On Christmas Eve, I watched ''The World According To Garp''. An odd choice for sure, but I stopped it before got shot. Why traumatize myself during the holidays? (I could have stopped before mother got killed, but I think you should know by now that scene doesn't carry the same level of trauma for me as... you know.)

Random Troper: My dad invited me to see ''ButchCassidyAndTheSundanceKid'' on video, and I was more or less introduced to the concept of the BolivianArmyEnding then. Later, we viewed the film when it came on TV, and my dad turned the channel right before the scene that actually set up said ending. Apparently, even an ending where you don't actually see the protagonists die was too much of a downer.

While on Spring Break, this troper's girlfriend invited him to watch ''WolfsRain'' with her in her dorm. After marathoning through the 22 of the 26 original episodes (they skipped the four ClipShow episodes), his girlfriend told him that the OVA was irrelevant. Of course, this troper has an undying curiosity about almost everything, so it was logical for him after the break to watch the OVA on his own. He regrets not listening to his girlfriend, being permanently exposed to the horrors of the series' true ending.

EricDVH has never seen the end of the original film of ''TheItalianJob''', his father always shut the movie off when they get drunk because “They're too smart to do something that dumb.�

A rather unintentional one: When this troper saw the film of ''{{RENT}}'', a few people left during the transition to the second "act", not realizing that the rest of the movie would be quite a bit more depressing after the rather upbeat tone of "La Vie Boheme".

Another unintentional: when watching ''The Notebook'' on television, the movie cuts to commercial after Allie's relapse into Alzheimers. This troper, watching for the first time, thought it was the end, and was totally bummed. Needless to say, she was quite a bit happier when she saw the actual ending.

A friend of mine is a FinalFantasyVII fan. He has Advent Children. Whenever he watches it, he always stops before the end and pretends that Cloud died. I guess this counts as a reversal, but maybe not. He stops the movie, but to avoid a WallBanger instead of a DownerEnding. That, and he hates Cloud.

This troper adores Solid Snake, but is terrible at the actual games, so she watches the cutscenes on YouTube. She was going through the scenes for MGS 4 and was completely horrified to find the one where Snake puts the gun in his mouth, and the camera cuts away as the gunshot is heard -- she actually screamed. For a long time she refused to look at the cutscenes again, until a very patient friend explained that this wasn't the end of the game, and there were subsequent scenes that she needed to watch, including Big Boss stopping his son from killing himself. The additional cutscenes helped, but she still prefers to imagine that her hero got a ''happy'' ending.

This troper, when he first saw ForrestGump, stopped watching when he met up with Jennie in Washington D.C. after the speech. I, when watching it again, cried pretty much all the way after that...

On the main page there's an example about how Phoebe from ''Friends'' stopped watching ''It's a Wonderful Life'' before the ending because she was so depressed by everything that came first. My high-school music teacher really did that. We were all talking about Christmas movies one day and he was horrified that we had all liked it, and we tried in vain to convince him that it really wasn't a "life sucks and then you die" movie. Hence the name. (Though actually, what had really put him off was the scene where the pharmacist won't let George explain why he didn't deliver the pills and keeps hitting him on his bad ear until he cries.)

In ''{{The Elder Scrolls}}: Oblivion'', this editor prefers this course of action, since the game is so open-ended: Stop following the main questline right after you return from Paradise and give Martin the Amulet of Kings. Just tell everyone in your party to wait and leave the temple, pretending that the coronation happened just fine. This will give you a completely happy ending, spare you the trouble of slogging through the difficult final mission, and avoid the {{Mind Screw}} of the actual ending. Besides, your reward for completing the quests is laughably weak anyway.

Not sure if this is an inversion, subversion, or what, but... when This Troper saw ''Swan Princess III'' for the first time when she was little, she ended up not getting to see the very end when notes get burned. A few years later they ran it on TV, and I was glad to see that the titular princess stay dead. Sorry about not using any names, but I can't remember how to spell them.