix that everything is possible in animation. Upon hearing this, Obelix magically teleports to the island of pleasure, which the pair had visited earlier in the movie. Oh my...

and gaining rulership over the entire Roman Empire. After his companion Obelix leans on the fourth wall by pointing out the historical inaccuracy of this turn of events, Asterix proceeds to break it, explaining to Obelix that everything is possible in animation. Upon hearing this, Obelix magically teleports to the island of pleasure, which the pair had visited earlier in the movie. Oh my... In the South Korean animated film Dino Time, one of the rocks in the kids' town has a mysterious carving on it, dating back to Cretaceous period. Mysterious because no humans were around then. The kids end up going back in time and at one point the main kid decides to make a carving to tell their parents in the future how to get the time machine to work, but he gets distracted when his sister is kidnapped and ends up not making the carving. At the end of the film, his mom explains they got to them in the time machine by looking at the carving, leaving the main kid to wonder how the carving got there in the first place.

The last twenty minutes of The Three Caballeros consist of Donald Duck entering Panchito's final birthday gift, a photograph of Mexico City at night. There he encounters singer Dora Luz's floating head and becomes smitten with her, before being accosted by flashing lights and images of women in bathing suits, while Panchito occasionally pops up to sing the title song with Jose Carioca and another Donald. He then finds himself in a flower patch and meets Carmen Molina, before being transported to a desert where he sees Molina using a baton to bring cacti to life. This scene abruptly ends and the film moves into the final "bullfighting" scene, with Panchito as the matador, Jose as the audience members (all of them), and Donald in a bull costume studded with fireworks. The filmmakers later claimed that the section (referred to as "Donald's Surreal Reverie") was intended to represent the idea that "love is a drug".

In The Spongebob Movie Sponge Out Of Water, after the plot has concluded, the talking seagulls begin to reprise their version of the SpongeBob theme, in a stylistic Flash animation. However, Bubbles reappears and expresses his disdain for the song , which inexplicably leads into a rap battle between them.

, which inexplicably leads into a rap battle between them. The Czech short film Club of the Discarded ends with the all the movie's mannequins gathered around a television screen and watching it. They are watching television static.

The ending of Bratz Kidz: Sleepover Adventure. Holy shit. When the Bratz pressure new kid Ginger to make her story scarier, she gets overwhelmed and runs out of the room, prompting the Bratz to try and look for her so they can apologize. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, they can't find her or her parents anywhere, it turns out the house is actually abandoned, and Ginger's family was heavily implied to be Dead All Along. The Bratz then run out of the house to discover the characters from their stories have become real. Then when they try to go to their own houses, Ginger and her parents are at the door, repeating the words they said before the sleep-over began. The Bratz are understandably freaked out and flee each time they see this, but when they go to Sasha's house, Ginger's family is suddenly scared to the point of fainting by their presence, and it turns out that the Bratz have inexplicably become the monsters from Jade's story, act like they've always been monsters, and find somewhere to sleep. And that's it.

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Musicals

Pink Floyd's The Wall Justified, as the viewpoint character spends the entire movie gradually descending into total madness. He only thinks that ending happened.

Our House the Madness musical: was always going to have two endings due to the parallel universes plot. However, even after these are resolved via dual Karmic Twist Endings there's still time for a third 'ending' to turn it all into a "Shaggy Dog" Story (done by introducing a third option in the life-changing event at the beginning of the play which would mean none of the things we've just been watching happened at all.) Oh well. Song and dance number!

P.D.Q. Bach: Einstein on the Fritz: The supposedly-lost musical is a parody of Einstein on the Beach, an opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, which is notorious for lasting four and a half hours without plot. Summarized thusly: Einstein feels a sneeze coming on, and takes his handkerchief from his pocket. In Act II, he realizes that he is not going to sneeze after all, and he puts his handkerchief back in his pocket in Act III. This is the summary of the epilogue supposedly tacked on by PDQ Bach: Einstein goes down to Hades to bring back his cousin Sophie, avenge the murder of his brother at the hands of Tsar Ivan the Inside Trader, slays the dragon guarding the entrance to the Golden Cave, seduces the Count's daughter on the eve of her wedding, and unites Italy.



Puppet Show

Radio

Most The Goon Show episodes have no clear ending, unless everyone dies. The grand finale actually dissolves into random gibberish as the entire show comes to a crashing halt, and it doesn't seem atypical. As the announcer often observed, "It's all in the mind, you know." This is mainly seen in later episodes, probably because Spike Milligan himself had no idea how to end them. Earlier surviving episodes tend to have fairly logical plot resolutions, for a certain definition of logic.

Theatre

The grand finale of the musical Celebration involves the old villain (and the audience) being bombarded with portentous symbolism until he collapses, though not before revealing that he and his youthful rival are one and the same.

The Threepenny Opera ends with Macheath ("Mack the Knife") about to be hanged for his many crimes. As he mounts the gallows, Peachum, who has orchestrated his execution because Macheath has married his daughter against her parents' will, suddenly shouts "Stop!" and addresses the audience. In order that the audience not have to face a sad ending, a happy one has been arranged. The chorus breaks into the song "The Mounted Messenger", as police commissioner Tiger Brown (Macheath's old army buddy and his OTHER father-in-law), in full uniform, comes in riding a stick horse, and reads a proclamation from Queen Victoria, in honor of her coronation, ordering Macheath freed, awarded membership in the Order of the Garter, a castle (at "Mucking on the Creek, Sussex") and an annual income for life... and extending "her royal felicitations" to all "the lovely wedding couples here assembled" (the thieves, beggars and whores)

The Pirates of Penzance: The climactic scene culminates with the pirates convincing the authorities not to punish them by declaring how much they love Queen Victoria. This leads to the entire cast singing the Queen's praises.

Very similar with Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims. For two hours we watch Loads and Loads of Characters, and we seem to finally figure out that, right, the French lady is in love with the Frenchman who flirts with the Italian lady who's secretly loved by the Englishman, while the Polish widow is torn between her two admirers when the plot cuts off for the whole lot to arrange a concert in King Charles X's honor.

Web Animation

Webcomics

The ending of the Tempura Panda arc in Parasite Galaxy had three characters figuring out they were all actually the same person who then became a duck made out of duct tape. While the comic is still ongoing, the ending to that arc can count as a Gainax Ending.

Web Original