Since it's Sunday, I expect I won't get much give-and-take on this: people tend to be more talky on Mondays and least talky on the weekends, but I'm at the ref desk and in dire need of entertainment, so I'm putting it up.

Notes on the elements of a powerful ending:

• The characters do not get everything they wanted/needed/fought for - bittersweet, rather than fully triumphant. A sacrifice is all-too-real.



• Not everything is explained - questions are left open for the viewer's/reader's mind to wander about it.

What other things go into creating powerful endings for you? For me, something doesn't always have to be bittersweet - in the book Bridge of Birds, the ending is unabashedly, gloriously, over-the-top fairy-tale, but I think it's because it's piled on so thick that I think it works. But I haven't run across anything like that in manga yet. :D

ETA: And obviously, the focus is more on manga and anime, but bring books in if you want, like I did above. I think Lord of the Rings is the canonical exmaple that everyone by now knows of for the powerful, bittersweet ending, with the notion that sacrifice is real, and that the person who makes the greatest sacrifice is not the person who reaps the most rewards: and that it has to be that way for the sacrifice to mean something.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Because this is such a minefield since we're all in various stages of having-seen and not-having-seen anime and manga, if you discuss particular series, PLEASE USE SPOILER PROTECTION - extra space isn't enough, preferably use color-on-color, like this:

<span style="color: #999999;background-color: #999999">Spoilery text goes here.</span>

which produces:

Spoilery text goes here.

And mention which series you're spoiling first, so we know not to highlight it. :) If you fail to use spoiler protection for plot points, I'm deleting the comment.

ETA: If you can't highlight, it's apparently a glitch in the new LJ Horizon thing. Details here in the comments.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Princess Tutu:

This is the series that got me thinking this way - Duck (and Fakir as well) succeeds in her stated goal, which is to rescue the Prince, but she sacrifices her human self and her chance at human love. Fakir retires to a small cottage with her duck-self, which is a shadow of the happiness that they - and we - wanted.

Fullmetal Alchemist:

Ed gets his brother's body back, at the sacrifice of becoming trapped in our world. (I'm at work right now and got distracted when composing this, so I forgot what else I was going to put here.)

Death Note (spoilers for chapter 58 as well):

DN had a sort of unsatisfying ending, but I'm not sure it could have been any better. Light got to go out like the ranting, raving villain that he was, but there wasn't any real denouement or catharsis. It was more affecting back in chapter 58 when L died, because he learned that he was proven right, as he lay dying - a big sacrifice there, especially since so much of his work was left undone. At the final end, the sacrifice is Mello's, but he's not really been a central sympathetic character for so long, and his deliberate choice of sacrifice is revealed only in flashback, so that it's removed from us emotionally. Near doesn't sacrifice a thing, and yet wins on the backs of other people's sacrifices so he's not an especially sympathetic hero.