 A few months ago on this channel, I reviewed a little-known fantasy series called The Dinosaur Lords. It's a good series. Solid characters, a fun setting, epic battles, a core mystery that the audience can theorize about, all the sorts of stuff you'd hope to find in an epic fantasy. It has one problem though. A problem that many people just cannot see past and would ruin the entire thing for them if they read it. You see, it doesn't have an ending. The author planned for six books, released three, and then he died. And that's it. None of us will ever know what happens to these characters, nor will we get answers to the nature of their world. It's heavily implied that the story takes place on the planet Venus after it's been terraformed and all the magic we see is just advanced technology. We'll just never know how or why this situation came about. We'll never learn what the goal of the Grey Angels is or what happens to our favorite characters. I know that sounds like a spoiler, but it isn't. It's implied very early in the first book and no one in universe ever confirms it. We've all been in a situation like this before. I'd be amazed if even one viewer hasn't. Some piece of media, particularly long ones that are released in parts, never finish. For one reason or another, things just never come together and we're all left hanging at the end. There's no climax and no resolution. Things just abruptly stop before they were supposed to. I'm not talking about rushed endings or endings that are bad for one reason or another. I'm talking about things that don't have an ending at all. Things that are left unfinished. What happens next feels like a lost memory. A hole in your knowledge that seems like it could be filled, but when you reach out to grab it, it vanishes. It isn't surprising this happens. When you think about it, it's more surprising that some of the things we love get made at all. A large number of factors need to come together in order for these to exist in the first place. For a book, you need the writer to get the inspiration they need to start, the motivation they need to continue, the time needed to write it, and the technology to get it out there. And that's not even starting on the nightmare that is publishing. Keep in mind that in a lot of cases, all of this has to happen while they have another job to support themselves or while they're taking care of kids or while some other obstacles get in their way. All of this makes it so easy for them to give up and never produce the story we love. For something the size of a television production, the complexity is orders of magnitude greater. They require money, actors, directors, writers, and a sufficient audience to avoid being prematurely sent to a farm-up state. After all, it is a profit-driven enterprise. It only takes a single wrench in one of the many gears to grind the whole thing to a permanent halt. We can all imagine something great. The real test is manifesting it into the real world. When the harsh light of reality strikes your creativity, that's when things start to go wrong and something unforeseen prevents you from completing your work. Until recently, it seems that this would be the fate of manga series Berserk. Creator Kintaro Murad died and it seemed no one would be able to complete the series until the reigns were handed to someone else. Will they do a good job finishing off the series? I don't know. I certainly hope so. The future is a fickle mistress, though. The new guy is the only one who heard the ending, allegedly, so he's in the best position to finish things off. That still leaves things like the art, scene composition, dialogue, fight choreography, and pacing that could go wrong. Only time will tell if things work out here. Then again, Guts was on that ship for ten fucking years, so things can't get much worse than that. A similar situation worked out alright for Wheel of Time, at least. Robert Jordan died before completing his magnum opus, but he had extensive notes detailing how he wanted things to go, and more importantly, he was close to the end when he died. Brandon Sanderson only had to write the last book, or rather, he was supposed to write one and had to split it in three. The last three books, which in total make up maybe a quarter of the total series word count, because Robert Jordan wasted about three million words describing skirt smoothing. That was an unusual case, not the norm by any means, but most fans were grateful to have it. There are people who complain about the Sanderson books, and that's fine, there are criticisms to be made. His style is different from Jordan's, even when he tries to emulate it. A few characters get pushed to the side, and by his own admission, Jordan would have written a better ending. What confuses me are the people who insist we would have been better off if the series never finished. There aren't a lot of them, but they exist. Would they truly be happier if they spent their entire lives never knowing how things wrap up? I seriously doubt it. Sure, they could guess that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and they might even be correct. All the small details would be lost, though. Even if the same thing happens in Epic Fantasy over and over again, it happens differently every time. And it's the details, the character interactions, the jokes, the small moments that make it worth experiencing. That's the whole message of the series. A bad ending is better than no ending because the bad ending actually exists. Some would argue that no ending would be superior since you could just imagine your own ending with blackjack and hookers. Thing is, you can do that with a bad ending too if it really bothers you. There's no stopping the power of imagination. There are some cases where we don't get a full ending, however we do get a basic outline of what was supposed to happen. My name is Earl is a great example of this. For those who never saw it, it was one of the best sitcoms of the aughts. It followed a character named Earl who had previously been a dirtbag criminal and decided to turn his life around by making a list of everything bad he'd ever done and making it up to people one item at a time. It was funny, heartwarming, and had a storyline that wasn't just zany episodic antics. Unfortunately, we never get to see Earl complete his list. Luckily, the creator, Greg Garcia, did a Reddit AMA where he gave the outline for how things would have ended. Basically, Earl was going to get stuck on a difficult list item and run into a stranger with his own list. He would then learn that his crusade had started a chain reaction of people making up for the wrongs they committed and that he'd finally put more good into the world than bad. Then he'd tear up his list and walk off into the sunset as a free man. Sounds great to me. It would wrap up the story in a satisfying way and let us know that the character's struggles were all worth it. I hope we can get something similar for the dinosaur lords, though I'm not holding my breath. This is better than nothing, at least in my opinion, but still unsatisfying. It's like reading a Wikipedia synopsis of the story. We know what happened in a dry, clinical way and we miss out on all the minute details that make a story a story. It's like an action scene. I could tell you that Jackie Chan fights a room of bad guys and wins, which would be unsatisfying, or I could show you the entire fight complete with the stunts and silly antics that make it worth watching. All of this is, of course, assuming the ending will be good or at least passable. It's easy to imagine a vague finale that checks every box you want it to and doesn't screw it up unlike those professional writers and directors who are clearly less talented than you, person on the internet who can barely type up a comment that makes sense. This is a really fucking stupid mindset. As long as it only exists in your mind, it's perfect and untouchable. No one can criticize it because it hasn't had to deal with the deadly weapon known as other people's opinions yet. When the rubber hits the road, people find things to complain about. Dialogue, prose, acting, special effects, and a hundred other things that aren't covered in a basic outline can all go horribly wrong. And the way people use, quote, the writing as a way to describe everything they dislike about visual media, like movies and video games, is meaningless. They use it to criticize directing decisions all the time, which means many of them don't know what words mean and their opinions are worthless. Even in books, quote, the writing is too broad to say anything useful. Do you mean the dialogue is bad, the characters are inconsistent, the descriptions are confusing? Criticism requires clarity to be useful, otherwise it's just people complaining about something they don't understand for reasons they don't understand. I almost never use the cliched phrase, good idea with bad execution, because it's pointless. It's always about the execution. Literally always. On the plus side, the internet has allowed us all to discuss things we love with like-minded people. On the minus side, making the media you consume a large part of your identity seems to make you view any deviation from what you consider proper as a personal attack. The fact that some people genuinely want entire book series or seasons of television to be remade just because they didn't like them is the highest peak of narcissism that humanity can achieve. Refusing to touch grass has convinced you that your opinions are super important and that the arcs of fictional characters is super serious business. You think that everything has to be catered to you and if it isn't you need to throw a fit until someone changes it. You're more of a Karen than any middle-aged white woman in history. Being upset or annoyed is fine. Expecting the world to cater to you at all times is not. Grow the fuck up. No discussion on stories that end prematurely would be complete without mentioning fanfiction and other internet fiction. Oh yeah, we're going there. They're notorious for this sort of thing specifically due to their unusual serialized nature. Most fanfiction comes out one chapter at a time. A single piece being released every week or every month or just whenever the author feels like putting one out. In order to keep the audience's interest, things have to happen in every update. This leads to wonderful things like plot points being hinted at and unceremoniously dropped later or characters angsting for far longer than they should be because the author doesn't know what to do next but they're on a schedule. It also means that a serialized fanfiction or TV show has different pacing needs than a book series or a binge model streaming show but no one seems to want to acknowledge that. After all, why would you want to trim out the boring or unneeded parts to strengthen the whole when you could just produce a flood of mediocre content with little thought and pray that some people like sifting through it all? I see you there, Ubisoft, go away. There's a specific fiction press story I always think back to when this subject comes up. It's called Rose by Y.S. Wong. The story is complicated but suffice to say it involves a magical revolution against an evil government in order to make a Japanese teenager the Queen of England. You're just going to have to read and find out how that happens yourself. The good news is that the Polish are oppressed in this world. The bad news is that everyone else is too and so the heroes have to fight against that. It's a great read, one that was updated like clockwork for a long time. Then there was an author's note about going on hiatus for exams and... nothing for a whole year. Then we got four chapters which were actually a flashback sequence for one of the main character's backstories that didn't advance the plot. It gave me hope that we might get back into the swing of things. That was over six years ago now and Wong's profile hasn't been touched since. Rose is actually the sequel to another story called Orchid. So the author clearly has the determination to write an entire book. It was relatively popular too so it's not like there was no interest. Whatever the reason, he just stopped updating. Hope he's doing okay, wherever he is. Did I make this entire video just to complain about never getting to read the end of a completely unknown internet story that no one else has thought about since 2016? Maybe. If this were a regular book series, we just would have gotten the first one and never gotten more. Which means we would have had a semi-decent ending where things wrap up, kind of. Instead we get a much bigger cliffhanger. This likely wouldn't have happened if it were a professional project, even if it did release serially. There's too much money at stake for an author to just give up, especially if this is their job. People always bemoan how things get cancelled when they don't make enough money and how things would be better if media was just made for the sake of art. No one ever mentions how relying on board creatives to get their asses in gear with no promise of reward is a recipe for disappointment. TV shows have been cancelled prematurely for decades and it's basically a meme that good ones always get cancelled prematurely. Netflix has been notorious for this for years. However, they don't release serially. Entire seasons drop at once so it's more like a traditionally published book series than a serialized fanfic where things are given to you in big semi-self-contained chunks rather than small pieces. The problem is that a season of TV takes a lot more money, expertise, and labor to make than a book. This means there is less room for error and if it doesn't make enough money it goes down the tubes and because they're released in big chunks that need to be completed before they drop there's no time to make any last minute changes if it doesn't have an ending. With traditional TV, where the last few episodes of the season are usually being filmed while the early episodes are still premiering, they sometimes have time to slap together some rewrites and bring things to a conclusion. Not a satisfying conclusion necessarily, just a conclusion. Arrested development is a good example of this as long as you forget about the revival, which you should. The American version of Life on Mars is another one. The show got cancelled before the end of season one so the crew got together and rushed out a resolution. Is the ending good? Not particularly, but at least we get an answer to the show's central mystery. We aren't left hanging for an eternity. Netflix can't do this so when one of their offerings is cancelled it's gone forever and you'll never know what happens next. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a deeply flawed show. It has something going for it that many Netflix originals don't though. It gets an ending. The series finale is... not great, but it wraps things up. Character arcs are completed, the final villains are taken care of, the day is mostly saved, the heroes get to live happily ever after, sort of. There's a sense of closure, if nothing else. I could talk all day about the problems that show has, but they are tempered by that feeling of closure. I would recommend this over something like Daybreak, even though I like to daybreak a lot more. Because that only got a handful of episodes before leaving us unsatisfied. Blueballs are painful. Metaphorically, of course. When something is put out one small piece at a time it takes less to interrupt it than if it has to be put together all at once. Even something with a low cost of entry like fanfiction. Since it's all being written for fun, usually, and there's no payment beyond attention from your own small corner of weirdos on the internet, it's easier to lose motivation. You realize how much time you're spending on this and decide you want to play Dark Souls tonight instead. Next thing you know you haven't updated in six months and your audience never finds out if your high school AU version of Severus Snape will live happily ever after with Dobby the Janitor. If there's no ending, it's hard, if not impossible, to recommend it to someone else. It's a frustrating way to make you feel like your time has been wasted. Without closure, we tend to forget about everything that came before. Even when we don't forget, we don't know what happens next, that knowledge is closed off to us forever. We can theorize and discuss it and fantasize, but we'll never know. It's like asking where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. Fun to talk about, depressing when the truth sinks in. And that's the tragedy here. The tragedy of knowing that we're all ignorant and we always will be. Is there a lesson to be learned from this? Be careful with cliffhangers, I suppose. Don't start something you don't think you can finish, might be another one. Sometimes ending out of nowhere is better than the alternative, where it just goes on forever with no end in sight until it becomes terrible and everyone loses interest, save a small cadre of hardcore fans who get upset by the bumbled ending. Better to fade away than make a fool of yourself in a bid for attention, I suppose. Maybe some story concepts are best when confined and don't get turned into long series, whether we're talking about books, TV shows, or anything else. Not everything needs to be a long series. Sometimes things are better when they're released in one piece. If that means making it shorter, so be it. Entertainment of all sorts has been getting longer for years anyways. The average length of Hollywood movies is 17% longer than it was in 1990, and books have been stretching to a ludicrous degree. Even YA novels are getting thick enough to stop bullets, which is missing the point of a fucking YA novel. Those are supposed to be shorter and easier to consume. Maybe there isn't a lesson at all and I'm just complaining for... I dunno, this many minutes. I started this channel specifically because I wanted people to complain about slash laugh at terrible books with and none of my friends were available. Having deeper discussions and trying to discern deeper truths is great. It's just not needed all the time. There doesn't have to be a deeper meaning to any of this, it's just fucking annoying. Let's all bond over that. I didn't have a place to insert this in the script, but did you know that Daenerys has been stuck in Nereen since Bill Clinton was president? Absolutely ridiculous. Huge thank you to everyone who watched this far. I'm sure everyone who's leaving a comment telling me to kill myself definitely made sure to watch the whole video. So thanks to them as well, and all the names you see on screen right now, these are my patrons. So thanks especially to my super ultra great patrons who are Oppo Savilainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotes, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anceliovic, Dark King, Dio, Echo, Eevee, Flax, Great Griebo, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Matthew Bodro, Microphone, Peep the Toad, Return of Cardamom, Robbie Reviews, Sad Martigan, Celia the Vixen, Tesla Shark, VaVixus, VaVictus, and Wesley. I'm not redoing that, I don't even care. If you want to get your name on here, be sure to join my patron page. If you can't do that, then please just write this video and comment on it. Subscribe, all the things I'm supposed to say here. Thank you, goodbye.