I no longer believe that the pieces of fiction most important to me will end in a way that is satisfying and coherent while respecting me as a viewer.
And as a writer and lifelong fangirl whose entire world and purpose is dedicated to creating and appreciating stories, that’s a fairly devastating place to end up. But these shows/games/movies didn’t just end badly, they all ended in a way that was a very specific fuck you to the audience. They all involved betraying the viewer to a frankly astronomical degree, almost as if they went out of their way to inflict as much actual pain on their fans as possible.
If this sounds melodramatic, look at my fandom experience of the last couple years:
(Spoilers for The Magicians, Game of Thrones, Marvel’s Endgame, Danganronpa: Killing Harmony, The Last of Us Part 2)
The Magicians: The narrative ate itself, no longer making any sense and turning characters into unrecognizable caricatures. One of the most important OTPs I’ve ever had, involving two characters I loved deeply on their own, never got a chance to get off the ground and met absolutely miserable ends (after being promised otherwise by showrunners, of course, in a rare instance of real queerbaiting).
Game of Thrones: The narrative ate itself, no longer making any sense and turning characters into unrecognizable caricatures. A female character who I admired and rooted for more than most characters I’ve ever encountered fell victim to some particularly nasty, incomprehensible character assassination. I loved her tremendously, and they fucked not just her character but her character’s entire history.
Endgame: The narrative ate itself, no longer making any sense and turning characters into unrecognizable caricatures. I’ve been a Marvel and Avenger fangirl since day one, since 2008′s Iron Man. Tony Stark imprinted on my psyche, ditto Robert Downey Jr. Aside from every other absolutely stupid creative decision in that fucking movie, I had to watch Tony Fucking Stark finally get to sacrifice himself like he’d always wanted instead of finally realizing that his life has meaning.
Danganronpa - Killing Harmony: The narrative ate itself, literally. A ridiculous, fun, dark, twisty, somehow deeply meaningful struggle between hope and despair suddenly drilled into its audience at the end of the series that it’s fiction. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter. It never did. And its laughable that you ever cared. Also fuck you.
The Last of Us Part 2: Joel and Ellie are two of my favorite characters in fiction. Period. It’s been that way for me (and many, many others) since the first game came out in 2013. We all waited seven years for a sequel that wasn’t even originally in the cards, but came to be due to the first games near universal acclaim. And what did the sequel give us? Joel is killed off in the first two hours and we spend almost the entire second half of the game playing as his killer in an attempt to humanize her for ten fucking hours. Joel and Ellie? That thing that fueled the first game and is the central reason for its success? A couple flashbacks together, maybe a total of an hour out of the game’s 22 hour entirety.
This list doesn’t count secondary instances, like fandoms I’ve loved deeply but haven’t seen the end of the content because I know how horribly it ends (like Sherlock), or betrayals I didn’t know about at the time (Voltron fans being promised amazing gay rep and being dismissed in canon when it was all said and done). But those are out there, too.
I’ve also been a die hard Supernatural fan for almost a decade, and that ends this year as well. At this rate Sam and Dean will decide they don’t need to hunt together after all and never see each other again because, what, you thought their brotherhood meant something? Lol.
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I was getting ready to do a Game of Thrones rewatch anyway, when I do I should write an essay comparing how they kill their main character versus how Magicians did it. This is very much a thing that should happen.
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Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming