Earn Your Happy Ending / Web Original

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• Bagger 288 just wants to find a place where he will be accepted. Unfortunately, Bagger 288 is a ridiculously massive mining machine appropriated dubbed by the internet as "Giant-Assed Saw Thing" that gets chased out of wherever he goes by either the military or protesters. When aliens show up though, he sprouts jet engines and takes the invader down with a Heroic Sacrifice, leaving him damaged to the brink of death and, when he sees all the people cheering for him, happy.
  • The secret ending has the people turning the area around him into a monument, to never forget him and what he'd done for them.
• Broken Saints: despite all the suffering they have had to go through, each of our "broken" heroes is healed in the end, the men by the power of Shandala's love, Shandala by the power of theirs, and the world is saved.
• Counter Monkey: "The Last Ride of Tandem the Spoony." After making it through a horrendously difficult campaign against all odds, Tandem and the only other survivor find themselves with a ship that can cross dimensions, so they first go home to resurrect their friends, and then everyone was last seen sailing away to whatever adventures await them next.
• Dragon ShortZ: after spending the entirety of Dragon Ball Z Abridged as the Butt-Monkey of the Z Warriors, died once, lost his girlfriend to the guy that killed him, and found himself increasingly irrelevant as a mere human Can't Catch Up to the power of the Saiyans, Yamcha finally gets thrown a bone as, while he is fired from the baseball team he's on (for being too good), he's also given a 20 billion zeni payout and can still take sponsorship deals, which he uses to invest in the biggest drink company in the world and a successful restaurant franchise, making him one of the richest men in the world.
• Matt McMuscles: Wha Happun? covers disastrous productions/releases of video games and some movies and these almost always end with a Downer Ending regarding a hated release, layoffs, studio closures, etc. However, there are the occasional exceptions where these stories end on a positive note. In particular, GoldenEye (1997), Demon's Souls, Doom (2016), and Metroid Prime, in spite of the insanely long and difficult journeys it took to get to release and the complete lack of faith from everyone, all ended up becoming seen as landmark games that either had a massive impact on their entire genre (with at least one creating a whole new subgenre), or saved their franchises from potentially fading into irrelevancy in the mainstream consciousness, or both.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion R (Prime ending)
• When The Nostalgia Critic fell into pretty epic depression in his "Commercials Special", he got to win by doing Awesome Music and be happy for the first time in a long while.
  • As that didn't take, leaving him to have a Despair Event Horizon over how horrible life has been, To Boldly Flee lets him be a hero and Die Happily Ever After, having made a Heroic Sacrifice to become the universe.
• Summed up spectacularly with The Nostalgia Chick's review of Don Bluth's Thumbelina, where the despairing heroine is surprised to find her prince Cornelius alive and well — "Things are impossible! Things are... oh! Hi dead boyfriend! Thanks for coming along and proving my pessimism wrong and not making me work for that happy ending!"
• Robo-san and Wan-chan: After being eaten by a giant living cloud, being thrown into water by a giant, multi-eyes Rock Monster, and following a path that leads him back to his ship, Robo-San FINALLY locates Wan-chan.
• RWBY: By the end of Volume 5, after the four heroines have undergone a lot of personal trauma and been through a number of arduous battles and a major close call with Weiss, they have saved Haven Academy and recovered the Relic, representing their first victory against Salem's forces. Oh, and best of all, they're finally reunited.
• Sailor Nothing is a huge Deconstruction of the Magical Girl genre that has the main character being repeatedly broken, her friends not faring much better, and the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism generally getting cranked up all the way to the Cynicism side, yet it manages to end on a happy note, with the complete defeat of the Yamiko and every character on the good guy's side surviving and earning the normal lives they very much deserve.
• SHARE MY STORY: The protagonist moves on from his break up with Clara, blocks her number from his phone, gets a new hobby in stand-up comedy to increase his confidence and even gets a few girls interested in him. It gives him hope that someday, he will find a girlfriend who will not cheat on him.
• Sir Ron Lionheart, in his Let's Play of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, went out of his way to set everything right, and we mean every last sidequest. It was a long haul, but it was worth it to see a dawn of a new day.
• Most of the time, a Character Arc in Survival of the Fittest has a Bittersweet Ending at best, due to the fact that almost the entire cast will die. However, in version four STAR comes in to rescue students as long as they're not actively playing the game and come forward for it. As a result, this was how a portion of characters' storylines ended.
• The two main characters in There she is!! go through a number of tribulations before they get to their happy ending.
• In the interactive poem Today I Die, this is used as a metaphor for overcoming depression. The protagonist must swim with a boulder tied to her waist.
• TP: The toilet paper roll manages to escape from the Disgusting Public Toilet he's been set up in, losing only a single roll of his paper to Earl in the process. In the outside world, he's found by a girl who throws him in the air, which he greatly enjoys. His paper unravels behind him, which causes him to age to near-death before he dies smiling happily while looking up at the sun from inside a flowerbed.
• Year 3 (episodes 50-70) of Welcome to Night Vale. After a year of Cecil growing increasingly more depressed, unhappy, and discontent to the point of nearly leaving town, a misunderstanding that nearly cost him a close friendship, and desperately missing Carlos, everything is resolved in one night. Carlos returns to stay, Cecil and Dana's friendship is on the mend, Night Vale has a wonderful new opera house, and Hiram is finally jailed for his crimes (except for Violet.) The only person left unhappy is Kevin.
• Most of Wildbow's Worm is very dark, and it's a very rough ride for the characters, especially the protagonist. But in the end, the world is saved and Taylor survives with a chance to start her life over.
  • Pact by same author is very rough to main characters too, and even darker than Worm, but its ending somehow even better: Blake turns into a sparrow and spents his time with Green Eyes and Evan; Rose presumably finds sanctuary from Lawyers in the Abyss and starts hurting them through writing and disseminating diabolic texts.
• This◊ recounting of a person playing a Darker and Edgier tabletop game, which was set firmly on the deepest Cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism (to quote the story, "if somebody asked me for help with their sister who was being mugged, it was a hook to mug me") and featured two notable mechanics: corruption points, representing how evil a character had become; and a Limit Break that could be activated when your character was under extreme emotional stress, allowing the use of some powerful abilities exclusive to that state. The person in question played an All-Loving Hero fisherman who continued being kind and friendly even though Being Good Sucks in this world and everybody including his own party members would take advantage of him at every available opportunity. Eventually they reached the Big Bad, who had used an Artifact of Doom to ascend to godhood at the cost of multiplying his corruption points by 100; as he had 750 corruption points already, his godly form was described as being horrifying enough to make an Eldritch Abomination scream and run the other way. Just when all hope seemed lost, the player was able to revive and heal himself through a few lucky rolls, and then managed to successfully activate his Limit Break for the very first time in the campaign (he had always rolled badly every time he tried to activate it before). He activated one of his Limit Break abilities, which transformed him into a giant Sea Serpent and gave him a combat multiplier equal to 1.5 times the corruption points of the most corrupted thing on the field. Since the Big Bad had so many corruption points, this gave him a damage multiplier of 112,500, allowing him to kill the Big Bad in a single hit. Even better, he then grabbed the crystal the Big Bad used to become a god and used it himself. The GM announced that he had become the new Big Bad, but the player disagreed, revealing that his fisherman had 0 corruption points. Since 0 times anything is still 0, the fisherman became a God of Good, and his influence caused the world to slowly but surely become a nicer place.

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