TNO death was tragic but it was kind of relief, it's like "Fuck, I done everything in my life(lives), know I must pay for all the mistakes I made and then rest in peace".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUwihtGDM0
That's pretty much the formula for a classic tragedy: hero makes grevious mistakes, either during the story (Hamlet driving Ophelia mad / killing R+G) or before the story (Lear the tyrant of a king, so despised that as soon as he gives up power, in the 2nd scene of the play, nobody wants to know about him as it's race on to see who can kill all the other power-players highlander-style and become the next king). Hero suffers for their sins, either during the story or at its conclusion. Importantly, hero eventually accepts his suffering as necessary, and through accepting it is able to grow and achieve his victory (though the victory never removes the suffering - Hamlet wins but dies, Bud Fox in Wall Street saves the union and brings down Gecko but still ends up going to jail - neither are 'complete' losses, a major part of what makes the ending in Wall St satisfying is not just the reminder in the last scene that Fox is actually on his way to jail, but the impression that this is a necessary moral cleansing, something necessary to making him whole again).
A 'stock standard' tragedy isn't a complete loss - TNO accepting that he NEEDS to die and start the long (near-eternal, but importantly NOT literally eternal) process of suffering to make up for what he's done both before and after the curse is crucial. Sure, once a writer has mastered the standard forms he can mix it up - Lear wasn't a 'classic tragedy' because it was so damn bleak. Every single sympathetic character dies, except the one guy that Lear banishes at the start, but who disguises himself and returns to Lear's side to protect him, revealing himself as Lear is dying, only for Lear to be so far into madness/dementia that he doesn't actually recognise him. For 200 years after the play was written, no theatre in Europe would agree to perform the full play - they all cut Cordelia's death and changed it so that Lear recognises and thanks the long-suffering bodyguard-in-disguise. Even now, it's often seen as a great play to study, but so crushingly morbid that it doesn't quite work on stage - tragedies usually aren't 100% bleak like that.
TNO was basically just using the standard archetype. That's fine with me - obviously in an ideal world, we'd have moved passed those archetypes and writers would be mixing things up. But I'm yet to see any evidence that most writers even have any understanding of the basic story archetypes and why they work. You can't mix things up if you don't have a clue what makes an archetype work in the first place, otherwise you'll have no understanding how the removal of certain elements will affect the overall story, so you won't be able to write around it.
That seems to be the problem with ME3 - the writers might have thought they were writing an epic, but really they were writing 1940s space pulp - Buck Rodgers in the 31st Century material. You can't invert that by adding on a bitter ending if you don't understand the archetype that you're working with. Imagine if, say, they had been subverting the upright-hero/collar-grabbing elements all the way - say by having the hero repeatedly fail to rescue everything (kind of like what they went for with the 5th doctor, except his failures arise from arrogant strength rather than feeble pacifism). It might then fit to have a tragic ending - not the one that Bioware came up with - but one where he's dying and willing himself onwards by the determination that he isn't going to allow THIS massacre to happen (ala the 5th doc's final serial 'Caves of Androzani' where he doesn't even try to bring justice to the place, but having caused the death of 2 companions and countless allies during his run, he throws out all of his pacificism and ideals out of determination to focus on a single goal: that THIS time he isn't going to let another companion of his die). But having run it as popcorn action the whole way, where you spend the series carrying on with your merry kickass crew, kicking butt and...uh...collecting minerals from planets, and then suddenly pulling that ending? Just sheer lack of knowledge of story structure.
. The end was better when they "died". Not that it wasn't idiotic already, but at the very least it was no "herosavesthegalaxyandliveshappilyeverafterwithhisalienlovers"-type of ending.
), but at least you get to know what happens during the final battle, instead of being left in the dark like it was before.
. Those random deaths still remain but now at least the ending doesn't feel like crasing against a wall leaving you staring at a blanck screen unsure of what just happened, lol.
