On De-Powered Endings

 So! Yesterday I finished BOTH The Last Enchantment AND Horizon Forbidden West, so already the weekend’s off to a good start. Not sure what I’ll do next in terms of games, but I have a few comics and Dead Man’s Hand to read for now.

Getting hyped for Assassin’s Creed: Mirage too!

Anyhow.

On De-Powering Endings

This past week I finished reading the Children of the Lamp series, which is a middle grade fantasy book series about twins who find out that they’re djinn. They go on globe-trotting adventures with their uncle (also a djinn), find ancient artifacts, fight villains, and that sort of thing. It’s exciting in an old-fashioned sort of way.

Spoiler alert: the last book in the series ends with the twins saving the world by using up their djinn powers, making them fully human, and them being happy that now they get to live normal lives like normal kids, with no more worries about djinn stuff and supervillains. This was… unsatisfactory to me.

Incredibly so.

I’ve been wracking my brains as to *why*, precisely. The idea of the heroes giving up their powers is not necessarily a bad one, in theory. Yeah, the kid in us is bummed that the heroes we’re rooting for no longer have cool powers that we would happily have, but sometimes it makes sense for the story. And after all, just about every single Chronicles of Narnia ends with the heroes putting the magical world aside.

Here’s what bothers me about it, as far as I can tell:

ONE: the lack of build-up. While this book has the twins bring up that sometimes they think life would be better with powers, this is the seventh book in the series and it hasn’t been a recurring theme throughout. The closest we’ve gotten is that Philippa sometimes thinks and talks about how power can be dangerous, but that’s not quite the same thing at all. So the idea that the main characters wanted to have a normal life feels right the fudge out of nowhere.

There ARE characters who wish they didn’t have superpowers; it’s not uncommon, actually. The very beginning of the first Percy Jackson & the Olympians book has the titular hero telling the reader that he never asked for this life, and would rather be normal. That’s not what we saw here, though.

TWO: this makes the entire series feel a bit pointless. With something like Chronicles of Narnia, where the main characters leave the magical world at the end of each installment (other than a couple of instances), it’s because the lessons they learn in Narnia are to help the protagonists become better people. Here, the running theme of the books has been to help the protagonists prepare to use their powers in a responsible way. That, and all of their friends (that we meet in-text, anyhow) are part of this magical world. By giving that up, and being happy about it, basically everything we’ve been invested in–the kids’ future, their friendships, their relationships–all of that is going nowhere! You go through several books of finding out how djinn world works, only to tell us it doesn’t matter anymore.

The reason that Kerr wrote this ending was that he felt like it was time to end it, that the characters had enough, but I thought he could have done a better job than this.

And again, I don’t think de-powering your protagonists is necessarily a bad idea–it can work! I think there are many cases it can work. Many magical or superpowered heroes are meant to be an everyman who never asked for the powers. Or having these powers comes with constant risks to one’s loved ones. Those people might like to give up their powers!

[As long as they’re not shunted off to someone else. An important message in Trollhunters is how Jim’s entire life has been screwed up by being a hero, only for him to decide in the movie finale to give those powers to his best friend, thereby… screwing up that guy’s life instead? Wow, Jim, you’re a great friend!]

I get that maybe you want to create a message in the story, especially if it’s aimed at children, that the normal world can be exciting and engaging enough, and much better than dreaming about magic powers you can’t have. Fine! Buzzkill, but fine! I get it! Though if you want that ending to land, you’ve got to build up to it, like any major change in direction for the Plot. 

You absolutely cannot take away the protagonists’ powers, after years of having them happily playing with it, and then say, “Yay! Happily ever after!” Nope, won’t work. It only feels like an abrupt conclusion, like the author is out of ideas and wants to kill a series without worrying about someone suggesting that he write more of them.

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