Should the video game section be cleaned up a little? About half of the Pokemon section, for example, is complaining about a boring post-game rather than simply padding the distance between climax and credits.
Edit rebuke: somehow after making an edit to the Video Games section it became merged with the Literature section. Please look over what happened and let me know since I never touched the Literature section nor the folder formatting.
Pittsburghmuggle
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Oh God - whoever put that in... BRAVO!
"Freedom is not a license for chaos" -Norton Juster's The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics
Can we add "Gods and Generals" that should REALLY be an example.... The extended director's cut is 5 hours, and it never feels like it's going to properly end.
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Sure, go ahead.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
discussion on Peter Jackson's Super long Ending from LOTR
- As noted below in the literature section, the books actually contain a further climax, the Scouring of the Shire, in which the hobbits retake the Shire from conquering pillagers. Peter Jackson left it out of the films for the very reason of this trope, feeling that audiences would react poorly to what was essentially a renewal of the action after the main climax of the twelve-hours-combined films had already been resolved, which says something, considering how the movies are notorious for falling into this trope anyway. For numerous reasons (including characterization and thematic significance felt by many to improve the overall story and the aforementioned 'being well-written' thing) it is a matter of intense debate among fans whether Jackson was right to do so. Fans of the original ending cite that it is vital to the meaning and structure of the novel and contains several important character moments, whereas Jackson and his supporters argue that including a second, arguably redundant climax after the climax of the main quest had been resolved and everything was already ending would serve only to make an already long, drawn-out and arguably frustrating ending even more long, drawn-out and frustrating for film audiences, who had already sat through a combined twelve-hour epic to begin with.
- Instead of having a whole movie on the Helm's Deep battle, he might have had enough room to put it in, considering the battle in the book is, like, one chapter.
- And originally it was going to be even longer, with specifics on what Gimli and Legolas got up to after the ring's destruction. These scenes were not put in even for the extended edition (which leaves the entire ending sequence untouched), but a couple shots from them appear in the special features.
- It's worth noting that the Scouring was removed from some of the radio adaptations and the animated Return of the King. So Jackson is not the only one to think it anti-climactic.
- Truth be told, if The Lord of the Rings were a contemporary series, rather than one dating back more than half a century, the Scouring of the Shire would surely form the basis of Book Four of the trilogy rather than act as a coda to the original story. Of course, technically speaking the original books weren't strictly a trilogy, but had to be released that way because post-WWII paper shortages would have made publishing them as a single volume prohibitively expensive.
- This is more of a Your Mileage May Vary thing as many don't find the ending to Return of the King to be drawn-out or frustrating and actually quite enjoy it. The simple truth is Jackson and co. had a lot of plotlines to tie up and they did as many as they could in as brief a time as they could and many applaud them for the end result, finding the ending ultimately very satisfying. Also, there are not six endings. There is one ending, and that is when the films says "The End".
- As noted below in the literature section, the books actually contain a further climax, the Scouring of the Shire, in which the hobbits retake the Shire from conquering pillagers. Peter Jackson left it out of the films for the very reason of this trope, feeling that audiences would react poorly to what was essentially a renewal of the action after the main climax of the twelve-hours-combined films had already been resolved, which says something, considering how the movies are notorious for falling into this trope anyway. For numerous reasons (including characterization and thematic significance felt by many to improve the overall story and the aforementioned 'being well-written' thing) it is a matter of intense debate among fans whether Jackson was right to do so. Fans of the original ending cite that it is vital to the meaning and structure of the novel and contains several important character moments, whereas Jackson and his supporters argue that including a second, arguably redundant climax after the climax of the main quest had been resolved and everything was already ending would serve only to make an already long, drawn-out and arguably frustrating ending even more long, drawn-out and frustrating for film audiences, who had already sat through a combined twelve-hour epic to begin with.
The footage at the end was very beautiful too. One last look at the beauty we were introduced too after the whole last half of the third movie was spent being dark and craggy was nice for this troper. And I normally don't have the patience for this sort of thing.
Edited by gibberingtroper
That's a (slightly distressingly) plausible idea, that a four-part LOTR 'trilogy' would be the result if the book were published today. The main novel would probably be published in three parts still, only not because of paper shortages but because publishers always love a series to keep the customers coming back for more. Then after the fall of Sauron and the climax of the main action The Return of the King would end and the coda would come, a year later or thereabouts, in the form of The Scouring of the Shire: a Return of the King novella to fleece the punters further...
Edited by VelvetAndroid
Removed from the trope description: In economic theory, this is called the Sunk Cost Fallacy, the idea that a decision maker will choose not based on what has already been spent (sunk cost), but what will be spent to get the end rewards. So in this case, the reward from finishing the book is felt to be less than the effort needed to finish it, even though quite a bit of time and effort has already been spent to get that far.
That's inaccurate. The Sunk Cost Fallacy is "I've spent so much time/money/effort to get to this point, I can't stop now!" It drives people to continue investing in a doomed project in an effort to recoup costs, which is irrational. In other words, the sunk cost fallacy would drive somebody to keep watching something they aren't enjoying because they feel that a watching a complete story that they hate is somehow better than cutting their losses and turning it off halfway through.
If Ending Fatigue drives a reader to stop just short of the end of the story because they're just so sick of the ending, that's precisely the opposite of Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Not sure that tale applies here: When I saw Poltergeist in the theater, someone actually got up and _LEFT_ after the fake-out ending (spoiler: "this house is clean"), missing the awesome *real* ending.
The "HMWTEIW" (well, the one with the spoon) example in web original doesn't have capitalization nor punctuation. Felt too nervous to edit the example.
(Don't) take me home.