The Art Of Endings That Live On

Mission Statement:

The goal of this post is to explain what's An Ending That Lives On, what it isn't, why it can be a desirable goal to aim for, and I will try to hint at some of the measures that could be taken towards achieving it.

Summary:

In this post, that grew out of control in the making, I shall describe what I understand by "An Ending That Lives On", I will compare it with other ways of keeping a work in the minds of an audience after they are done enjoying it. I will attempt to highlight the differences between said methods through a selection of examples of works that demonstrate one or more of these methods. Of the works that attempted to achieve an Ending That Lives On, I will attempt to single out the factors that would explain their success or failure in doing so.

Body:

What do you mean, "an Ending That Lives On"?

This is a specific type of confusing ending that plays with the audiences' minds, the sort that goes:

• STEP 1: through writing that is vague, inconclusive, inscrutable, or just plain lazy or mean-spirited*
  theoretically at least, it is possible to achieve this by accident
  , we achieve the effect of ambiguity and lack of closure
• STEP 2: ????
• STEP 3: LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYONE

Gainax pulled off Step 2 so well people keep passionately talking to this very day about a show that went on air almost twenty freaking years ago. Bio Ware infamously attempted something similar with its Mass Effect series, and failed memorably*

. This post attempts to analyze what step 2 is, that turns an unsatisfying ending into an ending that keeps you hungry (not quite the same thing), that Evangelion did right, Metal Gear Solid 2 did by accident, and Mass Effect did wrong.

It should be noted that whether you do it well or badly, you are bound to draw the ire of the fans, for the exact same reason that you draw their long-lasting passion: you leave them an unsatisfying ending that they must struggle to make sense of and make their peace with.

With episodic works, you can pull off an interesting variation similar to the Cliffhanger, where you do this with the ending of every episode, leaving the public to simmer and speculate and explore, and generally keeping the work in their minds. Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica did this very well, and so did Lost, and, unintentionally, Metal Gear Solid.

What and Ending That Lives On is not:

Keep in mind that the difference between this sort of ending and a Cliffhanger or Sequel Hook is that, in those cases, people are left with a burning need to know what happens next. Endings that Live On leave fans with a burning need to understand what the hell just happened. Let's see a few examples of shows that did not do an Ending That Lives On, but who Lived On through other means.

• Eureka Seven had a Gainax Ending that was very vague and open, but it was very fulfilling emotionally, solved most of the plot threads and character threads in meaningful, climactic ways, and left the audience happy and satisfied. With a full stomach, so to speak, and ready to move on. So, the show did not quite Live On in the sense of recreation or development, but it achieved immortality through sheer honest-to-goodness quality: its audience comes back to watch it, and recommends other people watch it too. It's become a Classic.
• Panty And Stocking With Garterbelt had a Gainax Ending that was perfectly in tune with the rest of the show. However, the plot was patently absurd and nonsensical, and the characters were unsympathetic: no emotional investment and no expectation of any meaningulness to be found meant that speculation died out rather soon: the public did not care.
• Harry Potter usually had very clear plot lines and mostly left every mystery solved at the end of every book. However, JK Rowling knew very well how to keep her audience in suspense of what would happen next, without even using cliffhangers. To the point that the audience went on and, repeatedly, finished the series all by itself through Fan Fiction. And her delightful abuse of Checkovs Gun and Law of Conservation of Detail meant that the fans went batshit trying to guess what happened next. Finally, the setting and the characters were engaging enough, and were so full of potential (partly due to a Worldbuilding that was far from airtight) that people were eager to play with it and write alternate or side stories around it. But it was not the ending that Lived On: people weren't struggling to make sense of what had happened, they were focused on either dreaming up what would happen next, or making stuff happen differently. Fans have remained eager for more supplementary material from the author, because the setting is fun, cool, and interesting to explore. So, really, it's the Story and the Setting that lived on.
• The Lord Of The Rings didn't leave a story that many felt compelled to continue or rework, but it left a charming, nay, haunting setting, that people wanted to explore more and more. Thus, different stories set in Middle Earth, from the author and his followers, as well as elements of the lore, kept the fandom's attention, but, unlike the following example, didn't appear to cause the fans to go out and make up stuff themselves: they seem mostly happy with letting this power in the hands of the Word of God and of whoever owns the rights to the license.
• Warhammer 40 K offers a very compelling setting, which not only thrives on conflict, but is entirely built with the purpose of enabling as much conflict as possible, in as grand and grandiose a scale as possible. It is also very flexible: by using Literary Agent Hypothesis, the authors have made all of Word of God unreliable, all contradictions of it acceptable, and so the fandom is entirely free to build, unbuid, and otherwise play with and or around the setting. As are the authors of the novelizations and Expanded Universe.
• Metal Gear Solid mostly relied on "What Happens Next" making its Plot Live On: the extremely specialized setting the characters move in did not seem to leave much room for creativity and speculation... but every game ended with a Stinger that caused the audience to question their entire understanding of what had just happened. Not that complete reevaluations of one's notions weren't a routine in plots where you were always an Unwitting Pawn, and recursive Gambit Pile Up after Gambit Pile Up delivered one Wham Moment after another. However, those pale in front of the extremely successful and extremely over-the-top Ending That Lived On that is Sons Of Liberty. Just check that page.

Works that tried to give their ending life, and failed:

• Now let us examine one example on how not to try to do this: with Mass Effect, Bio Ware tried to pull this trope off, and while they did elicit rage and infamy and lots of fans talking about the game and spending time and effort and passion in discussing it, they completely failed to achieve the desired effect of having them speculate on it.
  • Mass Effect failed to achieve an Ending That Lives On because, in a series where every character is thoroughly explained, every motivation dissected, every back-story explored, and every sub-plot satisfyingly resolved, the expectation is that of a climactic, satisfying ending, that will leave you free to go on with your life. The games also made you invest yourself in the story by making you think your choices mattered a very great deal. By its nature, Mass Effect did not invite an Ending That Lives On, because it explained too much and what were left weren't mysteries or the Riddle for the Ages, but Plot Holes and loose threads.
  • Said plot holes and loose ends might have encouraged a Story That Lives On: one way of enabling that would have been leaving one ambiguous epilogue that gave glimpses of uncertain futures, uncertain futures that would still show that your choices had far-reaching consequences, that would encourage the public to fill those blanks and speculate on what future they left the Galaxy. Instead, they chose an ending that was vague and unsatisfying, that was completely at odds with the established rules of the setting*
    specifically, that idealistic or cynical choices resulted in the story retroactively affirming the worldview that made them seem appropriate: we might as well call it Shrodingers Wisdom
    , and that did not invite any speculation at all because it didn't leave enough hooks in the unresolved threads to work with. Let me develop this point further:
• By contrast, Neon Genesis Evangelion went for An Ending That Lives On, but excluded A Story That Lives On from happening, for reasons similar to why Mass Effect failed to achieve that: people were notably not very interested in exploring what happened next, because they were given far too little to work with. There's no way of continuing a story in a setting when you have no idea what the new rules of the setting are, what elements you can or cannot count on, and so on. Like with Mass Effect, if you end a story right after a cataclysmic, world-changing, unprecedented event, the development of which nobody predicted, the aftermath of which nobody ever prepared for... you just can't continue: there's too many alternatives, and none of them can grasp any foundations in the preexisting canon.
• There needs to be a feeling of mystery: a riddle to be solved, a message to be understood, a code to be decrypted. If the audience finds out that you're "just making shit up", that there isn't anything "behind" your unfulfilled foreshadowing, unexplained character actions, inconclusive aesops, and plot threads Left Hanging, they will feel cheated, insulted, and disappointed, and they will turn their backs on you. This particular failure mode, when applied to episodic shows, is known as The Chris Carter Effect, and The X Files exemplify it, among others. Read the trope page for more information.

Why could this be a good thing?

• Advantages:
  • An Ending That Lives on is, commercially, a very desirable thing. It plants the show in the audience's minds, turning it into a very sustainable obsession. It means a fandom that is constantly eager for every bit of supplementary material that's All There in the Manual, for every Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition, for every side story and alternate universe that you might churn out, for every continuation that promised to make sense of what happened.
  • Also, from an artistic achievement standpoint, it invites analysis, critique, and intense scrutiny. This is a double-edged sword: by playing this trope, you are pretending for greatness, and if your show doesn't deliver said greatness, you will not be forgiven, and Ending will fall flat on his face and die of broken bones, organ rupture, head trauma, and ingestion of dust, and become one with the worm-ridden ground. But if the show is indeed great, the greatness will be amplified in an enormous proportion, and it will leave a much deeper footprint in the collective consciousness: its taste will linger in the media and genres associated with it, pervading future works, influencing generations of creators.

• Disadvantages:
  • Large numbers (commonly, and somewhat deservedly, qualified as hordes) of angry, demanding, obsessive fans. Some of them will completely miss your point, some of them will pervert it, some of them will threaten to kill you*
    they might
    , and some of them will write Fan Fiction so awful you might wish you never wrote the work in the first place. If it's any consolation, think that their obsession and their infamous activities mean more attention directed towards your work, which means more money, in addition to the money such Fan Boys and Fan Girls (might) already pay for the show themselves.
  • Getting forced by Executive Meddling into maintaining a Franchise Zombie when your creative needs would drive you to work elsewhere. Maybe Hideo Kojima wants to make works that aren't about Solid Snake, maybe the authors of Portal are tired of memes, maybe Hideaki Anno got over his depression and doesn't like to visit that bad place again, and the ravages he made while he was in it.

A final appeal:

So, I ask of you, tropers, if one of us here set out to give their work a Living End, how would you suggest one should go about it? Is it something that "just happens", or can it be properly planned? If one is trying to deliberately achieve this, what are the pitfalls to avoid, what are the elements that should be sought after?

edited 21st Apr '12 8:58:35 AM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

I just want to say, that after witnessing the end of Mass Effect 3, I freaking knew there would be a thread about this eventually.

Honestly, what I find most interesting about endings like Mass Effect or Harry Potter is the way that the fandom collectively rebelled against the ending, actively searching for better ways to finish the story they'd grown so attached to. Similarly, with Knights of the Old Republic 2, we were given an awful non-ending that was rushed out the door so quickly they couldn't even come up with a cogent explanation for anything, yet I still passionately love the game because of how excellent the rest of it is.

From instances like this, I can't help but feel like the ending often doesn't matter nearly as much as we've been led to believe. What I remember about, say, Hamlet isn't so much the final resolution (Everyon's Dead Dave!) but more Hamlet's journey and development over the five acts of the play. Similarly with Evangelion, the ending (for the sake of discussion I'm using End of Evangelion as the canon ending) invites much discussion for its own sake, but it's not what attached me to the series. Rather, what attached me were the characters and the overall story: if it weren't for those elements I wouldn't love the Evangelion spinoffs such as Angelic Days that use a similar plot and the same characters but tell a different story.

So what I would say is to make the rest of the work resonate with the reader. Making me care about the characters or the setting is always, I feel, the key to good writing; if I'm not attached to either of those things I'm not really going to care all that much about the story. Because, let's face it, if we accept the idea that there are only a finite number of stories with an infinite number of variations, it's hard to care about the plot or the ending because they're not what distinguishes the work, that gives it its unique flavor.

deviantArt | Twitter

Indeed. If a work is really good, it will stick with people no matter the ending. A good story relies on more then just the last 10 minutes.

However, a good or wierd enough ending can still be the difference between "fantastic" and "immortalised", so I can see why many try to go for this.

Considering that you're talking about ambiguous endings that leave the audience wondering, and you actually used the phrase 'plants the show in the audience's minds', I'm surprised, confused, and slightly impressed that you avoided mentioning the obvious.

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

That show was incredibly easy to figure out, and the only doubt it left behind was "is this real or not". Very basic Paranoia Fuel in any work with recursive realities or taking place In The Mouth Of Madness: the doubt is whether the character's perception is real, and the possibilities are fairly limited. For instance, Shutter Island's page contains a figuring-out of all possible ways the ending could be read. Christopher Nolan does interesting riddles, but they can be solved once and for all. They're not mysteries. The Matrix is more ambiguous because LOL Magic. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas leaves you wondering "what the fuck did I just watch", but the narration is very straightforward and what happened is clear.

edited 21st Apr '12 10:44:48 AM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Since I came here via Madoka thread, I will shed some light on the subject based on what I witnessed in that thread. I will try to be as vague as possible to avoid spoilers.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica, in the first two episodes, was just a simple little Magical Girl show. Had it gone this route, it would have been something of an old treasure. A forgettable Magical Girl show that would only have a few hundred fans riding on its coattails. That is until episode three. By that end, everyone knew this was no ordinary Magical Girl show, and soon, it was hailed as the Evangelion of Magical Girls. There’s the first condition to why Madoka’s ending lived on: A hook. You need to grab your audience as early as possible. Had they pulled that stunt off at the seventh episode, there would be less people who would care.

As the show continued, many visual cues occurred and by the eighth episode, things took a large turn for the worse. The eighth episode detailed how Witches, the Monsters of the Week, came to be. This lead into the second condition to why Madoka’s ending lived on: Interpretation. Upon realizing whom the Witches really are, many people begun to interpret what the Witches were before. It has become a pastime now, as fans still to this day talk about the Witches and their interpretations.

By the time the tenth episode rolled around, the Sendai Earthquake happened, resulting in the show to be delayed by three weeks. This starvation of a conclusion after what some a Wham Episode lead to the third condition to why Madoka’s ending lived on: Speculation. Many people decided to speculate on how the story would end. Many people believed that it would be a Downer Ending due to the cynical and sadistic nature of the show. Others foolishly became hopeful and thought up of a Happy Ending. Three weeks was also enough time for some fanart and fanfiction to come out, which lead to a fourth condition to why Madoka’s ending lived on: Fans. You need fans to keep your show alive. You need fans to remember your show. You need fans for your ending to live on. The delay caused people to write their own fanfiction, telling how the show would end or fixing some of the mishaps that happened in the show’s run. These provided material to help the fans hold out for the conclusion. Which eventually came.

And when it ended, some people were satisfied. Others weren’t. And this is because of one thing: confusion. The ending introduced new plot elements to the table without actually explaining them. Some fans liked it, others hated it and wanted a sequel to explain this. However, this all led to the fifth and final condition to why Madoka’s ending lived on: All of the above. Fans were hooked by the ending to interpret and speculate what had happened. People were still interpreting about witches, people were still speculating about the ending, and people were still writing works based off the setting. Even now, you can look at the Madoka thread on this site. A year after the show ended, and it is still being active, with their number of posts rivaling that of Bleach and One Piece.

Was this on purpose? No. If the Invisible Children has taught us anything, you can’t make a meme. If My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic taught us anything, it’s that memes happen on their own. One could have just simply ignored a commercial where a guy in an orange jumpsuit announced “MORNING RESCUE!” but instead, they took him and made him infamous. Just like this show. The show, the story, and the ending lived on all by accident. It’s one of those Lighting In A Bottle moments. It is something that just can’t be replicated.

I'll have to disagree with that last bit: I think Gen Urobuchi knew exactly what he was doing, and did it masterfully, in precise, concise, clear, coldly calculated strokes, like a mathematical demonstration, like a silent dance. I also feel that "The Ending That Lives On" applied more to the time between the episodes, in conjunction with the classical Cliffhanger, than to the time after the show ended: most of the figuring-out took place shortly thereafter, and, since then, I feel the Madoka thread is mostly pacing on threaded ground.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

I agree with you on those bits. The speculation after the episodes were another reason why the show had life breathed into.

@LOTR

"Thus, different stories set in Middle Earth, from the author and his followers, as well as elements of the lore, kept the fandom's attention, but, unlike the following example, didn't appear to cause the fans to go out and make up stuff themselves: they seem mostly happy with letting this power in the hands of the Word Of God and of whoever owns the rights to the license. "

1) I see no signs of Franchise Zombie linked in "and his followers" ("The author is told to write more books"). Christopher Tolkien published compilations of notes left by J. R. R. Tolkien. 2) Influence is not limited to "Thus, different stories set in Middle Earth" - multiple ideas propagated to other works of fantasy (hobbits, his vision of elves etc).

Allegedly. The trope I had in mind turns out to actually be Outlived Its Creator.

Being the codifier and co-launcher of an entire genre is indeed one of the greatest honors a creator can achieve in their life. However, I am here continued and perennial discussion speculation over the ending and what events transpired during the story. It's not a precisely case of The Setting Lives On either, since no matter how much of a Middle Earth clone your original setting is, it still isn't Middle Earth: otherwise you'd get sued. More like The Setting Had Lots Of Children or The Setting Started A Family.

edited 22nd Apr '12 6:02:01 AM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.