Besides the question of what is the payoff, I'm also trying to come up with ideas for how we can get a happy ending with that scenario.
This is what Melissa has said.
I'm trusting Melissa on this. So, I'm trying to trying to figure out a path from where we are currently at in the story, towards a non-dark ending that won't leave a bad taste in our mouths.
If Nikos is the bad guy, an ending with him "winning", should not be an option according to Melissa. However, I do actually want an ending with Nikos and Elena to be happily together, so I'm trying to find creative ways to make that happen.
An alternative is that Nikos gets arrested and Andrew/Elena ends up getting back together with Marina. I'm not against that idea, but I'm just not sure how popular that would be. Personally, I'm kind of souring on Marina's as a character. She hasn't "
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" yet but she's very close to doing so in my opinion (some people might feel like she already has). The story hasn't really been built or setup for a lesbian ending, so the odds don't seem likely even though I would be fine with that. The option of turning Elena back into Andrew shouldn't really be possible via real word surgeries, so I don't see very high odds of this happening, but it could be the ending that we get.
Some possible endings with Nikos and Elena living happily ever after.
1. This is all or mostly Aphrodite's fault. Neither Andrew nor Nikos specifically intended to end up with each other but somehow that's the way things have worked out. Maybe the love between Marina and Andrew couldn't be "magically" taken away for some reason so it had to be "destroyed" by playing within the rules of the "real world". Maybe that was why Andrew had to be surgically transformed instead of "magically" transformed. To cover up the plot holes, I'll add the possibility that reality and history are being slowly rewritten. So at the very end of the story, Elena is Elena and has always been Elena. Andrew never existed. The daughters are Elena's biological daughters. This sounds dark but I can see a few ways to brighten this up. Maybe Aphrodite was "saving" the Samaras family. Maybe if she hadn't interfered, one or more people would have gotten killed trying to scam Mr. Toska. Maybe Andrew has been a temporal paradox all along. Just some guesses.
2. This is based on the soap opera theory that
Stevedore100 talked about. An actor is playing the role of Andrew/Elena and has lost his grip on reality. Melissa has given us false narration and everything we've seen has been a distorted mix of what viewers are seeing on TV and what the actor playing Andrew/Elena is perceiving while acting. I'm imagining a mix of
Tropic Thunder,
The Truman Show,
Fight Club, and
The Usual Suspects. In this scenario, Nikos is just an actor, probably the star, and their love is becoming real. The actress playing Marina is worried and upset about her co-stars behavior and possibly about her role getting demoted or something. It's possible that the actor playing Andrew/Elena might not even look like the way he perceives himself to look right now. He might still be in prosthetics and we the viewers are seeing his false perception of himself. Or maybe all of the surgery has been done and what we see is real. Who knows?
Just some wild ideas. This would be a very "highbrow" story concept to reveal during the last chapter. Perhaps too highbrow for an adult comic, so I feel like the odds of this happening are low, but I kinda like it.
3. Nikos could also be a victim. Maybe he is being influenced to do this but not from "Aphrodite". I don't really have too many ideas about who else the mastermind could be, but it's not impossible.
4. There is a possibility that Melissa has a unique opinion regarding "dark endings that won't leave a bad taste in our mouths". Maybe she doesn't consider evil Nikos winning to be a bad outcome if Andrew's identity is dead and Elena is a blissfully happy love slave. It's a possibility.
5. Maybe Andrew is the evil character and really deserves this fate. This could be the last chapter reveal. It might tie into Melissa's recent clue about the TV show "
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". I haven't seen it but from reading a few comments, I have one theory. Maybe Andrew has done something worse than just lose Marina's money. What that would be, I have no idea. We haven't had any hints of Andrew killing someone or being responsible for some member of the Samaras family getting killed. I'll pretend like he did something really bad though. If so, maybe this story is kind of similar to a movie that I've yet to watch but has a similar sounding plot.
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- I haven't watched it yet because no one has been asking me for months to watch it!
(Inside joke! Someone here has been trying to get me to watch it and I promise that I will eventually...
) Maybe Andrew is responsible for the death of a woman named Elena. I have no idea if she was related to the family or not. Nikos turned him into her replacement for some reason??? I don't know. Someone else will have to flesh out this theory if they like it. It's another ending that I wouldn't call happy but maybe some fans could consider it to be happy if Andrew was really a monster. Personally, it's too late in the story to change my feelings about Andrew.
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isn't going to be very effective with me, but it's a possibility.
Quantum Butterfly is a good story. My absolute favorite from CBlack is
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. It's an oldie that might be getting close to 20 years old now. I can't remember if I first saw that on TheSirenSong.net or not. Ugh, now I feel old.
It's an oldie but a goodie! I love the simplicity of it!