What should an author do if they wrote a bad ending they don't like?
In the previous version, people liked to physically confront authors offline.
In December 1893, famous novelist Conan Doyle arranged for Sherlock Holmes to duel his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in "The Final Problem," resulting in both falling into the abyss and perishing together.
As a result, readers were not satisfied with this ending. They gathered outside Conan Doyle's residence, throwing stones and snowballs at the windows to protest Conan Doyle's "murder" of Sherlock Holmes. It is said that nearly 20,000 readers canceled their subscriptions to "The Strand Magazine," which serialized the story.
For the next eight years, the public never stopped protesting. It wasn't until 1903, when Holmes revived in Conan Doyle's new short story "The Adventure of the Empty House," that everyone finally calmed down.
But compared to offline brawls, this version has a more powerful tactic—directly "doxxing" the author in the comment section.
First, let me explain to those who don't understand: "Doxxing" refers to the act of obtaining and maliciously disclosing others' real identities, addresses, contact information, and other private information through public or illegal means.
Recently, on self-media platforms, many netizens have used "doxxing weapons" to threaten small comic authors, forcing them to change the predetermined bad endings of their stories to good ones.
Imagine a person named Shan Dama, a good student from a poor family. His father died in a car accident years ago, and the whole family relied on his sickly mother to struggle through life. As the college entrance exam approached, his mother's illness worsened, and the family's financial situation became increasingly tight. On the day of the exam, his mother's condition suddenly deteriorated sharply, and when Shan Dama came out of the exam hall, he received the devastating news that his mother was about to pass away.
Just as Shan Dama was in despair, a miracle occurred.
Just as the mother was about to be declared dead by the doctor, a guy with a cow-dung hairstyle suddenly burst into the ward, shouted "Ora" a few times, and the mother miraculously recovered instantly, able to get up and carry a large water buffalo for two miles. Then, an old man holding a baby entered the room, stating that the SPW Foundation would cover all of Shan Dama's future schooling expenses.
While Shan Dama felt relieved, he also felt that happiness came too suddenly and Everythinggj was too abnormal. He had previously vaguely sensed that his fate was being manipulated by a malicious hand, and now a terrifying power beyond causality had saved him from it.
Meanwhile, in higher-dimensional space, the Creator God who wrote Shan Dama's tragic story was scared sweatless by 18 mysterious fate numbers in the comment section, working overtime to correct the world line.
The author of "Mom, the Light Went Out," "Nian Ci," is one of those "Creator Gods" with such experiences.
The AI comic "Mom, the Light Went Out" tells the story of a son who goes to work in another city and feels his mother messages him too frequently, so he often responds perfunctorily. Until one day, his mother suddenly passes away from illness. When the son returns home and sees the note left by his mother, he is filled with regret.
Image source: Douyin @Nian Ci
Looking at this synopsis alone, you might think "Mom, the Light Went Out" is just a cliché tragedy about family affection, but the story doesn't end there.
The author "Nian Ci" later had a change of heart and added a follow-up chapter. In this subsequent chapter, the son suddenly wakes up at his desk, realizing it was all just a nightmare. Awakened by the nightmare, the son finally understands the preciousness of family love, returns home after a long time, and has a reunion dinner with his mother—a happy ending, congratulations, congratulations.
A man only cries three times in his life: the first time he forgot, the second time he forgot, and the third time was witnessing the mother and son in "Mom, the Light Went Out" having a reunion dinner. From this perspective, the "Mom, the Light Went Out" series is clearly a versatile work with strong countermeasures, tear-jerking moments, twists, and a heartwarming ending, making it suitable for airing during the Spring Festival Gala... But the story doesn't end here.
At the end of the sequel, the author Nian Ci also shared chat logs with a fan.
In the chat logs, in order to bypass the limit of sending only one direct message to strangers, fans pretended to offer a tragic plot twist. Once Nian Ci replied, they revealed their true intentions, posting both sides of Nian Ci's ID card and "requesting" that Nian Ci change the ending. With their privacy completely exposed, Nian Ci had no choice but to nervously smooth things over and agree to the fan's "request."
Scared to tears
Only then did everyone realize that the good ending patch for "Mom, the Light Went Out" was not due to author Nian Ci's change of heart, but because elders from the Tianji Pavilion secretly assisted, deducing Nian Ci's 18-digit mysterious fate numbers, and using this as a setup to forcibly help the mother and son defy fate.
Does this look familiar? Scenes like this are currently playing out in various small comics on self-media platforms.
In the comment sections of some self-media comics that went viral for their bad endings, elders from the Tianji Pavilion would quietly appear. With just a string of numbers, a location, or a surname, they could make the comic authors wear expressions of pain akin to Agni, and from then on, the authors would obey them completely.
From then on, the era of tragic small comics ended, and the vigorous era of "doxxing deterrence" marched towards us.
What does "The author didn't write a bad ending, they just haven't added the good ending yet" mean?
The friend who was supposed to have died in a car accident turns out to be a sports student; being run over by a truck only resulted in minor scrapes. The daughter, who was lying in the ICU on the brink of death, is suddenly declared misdiagnosed by the doctor. Even the blond guy who NTR'd the fiancée turns into a younger brother-in-law who loves testing his brother-in-law, and he even helped drive the wedding car on the big day...
Image source: Douyin @XXXkkk
Whether inside or outside the comics, wherever the Tianji Pavilion elders go, there is peace and joy, filled with a cheerful atmosphere—except for the authors threatened by doxxing.
For many netizens, the era of "doxxing deterrence" is the best era—just sit at home, use some red spirit stones, hire some Tianji Pavilion elders, calculate some 18-digit mysterious fate numbers, and you can easily interfere with the heavenly way and rewrite tragedies.
I say, Lord Hun doesn't need to frantically fight bosses for 66 days. If you want to defy fate, just have an elder from the Tianji Pavilion bring two cases of milk to Liang Qiwei. Anyone get it?
After failing to deal with the Tianji Pavilion's doxxing weapons, several authors who specialized in using AI tools to draw tragic comics simply incorporated "being doxxed into changing the ending" into their story structures. They would formulaically write a bad ending first, then add a good ending, interacting with the Tianji Pavilion elders as sanctioned villains in the process. This whole routine could also garner significant traffic.
You will find that in this narrative, the doxxers become the positive figures of "justice execution," gaining unanimous approval from netizens.
But everyone seems to have forgotten that so-called "doxxing" refers to the act of obtaining and maliciously disclosing others' real identities, addresses, contact information, and other private information through public or illegal means. Even if the information is blurred like the Tianji Pavilion elders do, it is essentially still an infringement on others' privacy rights, walking on the edge of the law, or even constituting illegal malicious behavior.
It cannot be denied that some authors write stories that are tragic for the sake of being tragic, pure industrial angst—but ultimately, this is the author's creative freedom, which is itself blameless. Readers who see bad endings may indeed get emotional, but they can also simply scroll past or leave a few choice words in the comments.
From a creative perspective, behaviors like "doxxing deterrence," where readers forcibly intervene in the plot direction, greatly hinder creative freedom and the creator's personal liberty.
Going back to the beginning of the article, the reason Conan Doyle "killed" Sherlock Holmes was that he had grown tired of "Sherlock Holmes." What he truly desired was to become a "serious historical novelist," but the character of Sherlock Holmes consumed so much of his time and energy that he couldn't realize his ideal.
But we all know the result: eight years later, Conan Doyle personally pried open Sherlock Holmes' coffin lid. His most famous title remained "detective fiction writer," and he failed to become the "serious historical novelist" he wanted to be.
A few months ago, a creator named "Black Heart Skeleton" serialized a short comic titled "Sacrifice Cycle."
"Sacrifice Cycle" roughly tells the story of a girl who, to keep her boyfriend alive for a few more days after he was killed by a truck, makes a deal with the Grim Reaper, sacrificing parts of her own body each day to extend his life. As the serialization progresses, you witness the girl's body gradually going from whole to mutilated, and the plot stops right there.
According to chat logs circulating online, in Black Heart Skeleton's original conception, the story was meant to have a bad ending. To this end, Black Heart Skeleton planted foreshadowing in many details, which would all be resolved in the bad ending. This was their complete expression as a creator.
But as the serialization progressed, the girl's body became increasingly mutilated, and more and more netizens couldn't sit still. Besides venting in the comments, some netizens directly DM'd the author, even calling on Tianji Pavilion elders to use doxxing weapons.
In the end, "Sacrifice Cycle" reached a good ending: the boy was fully restored, the girl's body was healed, and the two lived a shameless romantic comedy life thereafter. But... this was also a completely unprompted, abruptly severed good ending. Some say this is because Black Heart Skeleton might have been doxxed, or even physically confronted offline, so they changed "Sacrifice Cycle" to a good ending.
Black Heart Skeleton's own statement
The price of a good ending was that the author and the work faced a bad ending—even though "Sacrifice Cycle" was already described by readers as a story "written just to be tragic," it was at least a complete story, not one cut off midway. As for Black Heart Skeleton, they added the suffix "Pure Love Artist" to their account name, and subsequent works basically had no more "bad endings."
Laughing out of anger
To some extent, the good endings rewritten by some netizens are not wrong—the price for the two protagonists to live happily ever after is the author themselves.
Of course, based on online materials, we cannot currently confirm whether the direct reason for "Black Heart Skeleton" changing the ending was doxxing. But what is more noteworthy is that under the narrative of "justice execution," right and wrong are completely reversed, and doxxing, a form of vigilante justice, has been rationalized—the real victims become the perpetrators, and the real perpetrators become heroes. When people engage in doxxing, they not only feel no moral pressure but even feel a sense of justice acting on behalf of heaven. It is precisely because of this "reward" that doxxing attacks are more likely to become rampant.
Nowadays, readers' demands for doxxing attacks are still focused on "changing bad endings." But it's hard to say whether this notion of "acting on behalf of heaven" won't gradually slide into becoming a universal excuse for interfering with creation. Especially for self-media creators like "Black Heart Skeleton," they often have no room to fight back—they are mostly ordinary people serializing works on platforms out of passion, with no preparation or experience to deal with doxxing attacks. Therefore, they are more likely to compromise when facing such threats.
We also hope more people realize that the world cannot have only cookie-cutter good endings—using violent means to interfere with creation will ultimately make authors more conservative, exhausting the vitality of the entire creative environment.
May there be no doxxing in the world!
