Too much of a "cop out"?

Is it too much of a "cop out" or let-down if the aim of the characters is to find out WTF has happened and why but at the end of the story, although they have all grown and changed in various ways, they (and therefore the readers) never find the answers they seek?

Would a story like that be too annoying/frustrating to readers?

In very vague and general terms, you get a weird mix of people who find themselves in a strange place with no idea how they got there (except that it's pretty evident that someone must've put them there without their knowledge or prior consent) nor why they are there.

They have two main goals - survival and finding out the answers to the following: where they are, who brought them there and why.

They journey to see if they can find the answers. In the end, they are no closer to answering their questions but they've all developed in some way.

Would the readers feel cheated that after all that, they still have no idea why that weird mob wound up in that situation in the first place?

edited 17th Jun '13 7:39:31 PM by Wolf1066

Depends on how you handle it and how central it is to the story, I'd say. I can think of one movie off-hand that ended up somewhat similar to this in terms of people not knowing what was going on; spoiler-tagged just in case—Primer.

Another thing is that different readers have different tastes. It seems to me that this can be highly audience-dependent.

edited 17th Jun '13 9:38:53 PM by IuraCivium

plus 1 to 'depends on the audience': it would certainly annoy a fairly large number of people, but not so many that you absolutely shouldn't do it.

Just make sure you do it well (I know this is the shittiest writing advice ever, but there you go).

edited 18th Jun '13 11:23:50 AM by imadinosaur

Jesus, imadinosaur, that's the shittiest writing advice ever! Don't help!

[Sincerity Mode Cheers for the insight.] I suspected it'd annoy people but it's good knowing that it is not an automatic "don't do it, EVER".

The question becomes "do I have the skills/writing ability to pull it off?" Depends on how you define "central". It's "central" in that it's inherent in the set up because there's a bunch of seemingly randomly selected and unusual people, without prior warning, thrust into a myserious place and the questions of "who, how and why" are what prompt them to get off their arses and wander through this place rather than just settling down like a weird version of the Waltons.

It's not "central" in that finding the answers would not help them in any way - it's not like they utterly have to find the answers or the world will end.

Even if they did find out who, how, why and what criteria were used in selecting them etc, they'd still be exactly where they are under exactly the same circumstances - knowing the answers would not get them back to their respective homes.

I'm pretty sure that by the time they get to the end of the book, they'd have answers to some questions - just not those ones - and even more questions.

I only have two things to say (though with questionable merit ):

1) Since you are not going to fulfill the story's kind-of-central focus, then the strength of the story rests on the shoulders of the characters. Audiences are willing to forgive even bad plotting if you have good central characters (As proof, I present the fact that three Iron Man movies exist solely because Robert Downey Jr played Tony Stark). But this comes under the umbrella of "if it's written well," so...yeah.

2) If you're going to leave that plot point ambiguous in the end, your readers are going to start having discussions among themselves about it. And people love having discussions. Just make sure to bring any number of plausible explanations to their attention, provide proof in the story to support all of them equally and by the end of it, people might not even need an answer, instead preferring to stick to their personal Fanon.

edited 18th Jun '13 10:08:24 PM by Elfhunter

They'll probably be really excited at the end for a possible sequel, and it's a great way to end a first installment. But something tells me this is a oneshot kinda deal.

My advice? Downplay the question answering bit. Figuring out where they are and why they're wherever they are is a great motivation for the characters to have, but survival should be the real focus if you have no intention of answering those questions. Emphasize the peril and the fact that they need to rely on each other just to continue living before they can even think of looking for answers.

Amazingly enough I know of a decent example of something like this: Cage Of Eden. Bit of a fanservice heavy manga, but the first half deals extensively with a similar situation wherein the characters are actively looking for a way off the island and explanations for why there are so many extinct animals running around, but they have to first learn to live off the land and protect each other before succumbing to savagery Lord Of The Flies style. The second half then demonstrates why you don't answer those questions: the answers you come up with are likely going to sound a lot stupider to the audience than what they were hoping for. Sort of like Nothing Is Scarier applied to mysteries.

It depends what was heavily played up to the climax was made.

I mean, if answer the question was the largest hook, then you'll have problems. If you were writing it more from a character growth perspective and put heavy emphasis that they were growing and becoming less concerned about how they got there and more about what they have become since, then it's a fairly easy jump to make. The level of being "cheated", in my mind, falls on how much I actually cared about the question being answered first. So if I didn't care much about it by the end since I was more intrigued by their transforming interactions, then not having that answered wouldn't bother me too much.

My advice is decide how much wiggle room you have left and where you've been pushing since the start. There's not enough information from here for me to give anything more specific.

The characters are going to have their own personal hypotheses, e.g. a wizard/God/aliens did it, it's a hallucination, we're dead and this is the afterlife etc based on their own temperaments, beliefs etc. They will doubtless forward "evidence" to support their hypotheses and they may even change their minds depending on what they experience or what their moods are.

So there should be plenty of scope to advance contradictory theories and evidences and explore them through the characters. The same facts/observations could be claimed to be evidence for completely different theories.

I'm certainly hoping that the characters will be interesting and engaging enough to the readers that they carry the story on their merits.

Unless I can think of some other direction for the story to go at a later date or some story "left untold" that involves them and that place, then it's likely to be a one-off.

I was planning on the focus being primarily on survival and how these disparate, often conflicting, people can rally together, how they interact, how they grow and develop.

I like the idea of Nothing Is Scarier being applied to the mystery.

I was planning that the characters would care less about finding answers as time goes on and become more accepting that this is their life now, however they came to be here. I'm even planning that at least one of them doesn't react to the strange situation with "I want to go home, how do I get out of this place" that is typical in Portal Stories.

I haven't actually pushed very far as yet - I'm still at the beginning with one of the characters coming out of his tent in the morning and having a major "WTF, this isn't where I pitched my tent last night" moment.

edited 19th Jun '13 12:33:09 AM by Wolf1066