valtsv:

btw if you’re going to go down the route of “everyone lives happily ever after, by which i mean gets married and settles down and plenty of kids” at the end of your story then the ONLY right way to do it is to give the villain character a kid as well and have these descendants meet and become best friends before the sins of their fathers inevitably come back to haunt them and turn their innocent childhood friendship into a nightmare psychosexual rivalry in which people are killed

yes yes yes

show the future after the Happily Ever After

embrace the inherent horror in the concept of reproduction and continuation of bloodlines

(there is something deeply disturbing about the idea that “getting married and having kids” is the only way to guarantee that the story truly has a HEA ending)

(and yes this is partly because getting married and having kids does not actually guarantee they’ll stay happily together for life, only makes things messier and more tragic if they don’t)

(but also because, if you are starting from the premise “we need an unambiguous HEA that shows unquestionably that they stay together for the rest of their lives” you gotta accept that the only real option would be “they die at the end”)