Writer's Mini-Ramble: Deus Ex Nates: The Ending Out Of Your @$$ · 7:16pm Aug 4th, 2018
So there's this old graphic novel titled Camelot 3000. As it exists today, it's the bound collection of a twelve-issue miniseries which was originally published by DC between 1982 and 1985, and it holds several historical distinctions in the genre. Included in those: for technical achievements, it's among the first DC maxi-series, one of the original direct market projects, and the first comic to be printed on Baxter paper instead of newsprint. And for social, it was one of the first mainstream comics to tackle the themes of lesbian romance and gender identity.
It was written by Mike W. Barr, drawn by Brian Bolland. So we're clearly discussing a professional work here, one which has remained in print. This is a team which has worked on a lot of comics, and they even took the step of bringing in an expert on Arthurian legends as a consultant. A story with research involved.
The basics of the plot? You could get a lot from the title. Arthur is awakened in 3000 A.D. and goes out to put the Round Table's membership back together. The Knights exist in that year -- but they've been reincarnated, and the memories within them must be revived. This leads to several problems, as a number have changed race, gender, and for the rather unlucky Percival, species. But in time, much of the group is reunited and prepares to contend with Modred and Morgan leFay, who are also present in this new year. Basically, the whole thing starts all over again -- including the mistakes, because no one's learned a thing from last time, and that means Lancelot and Guinevere need about ten seconds to screw everything up.
Also, there's an alien invasion. Long story.
Let's skip past most of what happens and hit Issue #12. Everything has hit the fan, and the fan is losing. Several characters have died. Arthur isn't doing so well himself. There's a very real possibility that he's going to lose and when he goes down, so does Earth. He has one last move in him. So what does he do?
(This is not a dramatic pause. I have to actively gather strength before I can put the next words onto the screen.)
He uses Excalibur to cut an atom in half and starts a nuclear explosion.
...I'm going to say that again, because a few of you probably just closed your eyes in self defense and at least one person may have put a fist through their monitor. He uses Excalibur to cut an atom in half and starts a nuclear explosion.
No, I'm not joking.
Yes, this is what happens.
Actually, I do have proof. I couldn't find an English scan of the sequence, but... see for yourself.
Did you know that the fusion process can help to create elements? Turns out fission is also capable of that trick. Because at the instant that image hit, the entire book turned into crap.
I feel a certain need to repeat this: these are professionals. This team has multiple titles under their belt. The project itself was huge. A giant risk for DC: a new format, a way to try accessing a different part of the market, a more mature storyline than they had previously chanced. And what's the ending?
The ending could be found in FIMFic's New column. Just about any of the lowest-grade Displaced stories would be happy to use it. "And just when it looked like Celestia might actually beat my godlike self (I'm just kidding, I'm totally a god), I set off a nuke by cutting an atom in half!" Tell me you couldn't see the power fantasy of an uncontrolled id tossing that one onto the screen. Only in this case, we went through eleven issues of this thing, rebirth and reincarnation, legends who can't learn from their own mistakes, the Holy Grail was found and fused into a suit of armor, and what do we get to top all that off? Arthur cuts an atom in half.
Kind of begs the question of why he didn't destroy England when the sword first came out of the stone. I mean, you'd kind of presume there had to be some air in the way...
Eleven issues before that. They weren't perfect issues. The story has some flaws. But it's a good tale, in many ways. It's probably even more fun for students of the legends. It was a story where you might want to keep turning the pages. The gotta takes hold: how does this all come out in the end? Answer: radioactively. And with that, the entire story was contaminated.
Nothing which happened before mattered.
Deus Ex Machina: something just happens at the end of the story, and it resolves everything. More often, it's a someone. A god shows up. Turns out the main character knew a spell all along which would have fixed the entire situation: they just didn't mention it until now. Did I mention I've been carrying this card good for one free miracle?
It's annoying, right? It's hard to get away with as a writer, and it can just about destroy a story for a reader. If you haven't set it up carefully, if you didn't foreshadow with exacting shades, if you didn't slowly build towards the possibility -- then it's a cop-out. Several of the original Greek examples were basically the playwright putting themselves in a corner. Hey, this show only runs two hours and we can't possibly wrap all this up in the last two minutes, so cue Zeus. And thus one of the world's more annoying tropes was born, along with the possible origin for flying theatrical fruit.
Deus Ex Nates: we may not have gods, we probably don't have miracles, we don't necessarily have magic, but we do have a large intestine and it is packed. Time to make a withdrawal from the bank!
It's the last impression. The final thing the reader takes away from the story. A bad ending can corrupt everything which came before it. The longer the story (and this one took nearly three years to tell), the worse it gets. Because beginnings are free, but endings have to be earned. The characters fought. They struggled. They had their failures. Some may have been lost along the way. They paid and paid and paid, and here's what all that payment got them in the end. They invested themselves, you invested your time, and this is what was behind the final prize curtain. Even tragedies have to be paid for, although that coin is frequently minted in character error. Romances earn interest through tears, adventures take blood and sweat into the till.
But then someone cuts an atom in half. And you feel cheated. You were looking for a final payoff and all the writer did was snatch every bit of goodwill out of your hands.
Why did you bother?
Why did you come this far just for that?
Why did you read this story at all?
Everything you went with alongside and through the characters -- it doesn't matter. All you have is that last impression.
It's all you remember. And you don't even want to remember that much.
Not that you can forget.
"I went through all that shit for a blank book."
That's from the third Wild Cards novel. A thief who calls herself Wraith broke into a personal safe belonging to one of the city's crimelords, and took out a journal. Her power is to phase herself and a very small amount of extra matter. Very, very small. Put it this way: her thieving outfit is a mask and a bikini, out of necessity: to take normal street clothing along would use up too much of her limit. (About ten pounds: in winter, she has to phase out of her clothing.) And it's established fairly early on that ghosting herself is an effort. She can't keep it up for long, and if she tries to phase something exceptionally dense... well, she's good at stealing paper goods, but gold coins are often too much work.
A good part of that mosaic story is the crimelord trying to get the book back, because it's believed to contain information which could bring down his empire. And that book went through some things. It changed hands a few times. At one point, an alligator ate it. But at the end, the vigilante who's been after the crimelord for years is the final owner. Guess what? See dialogue line. Because our thief's theory is that the ink was something exceptionally dense, like gold (oh, just go with it) and so when she phased the book, the ink didn't come along.
...okay. Cosmic joke on our vigilante. Shaggy dog story. (No, he never got to open the book before that. No idea if any impressions were left on the pages.) But the crimelord doesn't know the book is blank (although we don't know if there's a splash on the bottom of the safe). So the vigilante at least has a potential lure to use. He didn't get what he wanted, but all is not lost. The entire novel, and all of its events, weren't a waste. And as far as endings go... I could live with that. Yes, it's a doubletalk piece of rationalization, but we've been watching Jennifer use her powers for a few hundred pages. We're familiar with her limitations. Gold ink: fine. That's livable. Next novel.
Because we didn't know it was going to end that way. (There are small hints. One temporary possessor flips through the book and while we don't see what he does, he doesn't understand what's going on. Jennifer realizes early on that it's blank, but keeps up the lie because it's the only way to keep the vigilante protecting her.) But we accept that it could.
Hey, at least it wasn't cutting an atom in half.
Because the ending is what we come away with. (I didn't have to look any of that up, check my own copy for details. I just remember it.) And when the ending betrays us... then we went through all that (the characters went through all that) and we got...
...a blank book.
They're very aerodynamic, with the weight of all previous content removed. I got mine to go twenty feet.
Most of the time as a writer, unless you're utterly freeforming it, you have your ending before you begin. I've said I know how Triptych finishes, down to what the last line is. I'm equally aware of how Anchor Foal wraps, although I'm not as committed to the exact final words. But between journey begun and journey complete is the process of earning it. Getting through every step of the trip, trying to bring everyone along with you. Sweat and blood and tears and effort. You pay for that ending. You pay for the right to have one.
...or you just write yourself into a corner, hit your word limit and can't resolve everything in time, know what you wanted to do while having no idea how to get there, and with absolutely nothing left to lose except your audience and reputation, Deus Ex Nates.
This blog isn't a how-to, or even a how-not-to. They're your stories, as writer or reader. It's just a warning. When people recall your work, they will often think of the finale. The last impression is the first thing to come back. They remember that last kiss, the sunset, the flight into the stars. They remember how it ended.
Could I tell you every detail of Camelot 3000, on the same level I just did for that Wild Cards novel? After all, I read the first one recently, and the last time on the latter was years ago.
No. I couldn't. Maybe if I read it again and livestreamed a blog, I could manage the trick. But there's a lot which didn't stay with me. There was no need to retain the majority of it, and just about that much desire.
But for the rest of my life, I'll be able to tell you how it ended. With some idiot cutting an atom in half.
As a reader, I don't think I earned that.
But my, did I ever pay for it...
Yes, I'm aware that if I don't stick the landing on Triptych, y'all are coming after me.
Possibly with torches.
(Pitchforks are traditional, but awkward in use.)
I am reminded of one of Pixar's Rules of Storytelling: it's okay to use a coincidence to get your characters into trouble, but not out of it.
I very much doubt this. :)
(I kid because I love. This kind of slip is never not funny. Once saw a guy write out "Canterhorn" when having a serious discussion about the Matterhorn, and "Canterhorn" isn't even canon.")
To be fair, that's an amazingly illustrated double-page spread. That's right up there with any of Walt Simonson's iconic "DOOM" panels from his Thor run.
Comic book trivia: Grant Morrison did a callback to this about twenty-five years later, in his very weird but very delightful Seven Soldiers series. It works considerably better there; in that context Camelot was a strange and wondrous pre-historical empire, a combination of Arthurian mythos, the Hyborian Age, and strange otherworldly technology and magic. In that context, splitting the atom using forge tools actually, you know, WORKS.
I'm unfortunately remembering secondhand the ending of Homestuck, as well.
I had to help the buddy who kept up with it replaster and paint his wall on the sly after he put a foot through it.
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I was waiting for that and own the error. (Although I fixed it before you posted. Someone else pointed it out. And probably laughed to themselves. A lot.) Call it a ponywriter problem...
And Bolland in his prime was one of the top-flight artists. I love his Animal Man covers. (More than I like his work on The Killing Joke, honestly.) But with what's happening... well, 'sword not drawn to scale' may be the least of the issues there.
As for Simonson's Thor run: I don't criticize miracles. One of the greatest matches between writer and characters.
He made the frog work.
Based off this I must ask, just how much planning have you put into your stories? I get that you have a plan but how do you make sure that events that would be a characters natural reaction or how their actions play out will not derail your story?
It reminds me of another author’s story on this site where his Twilight made some choices that led to several deaths and tons of destruction that the author had not intended. In the end it was partially explained away but it turned the whole story into a tragedy and there was no real winners just different degrees of losers.
If you set fire to the hay, you get Pitchfork Torches.
Until the burning hay falls down on top of the peasants and you end up resurecting them as flaming zombies.
To me, the ending of the Dune series, written by Herberts son, is one of the best. Most people would claim it as totaly rediculous OTP, but to me, running the maths and boundary conditions for procedural unlimited sandbox gaming, he has the right idea, but doesnt go all the way in the description, because if he did, he would be more vilified than CS Lewis.
And now I kind of want to write a story where Arthur goes through all of the above... and reality ensues. He just stands there, bracing himself as best he can while the reaction utterly fails to chain, and then Morgan le Fay takes pity on him, calls a timeout, and explains atomic physics to him.
In any case, definitely an important thing to keep in mind. I admit, I don't always know the last scenes of my stories going in, but I do make sure I know the final climax.
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Immediately I think of Gilbert & Sullivan. The playwrights who wrote Pirates of Penzance, Mikado, HMS Pinafore...
In Pirates of Penzance is a trope where one of the characters was mistakenly given the wrong education - his 'pilot' apprenticeship was switched for a 'pirate' apprenticeship. But all fun and good. One of my favourite plays.
Then HMS Pinafore comes along (naval setting again) and IN THE CONCLUSION in order to wrap up conflicts, an accidental education / birthright switch was discovered between two characters.
It felt lame. As though the writers were stuck in a formula of sorts.
And yes, I can't remember what the bulk of the story was about, but I sure remember that ending.
I can't believe we have got this far in the conversation without mentioning Mass Effect 3.
Because we should really never forget Mass Effect 3, nor the enormous kick in the face that it was (yes, even AFTER the expanded ending), made so miuch more painful because (aside from Any Bit With Kai Leng In It), up untl the last fifteen minutes or so ME trilogy was a shining example of how to Do It Right and Bioware at pretty much its best (the taint of EA nonwithstanding) and something like it will probably never will be again.
But that ending...?
I never bought the last of ther DLC, despite buying all of it for the trilogy to that point. I have, to this day, never worked up the energy to complete through ME 2 and 3 my Evil Idiot Shepard run.
No, even after all this time, I have neither forgiven, nor forgotten (nor bought anything from EA, though laregly because they have made a spirited effort to produce nothing but dung crap since).
Nor will I.
Garrus and Tali and Liara and all the rest deserved better, far better and I will never let it pass.
Even risible as Neverwinter Night 2's almost literal "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending (which at LEAST had the decency to come after one of the best executed final boss battles of ANY party-based RPG), never quite sunk to that level.
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Well, sounds like it's probably not worth me ever spending the phenominal amount of effort to ever look that one up (as aside from a couple of reviews on Atop the Forth Wall, what I mostly know about it is looooong.)
It doesn't necessarily ruin a story
Gandalf's explanation for surviving the Balrog was:
"I fell for a long time. Then, I climbed out of the pit & came here."
(Yeah, The Silmarillion explains it & why he couldn't tell the truth. But, that was decades later)
Pinocchio
Your kid is missing. So, your first step is to jump on a boat & sail off to a faraway land?
Just... this.
Ah, so this mostly happens where the writers are full of shit? To think about it, for many authors in the new stories column, it's not just Deus ex nates, it's tota fabula ex anus sordes, I'm afraid.
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Pinafore was first, actually.
Modern Major General specifically notes it by name.
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I will summarise.
After 8000 pages and seven years of buildup involving eldritch horrors, cosmic physics, destiny, time travel, and rewriting the universe multiple times, starring dozens of characters and with a thrivingly productive fanbase and more memes than you'd want to shake a stick at...
Our reasonably deeply characterised heroes fight the BBEG and get their asses beat. One character gets punched so hard they break into the author's 4th wall mailbox, where he's painted himself grey and started gibbering.
"Hey, asshole, you made the final boss too hard."
"Oh, my bad."
Final boss goes poof
Thank you for reminding me about ss&e, erf. I thought I put RDFE and the harp thing out of mind. But nope, not with the wasted time reading either.
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You're actually not missing much, because the series makes it progressively harder and harder to play Shepard as an evil idiot.
You get the most freedom in that regard in ME1, where you can play Shepard as a genuinely bad person; a thuggish, racist, human supremacist who murders and steals their way across the galaxy en route to using a galactic crisis as a stalking horse for a military coup. The game lets you embrace those choices and mold a full, complete narrative around it.
They SERIOUSLY jerk your choke chain in ME2. You can be kind of a dick in ME2, but the dick choices are actually... jarringly orthogonal to the rest of the game. Sure, you can side with Morinth over Samara and hand Legion over to be processed for parts and treat EDI like an uppity servant who needs to shut up and make you some dinner... but many of those choices actually come off SUPER WEIRD in the context of all the other narrative beats the game drops on you that are absolutely unalterable and which cast you as a much more straightforward hero. You're not even allowed to become too chummy with Cerberus, and if you played ME1 as the kind of Shepard who is so racist they won't even let Garrus on board the Normandy, that comes off as just... strange. Why WOULDN'T you like Cerberus?
The most glaring example in ME2 is actually Khalisa al-Jilani. You can cozy up to her in ME1, agree with everything she says and give an interview in which you essentially declare openly that you'll betray the Council in favor of Humans (not the Systems Alliance, just humans) at the first chance you get... but when you meet her in ME2, the game LOCKS YOU IN to an adversarial relationship with her and there's almost no way to get out of it. It WANTS you to punch her, and if you won't punch her, it'll at least force you to be in-her-face despite you having gone to great lengths to establish that you're ideological allies in the first game. Because Khalisa is bad, and it won't let you be THAT bad.
Evil Idiot Shepard also rather... removes quite a lot of content from ME2. Evil Idiot Shepard will head through the Omega Relay at the first chance they get. This is great if your agenda is to kill as many people as possible on that mission while still living yourself (I've done this, it is actually MORE difficult to engineer than everyone living)... but it also means doing no loyalty missions, and that's literally, not figuratively, literally half the game.
This lock-in gets even worse in ME3. It doesn't matter how bad a person you've established (or tried to establish) Shepard as being, you can't side with Cerberus. You just... can't. It doesn't matter how much you hate and loathe AI's; when EDI gets her new body she's on the team, yay! You're massively restricted in the bad choices you can make; the evillest you can get is killing Mordin Solus or equivalent while manipulating the krogan, but if you got Mordin murdered the last game it's just some guy you barely register. Sure, sure, there's Quarian/Geth genocide, but... I mean, again, these choices come off as weird and stilted and out-of-character given the heroic arc the rest of the game is settling on your shoulders.
Basically... if you try and play Evil Idiot Shepard, the game series increasingly gets weirdly, oddly "flat." You stop feeling like you're playing Mass Effect and start feeling like you're playing a Mass Effect demo, where they've cut out all the good stuff and just given you an incredibly basic experience. You're surrounded by a truncated cast of people you don't care that much about and who you barely interact with, while participating in a narrative that treats you like a hero you REALLY aren't. (But also sort of are?) You do bad things and they hardly register.
It's not even a matter of Paragon vs. Renegade. You can go full Renegade and have a rip-roaring good time through all three game titles... but you gotta be a Renegade in the sense of "cool space badass who doesn't play by the rules and secretly has a heart of gold under their gruff, violent exterior" sense, not in an "I'm actually just a thug and a killer and not too smart" sense.
Essentially, you're missing very, very little. You can get a LOT out of playing Shepard as a saintly idealist, because the game wants you to do that (but also gives you the option to sometimes shove a guy out a window) but much less mileage out of them as an evil idiot.
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That was sort of the point, actually. To be a complete dipspit to everything and everyone, regardless of how stupid or irrational it was (evil idiot...!), leave no face un-punched, no candy un-stolen no moustache untwirled and get as many people as absolutely possible killed, including, ideally, Shepard himself.
I actually have mapped out (i.e, worked out the right choices), such that Evil Idiot Shep would be good for maybe two or three (partial) playthroughs of 2/3 - one in which would Everyone Including Sheperd Dies in ME 2, one in which Everyone But Shepard Dies in ME2 (all new cast dies in ME3) and maybe one Get Nearly Everyone Killed IN ME2 Except Those You Can Get Killed In ME 3.
Well - as often usual actually (see also: KotR 1 and 2[1]), my first playthrough was my "proper" Lawful Good one - with the one True, Best Voice Actress FemShep, where Everyone Lives (Screw The Last Fifteen Minutes[2]), but as the subsequent playthrough for a giggle, it'd be something different. The fact it would shorter would not necessarily have been a disadvantage.
[1]I have fond memories of Force-Crushing my way through KotR2 on my second playthrough. (Notably, when I bought 'em again for a pittance to play on Steam, I played both as Mr Nice Jedi again.)
[2]I once started writing my own ending, with blackjack and hookers... Actually without the hookers... or the blackjack... But because it would have been such a big project I never got more than one chapter in, so never did anything with it. And this is why I don't write much fanfic!
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You actually can't do this, and it really frustrated me for awhile. I thought that I was doing something wrong, but I wasn't. It's just that the possibility space doesn't exist. You need two people with you at the very end to pull you back onto the ship. (If there's just one they deliberately let you fall.)
This isn't a big deal because you can just go with two people who are easy to murder in ME3, but it's actually impossible to walk out of ME2 as the Sole Survivor.
The ME2 suicide mission is actually incredibly well-crafted from a game design standpoint for players who are going in blind. Even if you're immensely genre-savvy, it is very very hard to get everyone out alive; you'll usually lose SOMEONE if you didn't read a walkthrough. But it's equally as hard to faceplant; it's very nearly impossible to actually get Shepard killed unless you're trying to. So nobody playing it feels like they're being unfairly hard done by. It's a hard needle to thread.
I actually *have* this series. The original. Not sure if I have *all* of the comics, though. Most of them for sure. And they've been read, which probably moves their value from hundreds to hundredths of dollars. Also Nth Man, Alpha Flight, and a whole bunch of 'why did I ever buy these for my friend' issues.
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I actually went and checked my document (and my old fanfic and my original reaction to the ending and the stuff that followed and all the rest of it...!) - apparently, The Plan was Everyone But Shepard (and Morinth and Zheed) Die, if my work was accurate.
4914133 In Bored of the Rings, Goodgulf's explanation on how he escaped the Ballhog went "Well, after I climbed out of the pit..."
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It's the only choice. When will Jennifer Hale return and play the exact same character already? Just in something that actually ends well! The fact we don't have a decent length space drama taking advantage of her presence as a badass commander yet sickens me.
Camelot 3000 is actually a thing I knew of before this blog, surprisingly. And I'm mildly amused that I'd found it through tv tropes now, since that's another random connection. I was intrigued by its exploration of gender identity through Tristan, but not enough to bother looking for it to read through.
I never knew the ending laid a wet fart ruining the rest of it. That sucks.
That sounds familiar. I think I've been reading a story on this site where Fluttershy has one.
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My advice is stop immediately. The writer is a known hack.
Foreshadowing!
i read Camelot 3000 and i didn't understand (until now) why there was a big explosion at that point...
but it's amusing to point out that i saw a similar thing in a recent comic book: Superman and Wonder Woman battle two renegade Kryptonians who escaped the Phantom Zone. they lose the fight, mainly because of a Sun God helping the renegades (because he was angry at S and WW for making him look foolish earlier), and are dropped into an abandoned Nuclear power plant...so WW uses a magic sword "capable of cutting atoms" to start a chain reaction and blow up the plant, which also destroys the device the villains are using to get more villains out of the phantom zone...
i've also thought that the ending of "there and back again" was partly a result of "writing themselves into a corner": consider how absurdly powerful Discord is. they needed SOME way to cut him down to size, or he would have simply turned all the Changelings into ants or something similar. but the way it not only made HIM powerless, but also made all the unicorns powerless, made it TOO good, so it took a cross between a Deus Ex Machina and a Changeling Revolution to win the day.
i like to imagine there are still a few old-style changeling around (not just Pharynx)...for example, the ones who replaced Twilight and her friends...
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Heh, if you do fail to land Triptych you might also want to stay clear of burning windmills.
Okay, that sword thing has me thinking of the one Wonder Woman used to have which could cut the electrons off an atom. But then, I'm pretty sure the whole point was for it to just be a sword that works as a sword on things a sword normally would be useless against. (Also as her answer to "how do they defeat Superman?")
More to the real point, know exactly what you mean. The flip side of course also holds: if you get the landing right, it'll stick with readers forever too. But I guess it won't quite to the same extent: if they made it to the climax, you were probably getting it mostly right before, too, and a good ending doesn't usually salvage an otherwise bad (long) work, though it can carry a fair amount of weight in an otherwise okay one.
I recently finished/caught up with something on Fimfic, and something akin to this has been my experience, if not exactly. There's still room for the climax to work, but I'm doubtful, and it followed a long long move away from the things I liked most about the story, including kind of demoting the key character to an afterthought. And it sucks, because for a good way through it was excellent, and glimmers of that continued to shine through from time to time.
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Yeah, that was rough, and a real contrast to the ending of Problem Sleuth. Wouldn't have been quite so bad if we hadn't been kept waiting years right on the edge, then get that.
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Interesting. I gave up after the Butlerian Jihad prequels and hearing about the connection they were going to have to the sequels. I'm glad you liked them, I guess, but I probably won't ever get to them: Brian Herbert and Anderson burned too much good will (and frankly the last couple from Frank were a good sight downhill from even the good-but-not-transcendent early sequels).
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But that doesn't really apply; it's a key point, but far from the end, and there's some actual setup there in the form of the various indications Gandalf is more powerful than we tended to see to that point.
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I don't remember that one, what was it? (I didn't even think she had that sword since the New 52 started.)
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I remember an article in Dragon magazine in the early 1980s, Based on spell use, Gandalf was only a level 5-6 AD&D wizard
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Right, but we knew from before Moria that he was playing below level in order to hide his presence. (And that's before the informed trait that everyone in the know (including by that point Elrond, who pulled something of a deus ex machina himself at Rivendell) consistently treats him as a big deal.) Granted, that mainly applies before his return.
This reminds me of a certain video game crossover fic where a certain chaos god is written as basically omniscient, all powerful and the main villain. Adding insult to injury, it's his shenanigans that move things along. Though the characters struggle they do so with his permission. My criticism was not taken well, wasn't taken all too badly either, I still have some faith left. I get raising the stakes is important but an all powerful omniscient enemy that enables the heroes out of boredom is by far the stupidest way to drag a story on that I can think of.
It's times like these that I think of fanfiction more like kids playing in the sand with a specific set of toys, less as an effort to actually make a good story. "Now, you two kiss"
After saying all that and in further consideration of the post my contribution is this: Deus ex anythings are shitty but even worse is a story that is never finished.
That's not actually that stupid. Probably not gold, but a quick look suggests that various iron salts and sulfates were common in ancient and medieval inks. So depending on exactly what sort of ink was used to write in the book, it's not beyond the realms of possibility. Though more likely it would be left behind as dust rather than liquid, since those sort are technically suspensions and the liquid medium dries out, leaving the solids imbued in the pores of the paper (or writing medium of choice).
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Someone else has read that! Can... can I hug you?
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The episode is hilarious with the DM of the Rings treatment.
>everyone but the new guy rolls high end 3.5 casters
>Discord's player convinces the new guy into running a bog standard defector monster class
>DM forces everyone to use anything but magic, cackling all the way
So, this reminds me greatly of David Weber's Out of the Dark. I'm going to spoil it because, frankly put, I don't remember any of the characters, I don't remember half of the plot, I'm pretty sure that there was a reasonable group of aliens who were on the verge of throwing up their limbs and helping Humanity, but I can't say for sure. What I do remember is that the entire book was about Humanity waging a kind of insurgency war against alien invaders, and generally being awesome; when the aliens finally got fed up and decided to throw rocks at the planet to finish wiping things out, along came Dracula to fix everything.
Yeah, 380 pages leading up to that.
That's the only takeaway that I've ever managed from that book -- and judging from the reviews, it seems to be the only one most of its readers have gotten. Weber, for all his faults, is fantastic at making characters generally awe-inspiring, larger than life, and memorable, and it could have been a wonderful paean to humanity's resilience, but nope. You get Dracula, end of book.
Every scrap of investment in a character is gone. Every moment of work the reader has put into sympathizing means nothing. The problems get fixed on their own, and - the author all but tells us - they would have been fixed this way all along, no matter what, with or without the characters we've grown to appreciate.
A shaggy dog story can sometimes still be good. If what the characters have gone through are still going to be relevant, if they've grown and learned and they've actually become a little better for their experiences, then the 'oh, the Maltese falcon was in your heart all along' type of ending can work. The journey still leaves it a fine story. Heck, it can show what characters do in an untenable situation, where there's no real way to win. But that has to be the point all along; it has to be written for that. Pulling an ending out of your tailpipe, stringing both yourself and your readers along and then throwing random solutions at them, is the exact opposite.
And, really, that goes double when your solution to everything is Dracula.
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A cloud of dust would also be a lot less noticable than a sudden splash of ink. Especially if the book was already dusty.
Honestly, I kind of like that ending. (Assuming the nuke wiped out Arthur and everyone else). He uses a final power he wasn't even sure he had and sacrifices everyone to take out the threat. It's not exactly subtle, but kind of cool, and definitely a surprise.
What would be worse: that they wrote themselves into a corner, just stopped caring, or had planned this ending from the very beginning?
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The latter, because it’s intentional and they damn well should have known better.
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I think she technically gets a happy ending as the female Commando in Star Wars: The Old Republic.