How not to end a story
Oct. 14th, 2006 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethYou know what's not a good ending?
"at the end I was certain we had lost."
"So was I." "Some wonder or another, beyond my understanding, intervened at the last."
*headdesk*
see, this is why I haven't read these books for a very long time. You trudge through a trilogy, increasingly wondering why he wrote it as a novel and not an RPG supplement, and when you get to the end?
They lose, but the writer doesn't let them.
*headdesk again*
To be fair, he has an explanation. There's a shiny rock tied to the life force of the entire planet. The bad things that made it thought it would suck the life out of everyone and they would get real strong. Instead "It was as if the very stuff of life, the souls of all that lived upon this world, rejected the [bad things]. The Lifestone aided us, not them."
The thing is, the story did not lead up to that ending. They had big battles with armies, and small duels with heroes, and a bit of magic where mages thought their way out of traps. This ending doesn't pay off any of those strands.
In order to make 'life rejects evil' the payoff, the story would really have to focus in on the positive emotions, the life affirming stuff, the getting married and having children and falling in love and all that, and contrast it with the nasty necromancy the other dudes are using. And it kind of tries. The trouble is it does so with characters that could be summed up by a character sheet, and relationships that basically seem to be "gain a dependent, -10". There's some feeling in the best friends fighting side by side sections, but its very skinny.
All adventure, no emotion. So an emotion based shiny ending just doesn't work.
imho, etc
I have an annoying tickly cough that isn't really a cough. I'm hoping it goes away. It would be nice to get more well instead of more ill.
I'm also very grouchy.
The other way this author can't make an ending - it's ended a half dozen times in the last three pages. Everyone gets their own ending. The big plot is finished and now all the people are getting shinies and going home with someone. Except the plot is *finished* so why do we care???
Blah.
"at the end I was certain we had lost."
"So was I." "Some wonder or another, beyond my understanding, intervened at the last."
*headdesk*
see, this is why I haven't read these books for a very long time. You trudge through a trilogy, increasingly wondering why he wrote it as a novel and not an RPG supplement, and when you get to the end?
They lose, but the writer doesn't let them.
*headdesk again*
To be fair, he has an explanation. There's a shiny rock tied to the life force of the entire planet. The bad things that made it thought it would suck the life out of everyone and they would get real strong. Instead "It was as if the very stuff of life, the souls of all that lived upon this world, rejected the [bad things]. The Lifestone aided us, not them."
The thing is, the story did not lead up to that ending. They had big battles with armies, and small duels with heroes, and a bit of magic where mages thought their way out of traps. This ending doesn't pay off any of those strands.
In order to make 'life rejects evil' the payoff, the story would really have to focus in on the positive emotions, the life affirming stuff, the getting married and having children and falling in love and all that, and contrast it with the nasty necromancy the other dudes are using. And it kind of tries. The trouble is it does so with characters that could be summed up by a character sheet, and relationships that basically seem to be "gain a dependent, -10". There's some feeling in the best friends fighting side by side sections, but its very skinny.
All adventure, no emotion. So an emotion based shiny ending just doesn't work.
imho, etc
I have an annoying tickly cough that isn't really a cough. I'm hoping it goes away. It would be nice to get more well instead of more ill.
I'm also very grouchy.
The other way this author can't make an ending - it's ended a half dozen times in the last three pages. Everyone gets their own ending. The big plot is finished and now all the people are getting shinies and going home with someone. Except the plot is *finished* so why do we care???
Blah.