Mohtalim

Are good endings a contradiction?

This question was spawned after having finished Last Exile and randomly thinking about design patterns. For those that don't know, design patterns attempt to profile successful solutions to a given problem in order to extract characteristics that can be applied to similar problems in the future.

After watching that last episode, I'm still rolling it around in my head, then got focused on this question as a whole. In general, people seem to agree endings suck, so a good ending may indeed be impossible for many. Apparently, the only good endings come to bad series (ie. don't have to watch it anymore).

All in all, I think mastering and being able to reproduce a good ending at will would probably make a lot of money.

Yes this is an open-ended post, and if it's too long, feel free to move it to the articles section.

Btw, Last Exile's music rocks in it's own sometimes grandiose, sometimes subtle ways.

good endings are not a contradiction, but they are one of the hardest things to produce.

I know I've seen a good ending, but I can't think of one right now because my mind is mush. I'll post one as soon as I think of it.

and a good ending usually makes you think and only slowly do you leave it behind.

I thought Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series, had a good ending. Also, Memento and The Usual Suspects had good endings, by virtue of having trick endings. Spiderman's ending was pretty good. Both of the Dirk Gently novels by Douglas Adams had particularly satisfying endings. Pulp Fiction had a good ending. Or middle, depending on how you look at it.

VLSmooth wrote:For those that don't know, design patterns attempt to profile successful solutions to a given problem in order to extract characteristics that can be applied to similar problems in the future.

according to contigency theory, it depends on the situation.

also contigency theory is the most pointless theory in existance. "depends on the situation" a trained monkey could've came up with that.

Peijen wrote:also contigency theory is the most pointless theory in existance. "depends on the situation" a trained monkey could've came up with that.

Heh, the vast majority of Software Engineering should be labelled common sense. Seems most people need a nudge though /sigh.

Heh, and HCI is a lot of common sense too, but people still put the overwrite everything even if there's a version conflict button next to the save everything, but make sure there are no conflicts button. There's not even a yes/no prompt on the overwrite everything option! This didn't happen to a co-worker at ALL, I swear.

Apropos of nothing, after I saw the trailer for Spiderman 2 before Prisoner of Azkaban, I told Amber that Spiderman 2 is going to make a gazillion dollars.

VLSmooth wrote:

Peijen wrote:also contigency theory is the most pointless theory in existance. "depends on the situation" a trained monkey could've came up with that.

Heh, the vast majority of Software Engineering should be labelled common sense. Seems most people need a nudge though /sigh.

if it makes you feel any better, it was a theory in my organization behavior class, i.e. business people came up with it.

A good "good ending" was Full Moon.

A good "bad ending" was Ringu. Also Godfather 3, even though I didn't like that movie as a whole as much as the others.

I still think the ending for Bebop was bad. For me, it just didn't seem right. I like bad endings when they're done well. I didn't think Bebop's "bad ending" was done well.

I thought Last Exile's ending was a bit confused. There didn't seem to be much reason for what happened - I think you know what 2 events I speak of.

Spiderman 2 had a good ending! Partly because it had a tie-in with the next movie and you got exactly what you wanted

I like S2 better than S1 by a lot

On a similar topic: Predictability

This is something I was talking about with Vinny on AIM, mostly in the anime realm. Specifically, the main characters' mantle(s) of invulnerability.

This isn't something I really cared about until I read "Song of Ice and Fire". In that series, George RR Martin kills off characters that you think are main characters almost out of nowhere, but there are always other well-developed characters to take over. I like that, I think it adds some unpredictability to the story - when a main character fights you actually don't know whether they'll make it through. And a main character with a specific goal might not even make it to the battle that would achieve that goal. Martin makes up for that by having multiple main characters have similar goals, so if one dies the story doesn't necessarily end. And all the main characters are equally developed, so you don't know which one(s) will make it. There are one or two characters who I think are invulnerable right now, but I thought that of another character who was killed at the end of the most recent book.

Maybe that's just me. It's one of the reasons I liked Ringu. They did everything, went through a bunch of stuff, and the guy died anyway. And then she sacrificed her dad to save her son.

So in short, I want to see more authors (and anime writers) with the guts to kill off his/her favorite character and/or the readers' favorite character. Like they did in Bebop, but not make it seem like an afterthought like in Bebop. That's the problem I had with Bebop's ending. It was like, "Oh yeah, they kill each other. The end."

Let me just add again that everyone should read Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin.

I reiterate that it's like Wheel of Time before WoT started to suck. But he writes even slower than Jordan; I guess because he's trying not to churn out 1000 pages of NOTHING AT ALL HAPPENING.

If he generates an ending, I'll read it.

Dwindlehop wrote:If he generates an ending, I'll read it.

Good point. I hope SoI&F ends in 5 books. He's spent like 2 years writing number 4.

Actually, in Robert Jordan's 1000 pages, many things happen. On every page at least one of the following happens:

-Women cross their arms beneath the breasts.
-Women complain about a dress's neckline being to low or the cut leaving nothing to the imagination.
-Women complain that they can't understand men.
-Men complain that they can't understand women.
-Rand tells one of his three wives to leave him before they get hurt.
-Mat hears or stops hearing the dice rolling.

Or did you mean nothing new/significant happens?

George wrote:Actually, in Robert Jordan's 1000 pages, many things happen. On every page at least one of the following happens:

-Women cross their arms beneath the breasts.
-Women complain about a dress's neckline being to low or the cut leaving nothing to the imagination.
-Women complain that they can't understand men.
-Men complain that they can't understand women.
-Rand tells one of his three wives to leave him before they get hurt.
-Mat hears or stops hearing the dice rolling.

Or did you mean nothing new/significant happens?

He should just start releasing books with 1000 blank pages to see if anyone notices the difference.

I prefer to read/watch complete series too, but usually that doesnt happen. I think WoT was the 1st fantasy series I started reading when it 1st came out. that of the semi-series Dragonlance thingy

Alan wrote:He should just start releasing books with 1000 blank pages to see if anyone notices the difference.

Bestseller of 2007: Let’s Face It, I Could Type My Name Ten Thousand Times in a Row and You Idiots Would Make It a Bestseller (Stephen King)
http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0007/b ... /index.cfm

The same probably applies to Jordan.

Given the corpus that is all ten or eleven WoT books out now, you could probably fairly easily write a Perl script to produce the nth+1 book. It's really just copy/paste plus a little light munging.

2028 It’s Not Too Late To Make Your Internet Fortune! (Joy Tratisch)

I can't wait for that one... followed of course by this one

2030 We Should Have Seen It Coming: The Terrible Crash of ‘29 (Kenneth A. Lavage)

2084 The New Constitution of the United States of Planet Earth (World President Herman A. Takota)

Somehow I could see that as:

2006 The New Constitution of the United States of Planet Earth (World President George Bush)

assuming he gets elected again of course.