Something that the Alita ending makes me think about is the importance of the ending bringing something new to the table. Which sounds like it should be obvious, but isn't - I think the "safe" ending, the most common kind, is either a complete affirmation or a complete undercutting of a theme that's been obvious throughout the entire story.

Like, suppose there's this story where the plucky heroine is sad because she is a beet farmer and the boy she likes is the Prince and the good guys keep saying/thinking things to the extent of, "It doesn't matter, love conquers all!" while the bad guys are saying, "You will never be able to get along because of class conflict and there will be divorce lawyers with unpleasant facial hair!" The two safe endings are 1) They live happily ever after with a re-stating of the "love conquers all" theme by a major character at the pivotal moment, like a fairly good English paper (see: mostly serious fantasy/romance novels), and 2) The Prince turns out to be kind of a bigoted snot after all and she ditches him (see: mostly comedy fantasy/romance novels).

Which is okay, but it doesn't merit caps-lock and slamming your hand down on the keyboard.

Whereas a h@rdkor! ending would involve hauling up something that hadn't already been discussed to death - it answers a question rather than re-stating a thesis. Like maybe the plucky heroine has also been worried about the political status of the MtF transvestite community in the Prince's magical city (I should kind of be researching okama right now, by the way) and none of the good guys have yet had any sort of a conclusive conversation about the issue. The h@rdkor! ending would in some way haul that up and involve it and say something very deep and important about both that and the major theme.

(And preferably the heroine would turn out to be a Japanese transvestite so that I could then use the book as a primary source. (see: Pokemon Adventures))

And this is relevant to, uh, my original thing about Battle Angel Alita because (assume spoilers all the way through volume 7 of Last Order):

The Big Thing in the series is identity - Alita stumbles around questioning who she was before the amnesia and why she's so good at killing people and why she enjoys it so much. In doing so, she gets involved in politics and worries about abuse of power and stuff, though never as seriously as she does about her own problems.

At the climax, she regains enough of her memory to discover that she had been one of the people she hated, just in time to be thrust into a position of absolute power. (Or technically two of them, I guess.) Her choice is to sacrifice herself, rather than returning to the man she loves and possibly, in time, regaining the rest of her memory and achieving her goal of being the Ultimate Warrior.

This is much more hardcore than if she'd just regained all of her memory and completely accepted/completely rejected her former life - that sort of thing is why people tend to be let down by much-built-up revelations-of-secret-pasts when they finally come. (The Bitterbynde trilogy is what I'm thinking off right off.) And it's why this Alita's Secret Past Revelation works better than the ret-conned new one in Last Order, despite that one being cooler - it's just context and didn't do anything new, particularly since it's still pretty similar the last one, and we've been through some of this already.

(Though I did pretty much hate the epilogue.)

Anyway. That got really long, so I hope there was a coherent point in there someplace.