The credits roll and the screen fades to black. Suddenly, I am sitting in my room with empty noise echoing from my AirPods, reflecting my empty heart. It’s actually over.
I have just finished “Attack on Titan,” a show I have been watching on and off for the past two years, and I don’t know what to do with myself. The characters I’ve spent hours with are gone, and the world that I have been consuming is now closed to me. All I am left with is this ache that feels embarrassing to name: grief.
This is not the first time this has occurred. It happens with sad shows, especially the ones that break you down, episode by episode, until the ending arrives and you realize you have been carrying these fictional people with you as if they were real.
The Weight of Sad Stories
There is something about sad stories that makes their endings harder to bear. When a show is light, fun and easy, you finish it and move on. But when a story guts you, when it makes you sit with brutal truths and complicated emotions, it leaves a bigger hole when it’s gone.
With “Attack on Titan,” I knew what I was getting into; I knew it would devastate me. And yet, I watched it anyway, came back to it anyway, for more than two years of my life. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we choose stories that we know will hurt us?
Maybe it is because sad stories feel more true. They don’t promise us easy answers or happy endings tied up neatly. They show us the world as it is: messy, painful and morally complex. When we finish them, we are not just grieving the story — we’re mourning the loss of that honesty, that willingness to sit with the feeling of discomfort.
What We’re Actually Grieving
When I say I am grieving, what do I really mean? Not just the loss of the plot, though I do wonder what happens to characters whose arcs have ended. I’m mourning the experience itself.
I miss the characters: their struggles, the way they grew, broke and kept going. I miss the feelings I had while watching: the particular mix of dread, hope and heartbreak. I miss the ritual of it: the anticipation of the next episode, having something to look forward to at the end of a long day.
For the past month, this show was part of my life. It shaped my thoughts and gave me something to turn over in my mind during boring lectures or long walks. Now there’s nothing — only a space.
The Unsatisfying Satisfaction
The ending was not what I wanted. Some choices felt wrong and hurtful, and many resolutions seemed incomplete. Still, the truth is that it was the ending that needed to happen.
That is what makes it more challenging to digest. If the ending had been bad, I could have dismissed it and imagined something better. But this ending was honest; it was messy, painful and inevitable, just like real endings tend to be. It mirrored the very thing the story was about: Sometimes there are no satisfying answers, no clean way to break the cycle and no victory without cost.
It is a feeling similar to true grief. When someone dies or something ends in real life, you do not get the ending you want. You get the ending that happens, and you have to sit with it.
Why Sad Stories Hit Different
Sad stories leave a bigger hole because they ask more of us. They do not allow us to be passive; they force us to face feelings we would prefer to ignore, confront ideas we would rather avoid and sit with ambiguity when we crave certainty.
When you invest in a sad story, you are not just entertaining yourself; you are performing emotional labor. You learn something about the human condition, about suffering and resilience and the cost of violence and love. You are letting fiction teach you how to hold complicated truths. When it ends, you haven’t just lost a story but a teacher, a companion, a mirror.
The Lingering
It’s been days now, and, although embarrassing to admit, I still can’t think about anything else. It doesn’t help that the characters haunt my For You page on TikTok, allowing the themes to remain echoing in my head. I see the world through the lens of what I just watched, everything filtered through the questions the show raised and left unanswered.
Maybe this is the strange honor of letting fiction affect you so deeply. It means you were paying attention, that you truly cared. It means you allowed yourself to be changed by something that isn’t real, but is real in the way it made you feel, think and grieve.
My head is still consumed, and my heart is still empty. I know that eventually I will find another story to fill the space. Another devastating and painful yet beautiful narrative that will break me all over again.
That’s what we do. We keep coming back to stories that hurt us because they also make us feel alive. Grief, even for fictional characters, is proof that we are capable of caring deeply about something beyond ourselves.
The credits have rolled and the story is over, but I am still here carrying it with me. Maybe that’s what “Attack on Titan” has — its own kind of ending, one that doesn’t leave you, even after you have left it behind.