Continuation versus Conclusion; The Dichotomy of Story Structure · 7:12am Sep 14th, 2015
The more fiction I consume, the more I notice patterns. Pigeonholing subjective art is never going to be perfectly accurate, but there are generalizations that have some truth. Today, I’d like to talk about a pattern that is present in all fiction, but is more noticeable and more identifiable in fanfiction.
Broadly speaking, fiction can be divided into two types; those that are designed to conclude, and those that are designed to continue for as long as possible.
Conclusive stories are designed to provide the reader with answers, to engross them in their plot, and then deliver a satisfying conclusion. Continuous stories are designed to provide the reader with lots of material to consume, to be lengthy without being tiring, so that they can be worked into a routine.
Both of these categories have many gradations and forms, of course. Even a story that places emphasis on plot can be lengthy, and a story that places emphasis on consumption can be short.
These two types of structure have very different goals, however, and they have very different audiences. Misleading readers often results in the audience being irate.
Let’s take an example I have used in the past; The Mass Effect trilogy. It is a series of three video games, each a lengthy and involved Action-RPG. You can take your character and import the major decisions from one game to the next.
When the Mass Effect trilogy ended, there was a huge uproar from fans about how awful the ending was. The backlash actually caused Bioware to release a free update to the ending.
Part of this backlash was certainly caused by how the ending was presented. I posit, however, that a greater cause was the disconnect between the games’ structure and their goals. The trilogy presented itself as an action-y game, with a lot of shooting and loot and level ups. It had those elements, but a huge part of the game was your interactions with the world. Huge chunks of the games are devoted to talking to your various squad mates, to learning about the setting, and to interacting with various bits and bobs. It was an action-RPG, and the third game even had a mode that stripped out story completely. The game’s point was its world and characters, though.
The story simply was not designed to conclude. The trilogy was always marketed as such, but the developers didn’t always make that clear. The second game is even fundamentally superfluous to the plot; you take a break from dealing with the major enemies, and get a whole new set of squadmates, just to justify further interactions with the world.
So what does this have to do with writing? When writing, is extremely important that you know what type of story you want to make. What are its goals, and does the structure of the story back up those goals? There are many fanfics that are lengthy, but they are unsure if they want to tell a story or are there to be consumed. My usual example in fanfic is The Life and Times of a Winning Pony. It presents itself as a conclusive story, but it is structured like a continuous one. When the author finally concluded it, there was a lot of backlash (not unlike Mass Effect). The author even started writing a sequel.
I think that a good story should have its goals match its structure. A conclusive series needs to provide regular clues as to the conclusion, and prepare the reader for the end ahead of time. A continuous series needs to have as little plot (or multiple, self-contained plots) instead of building up to a conclusion that will never come.
It took a long time for me to realize that this dichotomy was why I hated so many stories. I greatly prefer conclusive stories, but until recently I couldn’t really give a name to the specific issue.
In a way, fanfiction is a purer expression of this dichotomy, because a series can continue as long as the author is willing to write. Something like Austraeoh or Crystal’s Wishes updates constantly on a set schedule, regardless of whether people read it or not. Meanwhile, in real life, marketing and production costs limit how much entertainment can be produced. Something like Firefly might be intended to be continuous, but production limits and budget returns means that it doesn’t end up that way.
Thanks for reading. As with all my meandering musings posts, criticism, counterpoints, and comments of all sorts are welcome. If you liked this post, you might also like this one: The Three Types of Fiction: Art, Entertainment, and Propaganda.
Bleh. Unending stories. I kind of don't mind it with Doctor Who, but just generally speaking... eugh. Just take a look at superhero comics to see where that kind of story eventually leads. Eventually, every possible plot plays out for every character, and all sense of drama is defeated. I guess I see the appeal, but that kind of story is really not for me either.
I think the correct solution with continuous stories is to have multiple overlapping plot arcs; that way, there are always beginnings and endings. This also means that, when it does eventually end, you can wrap it all up, but it also means there's a steady feeling of progress throughout the series.
You can also go 100% episodic, but I suspect that wears after a while.
I don't think that Mass Effect's problem was that it was continuous, though; I think the problem was that it made promises it couldn't keep.
Mass Effect presented itself as though the choices you made mattered.
The problem is that they can't make huge amounts of content that most players aren't going to see; they need to give every player as much content as possible, so major changes - like entirely different adventures because of different things you did - can't be done on a reasonable budget.
In the first two games, there were always more games for your choices to matter in - thus, you could pretend like the choices you made had some payoff further down the line, and everyone did. But in the third game, you couldn't pretend like your choices mattered anymore - there was no future for them to apply to, they had to apply NOW, and had to apply from across all three games. Thus, major plot choices which felt significant - destroying the collector base, or freeing the rachni queen - didn't really pay off very well. And indeed, at the end of the game, the choices you made were pretty starkly irrelevant, and disconnected from the action of the game.
In Dragon Age Origins, you spent the game recruiting various factions, and in the end of the game, when you're going up against the final boss, members of that faction appear and fight on your side against the bad guys in-game. It was very simple, and the various allies were probably all of similar efficacy, but it felt like your choices mattered because hey, there you are having the mages, or the werewolves, or the golems fighting on your side. They're right there, doing something for you!
Combined with that, the actual ending choices had nothing to do with the choices you had made - sure, technically speaking your galactic readiness level determined which of the options were available to you, but it was wholly artificial and felt very disconnected. It would have made more sense - and, I suspect, felt more satisfying - if the choices had been directly linked to things you'd done.
The story wasn't really set up to go on forever, nor would the game series have been fresh, and I think that going on too many games would have just made it increasingly implausible that anything you did mattered, and made it nearly impossible for them to keep track of everything.
3391963 No no, you have it all wrong. After the superhero has all their plots played out, then you replace them with an identical character of the opposite gender! (Batwoman, X-23, She-hulk, Rescue [girl Iron Man], etc.) Then that character has all their plots played out. Then you make the original evil for a while, make them die and come back to life, and so on, ad infinitum
In seriousness, I'd say comic books are actually a good example of why people like continuous stories; it's part of a routine. The specifics don't matter, it's the fact that you can rely on there to be a new issue featuring your favorite character every month or week or whatever. Of course, comics are also a good illustration of the problems with continuous stories, since almost every major ongoing comic book is a continuity clusterfuck.
3391967 Well, most sitcoms and television series do go episodic; The Simpsons and Spongebob Squarepants spring to mind. It has the advantage of being able to split the writing duties up more easily, and it doesn't alienate potential viewers since they can start at any episode. Obviously, though, this isn't feasible for single-person projects.
The problem with overlapping plot arcs is that it can be wearisome in its own way. This is actually why I got sick of Game of Thrones after five seasons. There are distinct plot arcs for each character. The constant disruption of the status quo, however, makes each arc feel insubstantial. Each individual arc doesn't feel conclusive, and it makes the story feel wearisome instead of engaging.
You make a good point about Mass Effect (I mean, seriously, the collector base choice only changes one of the war assets by 10 points
). I still think that the structure of it was a major part of its appeal (and the eventual backlash against the ending). Huge swaths of the game are devoted to exploration, talking, and interacting with the world. Not only was the conclusion mishandled in other ways, but it was extremely abrupt. It not only represents an inability to further interact with the characters, but it doesn't adequately wind down before that point. But obviously there were many factors, considering how lengthy the trilogy is, and the obvious parts where the team was still learning lessons. Hopefully the next Mass Effect will learn from the many mistakes of its predecessor.
Yes, Fallout New Vegas had a similar teamup ending. The problem with Dragon Age: Origins is that it was then followed up with a game with an extremely tenuous connection to the first one.
Video games are perhaps a weird expression of this dichotomy--they require iteration and sequelization in ways that other media don't. I never played it, but I think Assassin's Creed has gone through about eight different timelines/protagonists by now
3391986
The sad thing is, after I played Mass Effect 3, I actually came up with a great way for them to have extended the series.
I mean, the whole game was about breaking the cycle, but I felt like the most interesting ending was the one where you choose to shoot the hologram, and so instead, the next cycle wins the day. I think that they could have done something interesting with it where you build up, you do all this stuff... and then you still lose and the rest of the game is figuring out how to save people and put them into stasis until the next cycle so you can fight back and win then, and then they could have made yet another trilogy.
Clearly I should never work in their marketing department for coming up with ideas that evil.
Incidentally, another thing that the ending of that game did which was extremely bad was that it denied the player a sense of agency - basically, the fact that you went up there and a hologram said "YOU WIN! NOW DO THIS!" made it feel like your victory was hollow - it was just giving it to you. It was a denial of agency, as your victory was, in the end, served to you on a silver platter. This was possibly the biggest mistake they made, above everything else, because it felt like the hologram was doing it for you/telling you what to do.
How it should have ended - and it could have even kept the same set of endings - was there being no hologram. You get in there, start activating everything... and then you realize what it is going to do (destroy all those big gates that let people travel all over the galaxy at high speeds). And then your allies could chip in - either over the radio, or getting onto the ship with you separately and then reconverging on you after you've taken out the head of Cerberus - and then everyone could work together to try and figure out what the best solution would be. If you had a low galactic readiness, you wouldn't have the time to implement any fancy solution - your side is losing the battle, you'd have to just blow it all now, and thus everyone in the crew would die, but you'd kill the Reapers. If you had higher galactic readiness, you'd have more time to deal with stuff, and depending on which allies you'd picked over the course of the game, you could have the control or synthesis options presented to you, or at the very least, allow your allies time to evacuate before you blew everything up. And if you had the highest level of galactic readiness, you'd have enough time to rig up a system that detonated the thing automatically, giving Shepherd the time to evacuate.
And all your allies would give you various bits of advice in the end, telling you what they could do, telling Shepherd what he SHOULD do, which would have both played off the strengths of the characters as well as allowed you to pull in more stuff to make it feel meaningful.
I think just doing it differently would have made people a lot happier, as it isn't actually important that people have real decisions so much as that they feel like they have them.
3391986
Well, characters like Supergirl and She-Hulk and whathaveyou are all around doing their own things at the same time as the heroes they're based on, so even that really solves nothing. Though, replacing heroes by having a new character come along to take up their mantle every once in a while is common practice. It's just that it's usually not a gender-swap that they do it with. Well, okay, that happened to Thor, but it's actually the racial minority replacement which is the trendy thing to do right now (at least it is for Marvel).
Not a practice I'm fond of either way.
I knew from the title this was going to be about Winning Pony.
With regards to that story, I voiced very similar thoughts in a different way back when it had just ended:
The two are not entirely dissimilar because "nothing ever really ends." What I mean by that is that any story can be continued, simply by thinking "What happens next?" and following that line until one hits an interesting situation. By the same token, each part of a series of stories must come to some sort of conclusion (though in one variant of the serial form, it then continues to a cliffhanger which is not resolved until the sequel).
Furthermore, any story is made of elements which create minor climaxes and denouements. Spike breathes fire at an attacking robot. Conflict: Spike versus the robot. Will his fire stop the robot? Climax: his fire hits the robot! Denouement: the robot shorts out spectacularly and goes dead. A fight scene could easily contain dozens of such sub-scenes, and the same is true for a dialogue scene, only then the elements would be conversational sallies intended to achieve certain effects, and the reactions to them.
So, story structure is fractal, and a single story (whether short story, novella or novel) is just one of the possible scales within that fractal system.
To be honest, I don't really agree with your assessment of ME3's ending. I of course can't be sure how it was for everyone else, but for me the games made it pretty obvious by the end of the first one that they were gearing up for a large, final confrontation with the Reapers that would end the trilogy. The exploration in the games served to flesh out the universe and its characters and is largely a staple of the old-school RPG genre; its absence would be significantly stranger than its inclusion. To use an older example, Planescape: Torment has plenty of wandering around and completing pointless tasks, but I was never under the delusion that it wasn't going to end.
I particularly dislike this assessment of the backlash against ME3's ending because it was one of the ways BioWare was dismissive toward outraged fans: the implication that they would have been that angry at any ending. Well, there was that and the whole "You just don't understand the ending" nonsense. The ending was terrible on its own merit without the need for extra reasons. It was badly written, poorly thought out, confusing, and thematically and structurally divorced from the entire rest of the series.
Your thoughts on that sort of dichotomy are interesting, and I enjoyed your blog post, but I don't think your assessment of ME3 in particular is accurate.
3392046 Yeah, that's a common move too. For bonus points, also make them gay or handicapped.
I don't like it either, but the big two comic companies are not exactly known for taking risks/upsetting the status quo
3392081 It's not only about Winning Pony, that just happens to be a convenient example
I actually never read the fic, but your blog post is one of the things that helped me formalize this dichotomy. Seeing someone else comment on it helped me put my finger on the specifics.
3392001 3392290 Alright, perhaps I overemphasized the structure of the ending. Like I said, the ending does have a lot of problems besides its structural disconnect. As someone who did treat the games as more of an exploratory affair, however, that did bother me. I wasn't as bothered by it as I might have been, because I saw it coming. The other aspects of it were more underwhelming than actively bothersome.
I considered using Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead as my illustrative example, but I figured that was asking for even more nitpicky debate
3392287 True, but in a way, implying a continuation is its own sort of ending. The reader might be free to envision further scenarios (or write some fan fic), but the story itself does not offer any more content.
It's true that a good story should have periodic arcs and ups/downs as it goes, and this is particularly important for lengthy stories (in order to avoid reader fatigue). In the world of amateur writing (particularly with fanfic), however, a lot of authors do not think through the specifics that carefully. That was actually one of my main criticisms of Asylum. With stories that are designed to be consumed for as long as possible, it is crucial to make them digestible, and "fractal story structure" can be one way to do that.
3393140 I'm trying to think of a better, clear cut example of a game that fits your criteria. DA:2, I think, did a pretty bad job of setting up Meredith's insanity, but it was clearly building throughout to a conflict between the mages and the church. It's hard to screw up a game's ending quite the same way, for instance, Crystal's Wishes could be if it ended unexpectedly in the next chapter.
3393829 Yes. That's probably one reason why I couldn't really put my finger on the exact situation until I spent a lot of time among fanfiction. Perhaps comic books are a better clear-cut example than video games, as mentioned by 3391963. They have lower production costs, and the sacrifices they make to keep themselves going are more obvious than with video games, since they have been around so much longer.