The power of story is so strong that fans, in anticipation of the next installment, gin up their own desires for how things ought to go. Who they think should win, or be heroic, or find love, or whatever. The realm of strong opinions in Star Wars or Game of Thrones or the Marvel Universe assures that any single ending will not have universal approval. And you have to wonder if it did satisfy everyone, how deeply did it cut into the realm of soul? Star Wars didn’t go the heroic route people expected and there is a kind of schism you find in religion. Same of Game of Thrones. And, well, everything else.
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People desire a particular heroic route. But the show, and I’m thinking Game of Thrones here, isn’t about that. It never was. This has been clear over and over again as main characters have been killed off before. Main characters that we thought were the heart and soul of the series. When those shocking incidences happened, the audience loved the show for it’s dangerous writing and how fresh it was. It was The Lord of the Rings for grown ups, with surprises, complexity, and real stakes.
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Now when more heroic types fail, the same audience protests. Why is that? Because they now have t-shirts and mugs with their favorite characters. Baby girls are named “Daenerys” or “Khaleesi.” People have had longer to anticipate a certain road map in their minds, time for those ideas to harden into cement. A hardening that didn’t allow other possibilities that were right under our noses the whole time. (Yes, Arya’s been training for that moment literally for years!) The thing is, and it’s puzzling why few admit this, that if the audience gets the ending they are anticipating, they’re always disappointed. As Christopher Cross sang in Arthur’s Theme, “I know it’s crazy, but it’s true.”
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A big reason a single film can have more power than a serialized franchise is the story happens in one swoop. The audience doesn’t have months or years of anticipation to fill in the gaps with fan fiction and Youtube fan theories they cooked up chatting with their pals at work.
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But serial or not, the authors have to make their own choices. But it’s not made for you or me in particular. The actual author doesn’t care about our fan fiction, our theories and tangential wondering. They have their own story to tell. The story has a life of its own. It has its own sense. The story isn’t out to get anyone in particular. In fact, that’s not even the purpose of storytelling. If its worth its salt, the story gives the ending one needs, not what one desires. It may provoke. It may bother you. That too is a gift and frankly that is part of the meaning of the hero’s journey.
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It’s been said by a number of writers, (I have in mind Neil Gaiman and Aaron Sorkin), that the audience’s reactions are always important and have emotional truth. But when audience members make suggestions on how things should go, they are always wrong. Why? First, because it isn’t their story. Story, like a soup, shouldn’t have too many cooks. Second, they aren’t the expert. An audience telling a writer how to write is like a plane passenger telling a pilot how to fly. Yes, they might have had a bumpy ride, but they don’t know how to take off much less land. And even if they did and the audience were writers, they would know enough to write their own damn stories. Most don’t. Some do, and it’s fan fiction. It’s easy for an amateur to criticize, but actually mastering story is very, very difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
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It’s a troublesome thing that I can only surmise might be what is dampening George R.R. Martin from writing the last two books of his series. People are filing in the gaps on their own and in a sense the story has outstretched his typewriter. If he ever finishes his books, people can only be disappointed. Martin has said that doesn’t outline heavily before writing because he might lose the motivation to finish. He may have a direction in mind, but prefers to discover the depth of the story as he goes along. But he’s in a very strange position. What of a series and a fan base that gets way ahead of him? What of a world where bloggers and vloggers have endless speculation about the world he’s created? What motivation is there to create an official cannon when others have filled the vacuum like this? No wonder he hates fan fiction. Not only is it more prolific than his own, but it waters down the official narrative.
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If only we can loosen the dogmatically critical pathways of our own mind, leaving it open to surprising turns. This looseness doesn’t only apply to our tireless story-consuming habits, but life itself. What in life turns out the way we think it does? If we’re honest, hardly anything. And how dull it would be if it did.
A Fragile Dignity 