Stories Must End

My nose is runny, which is quite annoying; otherwise, I’m mostly okay. I’m trying out letters for Lent, and also making some kind of travel plans? It’s all a bit messy right now.

I’m finishing up the Bloodsworn Trilogy, which is good but also terrible because they just killed off the coolest character. After that might be a Scott Hahn book? Or maybe a Witcher comic.

Daylight savings this weekend! And now for the Saturday Note originally planned for last weekend.

Stories Must End

A story works because it has a conclusion.

Okay, that sounds like a ‘duh’, but it’s a problem for a lot of different kinds of media that doesn’t seem to understand that. Or rather, the people selling it don’t seem to understand that. Comics, for instance: when you have a successful comic book superhero, the company will keep that character running through different storylines for as long as it sells. Which is a problem! It’s difficult to get invested in a comic book storyline if you know that somewhere down the line, any victory is not permanent, and villains could be brought back to fight the heroes over and over again for no other reason than to keep selling issues.

Now there are ways to make good storylines with ongoing comics–it’s happened plenty of times. But it’s darn difficult to do consistently. Part of DC’s problem is that they haven’t figured out the formula, so they keep rebooting themselves: Crisis, or New 52, or Rebirth, or whatever they’re on at this point. Even then, they tend to do storylines that are good for new readers, but are nonsense for longtime fans. Look at Hush–it’s a great place to start comics, especially if you’re familiar enough with an animated series or two, but as a place in the overall story, it’s just silly.

There’s a reason that the most acclaimed comic storylines tend to be one-shots or the like, that are sometimes retroactively applied into continuity (like Batman: Year One). Those authors are telling limited stories instead of trying to make big ones that are supposed to continue for other writers to pick up.

I strongly suspect that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is starting to run into this issue. Unlike some, I don’t think it’s quite out of meaningful material just yet, but I do think it’s becoming obvious that Marvel Studios was operating under the assumption that they would keep going forever, and that’s just not possible. They did something astounding by making a set of comic book adaptations that told a story over the course of a decade with dozens of movies. Except after finishing that story… well, unless they came up with a clear direction quickly, it was difficult to explain why we should still be invested. And Phase 4 didn’t make it obvious where any of this was going, so people wondered why they should care outside of interest in new characters and stories being introduced. Otherwise, people think that Marvel doesn’t have a point, it’s just making movies to make movies.

[It really doesn’t help that, several movies and television shows in, they introduce what the actual Plot is meant to be–Kang’s attempted takeover of the multiverse–only for that movie (Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania) to be a flop, and the main villain, Kang, to be played by an actor who gets accused of assault. Instead of recasting, Marvel decided to change directions altogether, meaning anything they were setting up with the multiverse is now quietly dropped.]

Comics shouldn’t go on forever; likewise, their adaptations shouldn’t either. Audiences are only going to get tired of it.

I have read somewhere that Young Justice was planned to run forever, which, if you true, is absolutely maddening: the first two seasons set up a conflict between the heroes of Earth and Darkseid, and if there was no plan to actually resolve that, that means that the entire story was pointless, except as a way to adapt every corner of the DC Universe imaginable. Even though the story is (as of now; who knows if it’ll get un-canceled again) four seasons, fans were already getting frustrated that the storyline was no closer to actual climax, and instead the writers just threw more complications into the mix.

Gosh, can you imagine if that happened for like ten years? Ten years of the villains standing in corners, smirking and cackling about how their plans are advancing, while the heroes keep desperately trying to play catch-up? That’d be obnoxious.

Look, the audience needs to know that they’re getting somewhere, and that there will be payoff to the attention they’ve been paying. The movies, television shows, and comics that have the greatest impact on audiences are the ones that have an end where things are supposed to go. Lord of the Rings is good because you know that this conflict with Sauron is going to end one day, one way or another. The original trilogy of Star Wars tells a story which ends with the defeat of the Empire and Luke becoming a Jedi. And so on, and so forth. This whole idea of, “We can just keep going forever!” is some weird, stupid notion cooked up by Hollywood executives in suits because they think if something can make money, it’ll make infinite money.

But no, that’s not how it works. Stories work because they’re stories, not because they’re money-printing factories. Let them function as stories. Let them end. And then people can move to the next one.

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