It’s been popular in the last few years to bemoan the dominance of franchises. The MCU, Star Wars, and Star Trek get the most flak, but complaints encompass The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Good Omens, and other titles, and range from content overload to the demise of creativity. While I don’t love the endless sequels, prequels, and adaptations, I consider many of these complaints overwrought, amplified by the attention these properties receive more than by the scale and significance of the individual complaints. Razak’s essay exemplifies this, attributing great societal malaise to the cause of a lack of “endings” to distinctive franchises. That’s his prerogative, and I wouldn’t bother writing a post in response to another of a long line of similar complaints, but it a useful opportunity to examine what it is we mean when we say “the end.”
As I’ve written before, I think I struggle with endings. The closer I get to the end, the more difficult I find the writing, and I rarely feel satisfied with the result. To be fair to myself, it’s something I’ve worked to improve, and feedback on the ending to Impressions, which is one of the hardest endings I’ve tried to pull off, has been largely positive. People make much of the importance and significance of first impressions, first pages, first chapters because of the weight these bear in introducing a reader to a story, and those are certainly important to the writer. To the reader, though, the ending might be the most important part. If the beginning isn’t strong, you’ll just bounce off the story, but if you read all the way through the end and the story doesn’t stick the landing, that is far more frustrating.
Simultaneously, the best stories don’t really end for the reader, even if the author never writes another word in the canon. The best stories stick with you, you keep thinking about them, thinking about what happens next, what happened before, and so it doesn’t end, per se. Part of writing a good ending is determining where and when that ending should come. Just like it’s important to know when a story should start, it’s important to know when it should end. End too early, and the reader won’t get enough answers, the story won’t really come to a conclusion, and the experience will be abortive. End too late, and the story will seem to drag on, becoming dull and uninteresting. A great ending balances a sense of closure, of answering questions, with enough left unknown or unsaid for the story to live on in the reader’s imagination. What that looks like will depend on the story you set out to tell. The Return of the King has a long series of endings that pretty conclusively answer all the readers’ questions and conclude all the plot elements. It might answer too much, but it works for the type of story Tolkien tells, with its mythic scope and tone. Discworld novels, on the other hand, tend only to answer the main questions asked in that specific novel, leaving the characters to go on however the reader imagines them until they reappear in another installment.
Endless prequels and sequels don’t obviate the need for endings or rob extant endings of their power…if they’re done right. The single greatest flaw of the Star Wars sequel trilogy which began with The Force Awakens is that it cheapened the ending of The Return of the Jedi by essentially undoing everything that happened in the original trilogy. Despite defeating the Empire, they’re still somehow the underdog rebellion fighting an evil regime. The Mandalorian shows, on the other hand, despite coming after the events of Return of the Jedi honor the ending of the original trilogy by following through on the remaining threads and asking new questions. It is not the endless new content in these massive worlds that gives the sense of there being no satisfaction, no conclusion, but rather the questions the new stories being told ask. If they are too similar to what has already been done, it will be like asking questions we’ve already seen answered. The Rings of Power, for all its flaws, doesn’t diminish The Lord of the Rings, either its beginning or its ending, in any way unless you allow it to do so.
When we tell stories, we’re not trying to encapsulate something complete in the bounds of our words. We’re instead offering a window, a peek into a fragment of a world. That peek begins somewhere and ends somewhere, but its beginnings and endings can never encompass everything about the universe into which we peer. Millions of stories are told set in the “real world,” and no one complains they are less than satisfying because the world hasn’t ended yet. There is no reason to suppose that any invented, imagined world need be less replete with potential stories than our real one. Beginnings and endings to our stories are frames on a picture, and just like a picture, they can’t convey everything, even about their particular subject. If the endings aren’t satisfying, don’t blame it on franchises, on connected worlds and expanded universes. The blame rests on that oldest culprit – bad writing – and that’s a flaw which can afflict a stand-alone story just as much as a sprawling universe of them.
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