all good things what you leave behind

[melannen]

I am realizing very strongly, this week especially*, that one thing that has really shaped my media consumption: I don't like stories with "endings". (This has no spoilers for anything recent, as I've only been watching the outside-the-spoiler-cuts wailing about several different series at once.)

*(Actually if you want we can pretend I'm writing this mostly as a response to finally finishing Record of a Spaceborn Few, which does not do the thing I'm complaining about at all, but does things with story structure in general that I will be pondering for a good long time.)

I mean. I like major plot threads to be wrapped up, sure, and I like emotional arcs to come to fruition, and it's good if Chekov's Gun gets taken away by the BATF agent at some point, but. I like my stories to end in a way that goes "we solved that specific plot problem, and now everything else gets to continue on more or less as it was, except for the ways the characters and their relationships grew and changed, and the repercussions of that specific problem that are still shaking out."

I don't like my stories to end in a way that goes "And everything you've been invested in is changed and gone forever and nothing will ever be the same!"

And it seems like in our new 21st century media era of Everything Is Part Of A Years-Long Dramatic Arc, that's the only way things get to end anymore.

Like.

Why.

I liked the story because I liked the people and places and setups that were in it. I want to finish the written story and be able to think about that world I liked going on and on after the story ended (and yes, this is part of why I will never escape fic fandom, but it's not just that.) Why do writers think that "destroying everything we built" is the correct way to end a story, even if it's technically a happy ending? Why do they think "half the characters died, the city rose into the sky, I'm now married to somebody I haven't been romantic with in years, everybody's fired and the band broke up" is how the series should end?

And! The thing is! It's not that I want stories to take place in a static world where nothing major ever changes! It's just, if you want me to care about the story, the band should break up and the city should rise into the sky at the beginning of the story, and the rest of the story should be about *dealing* with that. Or at the very least, at the midway turning point in a classic dramatic structure. (Or you can have a structure where you show the unfixable cracks in the foundation early on, and it doesn't actually fall until the end, but then I want you to have spent most of the middle of the story working on what you're building to replace it, not nesting in the cracked place.) If you spend the whole story marking time until this change, this overturning, and only get to it in the last 10-20% of the story, then you've just kicked over your sandcastle and now you don't have time to do anything interesting with the rebuilding so your audience is left kind of shrugging at a pile of rubble.

If you want a dramatic overturning, kick over your sandcastle in episode 2, and let us watch three seasons of people arguing about architecture, and your ending is when the new, completely different spire goes up and you've got a story that ends on a strong point, not a pile of rubble!

And the pile of rubble ending is especially worthless if it's a serial sort of format that hasn't had a strong overarching plot structure, just various problems being solved over time as the characters grow, so you *haven't* been steadily building up to it, but you still decide to kick everything over in the very end.

It's very much how a three-year-old ends a story if they have to go home and don't want to let the other kids keep playing.

(I think maybe my ideal for how to end a long-running series is the first finale episode I ever remember watching for a series I actually cared about, the finale of ST:TNG. I mean, the plot itself was not the strongest, and I'd've liked more character work from the whole cast, but that's how you end a beloved series: looking back on what you've built, strengthening it, and ending on a new determination to keep going. Compare that to the DS9 finale, where several of main characters more-or-less die, a planet is mostly destroyed in a genocide, nearly all the main characters move away, and I wish the series had ended several seasons ago.)

(Or Lord of the Rings, the books, which kicked over the sandcastle at the beginning, and had everything slowly continue to fall apart for the next five books, so that the ending wasn't "everything you loved is gone", it's "we thought everything would be gone, but look what we've salvaged that we spent so long fearing was lost; look what we've learned we don't need to keep; look what we're ready to build out of what we've learned". If instead we had spent five books watching Gandalf, Aragorn, Boromir, and Elrond try to protect the lands of the Third Age that the readers gradually come to love from the growing power of Sauron and then they realize the Ring is in the Shire at the end of Book Five and spend the last 1/6 of the book destroying the Ring and ending the Rangers, the Wizards, the Stewards, Rivendell and Lothlorien, the same ending is a TERRIBLE ending. Or if the Fellowship had stayed together, becoming a stronger unit, until the very edge of Doom, and then all gone their separate ways in the last few chapters, that too would have sucked, but instead we saw them start to split early on, so what we got at the end was a joyous reunion and strengthening of old bonds, not a sudden splitting up.)

/your fangripe for today

(feel free to spoil stuff in comments, I have now decided that any finale that destroys the rest of the story never actually got filmed, the series was tragically cancelled mid-arc, oh well.)

Meanwhile I am still working on clearing out nonfiction books. Score so far: Books 50, Melannen 0

Comments

[shadaras]

I'm curious what your thoughts on Record of a Spaceborn Few are, even though that isn't the main thrust of this post. :) When I read it, I found myself frustrated by the ending because it dangled tidbits of plot/worldbuilding that I personally found super interesting but then didn't linger on them. It seemed like it did what it set out to do, and Becky Chambers seems to have a fondness for atypical structure -- which I generally like! -- but that one didn't sit well for me, so I'm curious if your thoughts would shift my perspective a little to something a little more positive.

Overall I agree with your thoughts here; let the book end where it's built up to, not with a dramatic change -- or, if it's a dramatic change, have that be built-up and thought about beforehand (and maybe think about a sequel dealing with it).

[melannen]

I'm not actually sure what my thoughts on RoaSF are! I really liked the setting and characters and what it did with them, and I thought the worldbuilding was generally stronger than either of her previous books and 90% of other recent SF I've read. And I really do love stories in general that are basically realistic fiction/slice of life only set in well-realized SFF worlds, and this was a really good example of that.

But the structure isn't what you expect in SF, and I sort of feel like my first reading was spoiled because I kept being distracted trying to figure out what the structure was, and if I liked it or not.

I think I definitely would have liked it equally if it had been set up as a bunch of short stories, one per POV character, instead of as a novel with alternating POVs, but then I feel like that about nearly every novel with that many alternating POVs.

And the structure of different POVs in the same setting that seem entirely separate but then come together at the end is something that's used not infrequently, lately, in literary fiction. Only I haven't read many of them because I very rarely enjoy that kind of literary fiction (for other reasons!) So IDK? I think most of my issues with it were around the fact that it's not a structure that I'm used to, but the solution to that is for more people to write good SF with that kind of structure.

I am also thinking kind of incoherently about how it's essentially a book about living in a recently-colonized culture by an (afaik) White Australian. I am not sure what I am thinking about it, but I'm thinking about it.

What were the plot/worldbuilding bits that you found frustrating? I didn't really have an issue with that.

[kore]

....hahahaha wow, this accurately represents my feelings about the Infinite Saga, especially Infinity War/Endgame, in a non-spoilery way. Kudos.

I also dislike endings like that, but they seem to be considered Mature or whatever these days.

[melannen]

I will hold out forever against all comers that the end of TNG is 1000% more mature than kicking over a sandcastle because you can't play anymore. :P

(And honestly, I would probably have those feeling about any "last installment" named "Endgame" regardless of what happened in it. Which is why I've felt no particular desire to engage at all with the last couple Avengers movies.)

(But it's also why I haven't finished Guardian, which is probably more of a loss.)

[recessional]

I mean I'm allergic to blanket statements about How Stories Should Be and I have at least one original epic where the end is quite LITERALLY "and now the survivors deal with a pile of rubble but at least they're around to do that".

Yet at the same time I kinda feel you here but I think that, for ME, what I don't like is stories where the whole build up is treated like A Phase You Go Through And Outgrow. Where I'm supposed to be HAPPY or at least satisfied with that "and now the Heroes Journey Is Over So We Go Back To The Community With What We Learned" vibe.

[melannen]

Yeah, I mean, if there's a build up, I want a payoff of some kind! And if the buildup IS to changes, I want those changes to stick. And if you spend the whole story building up to a pile of rubble (or if you're intentionally writing a tragedy) then it works differently.

I'm using "rubble" metaphorically here - sometimes the happy ending where everything is beautiful *is* the kicking over of the sandcastle, because the story I loved wasn't a happy place where everything is beautiful. And sometimes the pile of rubble is what the characters need in order to go on and keep growing as they have been. (This is, I get the impression from only reading things outside spoiler cuts because I ignored the original ending, what the new Homestuck epilogue is playing with; fixing a happy ending that didn't work because a happy ending isn't what the rest of the story was about.)

I actually think the classic Hero's Journey is also the kind of story I'm complaining about here - if we spend most of the story with the hero travelling around, having adventures, growing into the kind of person who is good at travelling around and having adventures with their hero friends - then an ending where they go back home and live behind a white picket fence is still, essentially, destroying everything I loved about the story.

Brilliant.

[jesse_the_k]

the band should break up and the city should rise into the sky at the beginning of the story, and the rest of the story should be about *dealing* with that

I'm actually pumping my fist in the air. Yes!!!!

Re: Brilliant.

[melannen]

Now I want a story about a city that rose into the sky because a band broke up. :D

Re: Brilliant.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Or a story focused on the bands that went down with their ship/Circus tent. A weird sort of Valhalla tale. You'd have to focus on the woodwinds.

[sarken]

Sweet lord, yes. Don't spend six seasons building a found family and then rip it apart in the last five episodes, not that I have a specific series in mind or anything.

[melannen]

Riggght? The sad part is that we probably all have a series in mind and it's a different series.

and sometimes you have to do that at least a little because of actors leaving, or because there's a built-in limit to you initial setup ( like graduating college) or because you got renewed for three more seasons and you can't think of any more stories to tell in your initial setup (I'm actually more forgiving than a lot of people about this one, I think, I authentically liked Agent Reyes) but you never ever have to do it just because the series was cancelled. In fact, the series being cancelled means no actors will ever leave again and you don't have to come up with any more stories, so you can * stop * planning for that!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

It's like all the writers think Modernity Trauma is a Good Thing (tm) and they need to make as much of it as possible.

I bite my thumb at them. I've got a plate full of it and I want characters that I love dealing with Big Problems and Meeting them. I'll be over here standing on Ben Grimm's shoulders changing lightbulbs for him.

[melannen]

Like we all need more trauma in our lives, right?

[kore]

I think part of what tires me out re Dealing With Trauma stories is....so many of them are written by white guys and I am really way too familiar with that perspective and those consequences. Jessica Jones (Netflix) was one of the very few series I've ever seen that firmly centered the woman and was about her reactions and the guy didn't take center stage. But everyone going on about Thanos and Gamora in Infinity War....I was like, that is not a new and bold and amazing plotline for me, sorry.

[snickfic]

BOY I SURE DO FEEL THIS. I just want the canon to leave the playground open for me to keep playing in. :(

[melannen]

I don't like open canons because they're probably going to mess it up.

I don't like closed canons because they've probably already messed it up.

Just make me a story that I can wander around in as much as I want! And then let it be.

[kore]

Right now I feel like between IW/Endgame and Magicians it is going to be a cold day in hell before I throw myself into an open canon again, especially if it is primarily written by white dudes. I think I might actually prefer closed canons (X-Files was my first experience with a canon going wildly off the rails....or no, that might have been late Xena) because it's not as intense. The tradeoff is....it's not as intense. IDEFK. I am very tired of "EVERYTHING IS CHANGED AND NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!!" stories that also leave dust on the status quo right now.

[mindstalk]

Yeah, I largely agree. I can appreciate a good tragedy, I guess, but even as a kid, Prydain's "whoops magic goes away now" seems like a lame imitation of Tolkien and/or a lame "grow up now" metaphor. Tolkien at least foreshadowed "destroying the One might ruin the Three" (even if that doesn't make that much sense) and harped on elven and other decline.

One reason I didn't go see Infinity War. I was open to spoilers and my reaction to "half of everyone dies" was "bullshit". Though it sounds like (no spoiler) Endgame is doing something interesting on the rebound.

I loved Buffy and Firefly but Whedon or his writers are overly prone to "let's murder beloved characters at random".

I've been wallowing in a bunch of Silmarillion/Fourth Age Valinor fics that are basically "happy ending now plz".

There's a different form of twist. The original manga Karin (brought over as Chibi Vampire) had a heartwarming story of a Japanese vampire family and their atypical daughter and such. And then ended with the family erasing her memories of them so she could go have a 'normal' human life. Which I thought completely undermined the whole theme of the series. Like if Frodo seized power atthe end as King of the Shire, First Of His Name and this was presented as a good thing.

[melannen]

Oh, jeez, Prydain. Taran's ending actually mostly worked, because he had spent the last couple books building to that, so it was a continuation of where he already was. But Eilonwy had spent those books building to "I will be a great enchantress and powerful in my own name!" DDD: And "The magic goes away" part was pretty clearly an imitation of Tolkien, but the difference is with Tolkien, they *didn't* just all whoops gone - they'd already been visibly dwindling, and talking about how much they wanted to go, and they'd overstayed, and even then a lot of them stuck around long enough to help get the Fourth Age rolling and mentor their successors! Augh. I will never forgive Alexander for what he did to Eilonwy for no reason whatsoever.

Any serial that ends with somebody getting their memories of canon erased is a bad ending. That should not be enough of a thing that I can name several other characters it happened to.

[rosefox]

(The last MCU movie I saw was Winter Soldier but I've more or less followed along with how the subsequent ones have gone.)

I have been thinking a lot about how no one really does or understands tragedy anymore, in the operatic sense, because tragedy requires a solid moral footing—the tragic figure died because they made choices and that is the consequence of their choices—and a lot of present-day storytellers are really nervous about actually making moral judgments out loud and on purpose. But you can't just have bad things happen for no reason because that is also bad storytelling unless your story is about coming to terms with the fact that bad things happen for no reason. (See the Magicians showrunner talking about how it's fine for Eliot and Quentin to not get any kind of resolution because sometimes people you love just die, but also not making a show that's about that, and what an abject storytelling failure that is.) So instead of the catharsis of tragedy or of recovery from trauma, we get this weird hybrid where bad things happen for reasons, but the reasons make no sense, and then the responses to the bad things also often make no sense, and then it just peters away into people going "Well... time to write fix-it fic, I guess".

When I saw that Tony dies in Endgame, my first thought was that they had a chance to make him a bona fide tragic figure all the way back in Iron Man 1, where he is clearly established as someone who's made terrible, destructive choices, but you can't really do a tragic arc for someone who's supposed to be the linchpin of your 22-film franchise, so we got, what, a dozen movies spooling it out and now his noble, self-sacrificing death, which in a tragic arc would atone for all the shitty things he's done, is so distanced from those shitty things that it loses a lot of its impact.

I'm not like you, in that I love endings. But the endings can't just be stoppings. They have to make narrative sense, and they have to get you right in the feels because of everything that's led up to them, and they have to feel appropriate to the story. An ending is a statement about how the world is or should be. I mean, speaking of tragedy, I hate that RENT fucked with the tragic ending of La Bohème, but I also appreciate the absolute refusal to make Mimi pay with her life for being a sex worker and drug user. La Bohème has a totally different moral element because of the different associations with TB vs. HIV, and simply copying the ending would have sent a message that the writers clearly did not want to send. They put in an absolute cop-out non-ending instead, which is why I hate it, but at least they were thinking, "What does this ending say about our ideas of what's right and wrong?"

As far as I can tell from reading spoilery things, the Endgame ending has nothing at all to say about what's right or wrong, except that sometimes parents need to make sacrifices for their children, which again would have a lot more impact if the series had been about that theme in any way. Meanwhile, major emotional elements like what happened between Steve and Tony in Civil War (which really messed with people) seem to have been resolved very hastily. So of course it's unsatisfying.

I feel really bad for everyone who's been in this fandom for years and years and now has to watch the Avengers be disassembled.

[kore]

Yeah, "Avengers Dissembled" would have been a much more apt title for the movie.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Ooh, I like your point about LotR.

"Chekov's Gun gets taken away by the BATF agent"
yes! :))

[melannen]

You don't have to *fire* it, but you should have *something* happen....

[calime]

I just want to nod my head so hard it's in danger of falling off and go Ys! Yes! This! I agree! to this post.

That is all.

[melannen]

I am glad people are resonating with this!

[beccaelizabeth]

agreed
👍🖖

I just get so frustrated at stories that end all 'look at this huge great problem!' Like, yes, we can see a problem, but why they so proud of that? the clever bit is fixing it.

[melannen]

Sometimes ending on a problem is good! Like, if you're a TV show where you sole a problem every week, and your characters are really good at solving problems, and your characters really enjoy solving problems, then ending on "And here's one more problem for us to keep solving" is a great series ending.

You shouldn't end on a problem that's a problem for the *storytelling*, though...

[dhampyresa]

your ending is when the new, completely different spire goes up and you've got a story that ends on a strong point
I see what you did there.

This post is a perspective on things I had not considered before. Thank you.

[sholio]

I've had this open in a tab for awhile to respond to, because one thing this post made me think about is how much I love that it's very clear from reading CJ Cherryh's books that her favorite kind of ending is "the found family is all living together and poised on the edge of new adventures doing the same kind of thing they just spent the book doing", so like 90% of her books end that way - and how rare that is, with canons always wanting some kind of big apocalyptic finish.

[pedanther]

One of the things I was thinking about as I read this is one of my favourite book series, which I often dip into for comfort reading. It starts with a spy and a bodyguard meeting in an alleyway as they're each on the run from the respective people trying to kill them, builds up to them foiling the spy's former boss's plot to take over the galaxy, and ends with them about to embark on a life of married domesticity -- except that how it really ends is with somebody showing up on their doorstep and offering them another adventure.

And I know fans of the series who were annoyed by the ending, because they wanted to know who is this person and what is this adventure, but it made me laugh with delight because it was Perfect.

And then a few years ago, the authors started writing a new series about who was that person and what was that adventure, and it's lovely to have new stories about that universe but there are times when I find myself wishing that they'd just left it at that.

...and I've just now realised, as I was writing this comment, that part of the reason I'm not quite on board with the new series is that it turns out the spy and the bodyguard don't get to go on the new adventure; in the new series, they're the responsible adults who hold down the fort at home while the adventure happens to a group of new characters. The ending that said "Don't worry, their adventures are not over yet" has turned into a continuation where actually, they kind of are.

[mindstalk]

"Hold down the fort" here means trying to shepherd an an-cap mafia planet into civilization, while being shot at by angry locals and angrier spies. They're not exactly adventure-free, it's just that adventure comes to them. And yeah, they have to share books now.

But the very second book in the series involved a different couple than the one you describe (who got books 1 and 3); jumping around is what this series does.