Most slice-of-life stories, Creme, Tally Ho, have this aspect where failure is not too overblown. It’s not disastrous, but it’s clearly not optimal either. Probably because slice-of-life entails that the stakes be neither too low nor too high. In contrast in the action genre, where the stakes are really ramped up- you can even die if you run out of something, whereas in the slice-of-life stuff I read, you can never get a really, really bad ending. Sometimes a failstate is humorous, sometimes unexpected, sometimes ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’, or even ‘you got your objective, but you lost something important which may be necessary down the line’ kind of failure with caveats, which works out to have a sliding success scale. These are the kinds of failures that still turn out to be engaging. Maybe we can have some surprise bonus endings that have nothing to do with your original aim but are great endings as well. And maybe we can have some endings that aren’t necessarily better but that different people would prefer.
