Winter is coming. Or rather, it’s supposed to have been coming for a long time now, but this is starting to look less like time on the edge and more like a performance issue. Which is fine. It happens to every season. There’s no reason to get embarrassed, winter. We’re all just happy to hear your sighs. And by cold sighs, of course I mean the Winds of Winter, the next entry that’s supposed to drop in the Song of Ice and Fire book series by George R. R. Martin, more famously referred to as the Game of Thrones series. Martin has been working on the book for a long time and, given his age, there are plenty of fans speculating that he might pass before finishing the series. There is a sort of… grossness to that. But for the most part I haven’t seen that meant viciously. I think the fans who say that are still concerned for Martin as a person and want him to be happy, healthy, so on. But many of them have invested hours upon hours into this series. They’ve come to love the characters, the world, and, specifically, Martin’s ability as a wordsmith. He has captivated the world with his stories. Largely, their desire isn’t to see Martin get on with it and give them their treats. They want to get to celebrate him.
But… what if their fears come true? What if Martin never does get to finish his work and put it out there how he wants it out there? I’m sure he has notes somewhere that could be published posthumously that would satisfy the need to know, but it wouldn’t be the same. His words are more important than the bones of his story. So… if that happens… what then? What if we fall in love with a story… that never ends? What happens when art stays incomplete?
One - Cancel Culture
Cancel is short for cancellation, as in, TV show cancellation.
The Society is a young adult dystopian sci-fi show meant to explore how one builds a proper society when civilization breaks down, as told through teenagers. It’s the Gone series by Michael Grant but without the whole superpowers thing. The first season is presented as a series of mysteries. How did they get here? Who shot Cassandra? Can they leave? Can they find food? Who is really aligned with who? We get some answers, but the show leaves plenty of its ends open. That’s how you get people to tune in for a second season, after all.
Then Covid happened. Netflix canceled the show. No other platform picked it up, and the mysteries have gone unsolved. Given the time between now and then, it seems like they’ll remain unresolved. In an article for ScreenRant, Jordan Williams says she’s glad the showrunners haven’t come and just given the answers. Knowing would give fans a type of closure, sure, but, as with Game of Thrones, people aren’t fans of plot summaries. They’re fans of art. Williams says she wants to see the scenes acted out. She wants to hear the music and see the camera work. Currently, she has hope that maybe one day The Society will reemerge. To give a summary would be like giving up. Wouldn’t that be more sad?
JK Rowling was once upon a time a writer of boy wizard stories. Then she became a writer of British mystery stuff. Then she became a screenwriter of maybe-autistic wizard zoo men. You might be thinking, oh, she’s turning to adult fair. Wizard zoo men sounds like a very sexy concept. I would read that series. Be the niche sexy fantasy you want to see in the world. Maybe I’ll write those. But no. Fantastic Beasts was apparently going to be a pentalogy following the events of Grindewald’s war with Dumbledore. There were issues with the cast. There were issues with the writing. There was a global pandemic. Rowling decided to spend most of her energy on being a transphobe. Bad press, bad press, bad press. After three films, the series is “on pause,” according to Vanity Fair. For some of the broad plot, you can piece together what happens from the Harry Potter books. But that doesn’t answer specific questions over characters not mentioned, the interactions they have, how everything happens. The director sugarcoated it with “on pause” but, uh, it doesn’t seem like anyone is interested in finishing that series.
This happens often. Every year, pilot season goes crazy. A bunch of stuff is shot. A lot of it is not picked up. A lot of them get a few episode, maybe a season, and then its done. The series Supernatural had a few backdoor pilots built into the show meant to spin mysteries and characters for a new show and then the CW said, “Yeah, nah fam, we’re good.”
If you read manga on something like Shonen Jump, you’ll find that stories end suddenly surprisingly often. Well, they be canceling stuff, and the mangakas scramble to give as satisfying an ending as they can manage with however much space they’re given to end things. The horror manga Bloodie Junkie by Hasumi Natsume is a Battle Royale manga. The “let’s do a death game for a mysterious audience of sadists” is a weirdly popular genre. I don’t mind. I think it’s a fun realm of horror. After two volumes, the manga was canceled. The ideas for what would have happened to the characters are written out.
A lot of people have their pet canceled media, the thing they truly wish would get another shot or will go to the grave thinking it’s a damn shame some corporate bigwig pulled the plug before it reached its natural conclusion.
NBC says an Australian study found people respond to canceled media the same way you do when you experience a loss in your personal life. Labelling this a parasocial breakup, the article says of a psychology professor, “Greenwood said grieving the end of a parasocial relationship is a fundamentally human response.”
We can then take the natural conclusion that you get more of a sense of closure when a series draws to a planned ending where you can tell this is where the author intends for it to cease. The death of an elderly person who has lived a full life is still sad, but it is easier to accept than the death of a teenager taken by a sudden illness or a car crash. If we experience the end of treasured art in a similar way to loss, cancelation is analogous to the death of the young. It comes out of nowhere. You might have a few moments in the hospital holding their hand, or the loss might come out of nowhere.
What do we do when someone dies? How do you handle that? It’s easy to say theoretically. Not long ago in my personal life I almost lost someone. That person is still alive, thankfully, but sometimes, for some unexplained reason, I still grieve them. I get insanely sad and I blame myself. Everyone loses someone at some point. To love is to lose. To lose, oddly enough, proves that the love was so unbelievably real.
When someone dies, whether that’s sudden or at the end of their time, with a full life, how do we handle that? Can we? Is it possible for us to accept loss? We are mortals. Is God real or did we invent Them so we can avoid loss?
Two - Disco Elysium
It’s natural to want closure. When a relationship ends, if it isn’t mutual, often the party broken up with wants to figure out why. They want closure. Love was swiped away from us and it is hard to understand. Understanding doesn’t even help. It doesn’t feel closed. How do you shut doors when your heart has an open floor plan?
Disco Elysium is a detective role-playing game. You get to invest skill points and you do dice throws to pass random checks. It has this grimy but cool water-painting-like art style. The game is… depressing. From my understanding, your choices don’t really affect the plot all too much. The killer is still the random dude on the island, which is unsatisfying since you’re not allowed to investigate that until the end moments. The changes are mostly in your inner narration. There are some differences in character interactions and the like. Sometimes you die and have to reload a save. Your detective is an absolute loser. You’re a drunk. A substance abuser. You get obsessed with knowing why. We have to know why. We’re asking all these questions, and incessant questions make for a good detective, but they do not make for a good, happy human.
In the game, the love of our life left us. We want to know why. We want another chance. How do we move on? And the game seems to say… you won’t. Your need to know will kill you. You ruined your life. You know it. You are addicted to the pain. Do you have hope because you’re hopeful or is your hope another form of self-harm?
A guy broke my heart a bit right before I played it. It’s hard to be in love with someone, sad that things ended, wanting it to be right again, and to play a game that says, “You won’t be okay. That’s not in your nature.”
It depressed me.
Rationalization and intellectualization are two ways of avoiding our emotions. We ask questions because we think there is an answer. We shame ourselves with what we’ve heard about therapy, what we would say to other people, because intellectually we can say we know what’s going on and, intellectually, here’s the answer. Here’s the thing we need to know.
When we experience a loss, whether that’s a breakup or a death, the end of an art series we love, its cancelation, its unfinished nature… How do we get closure?
What if we can’t? What if closure is a myth? Do we surrender to despair and drink ourselves to death? Do we buy into political extremism as an outlet for our despair? Do we ask questions and search for answers until we drive ourselves mad?
At the end of Disco Elysium, a cryptid shows up. It’s gross because it’s a bug. But it’s kind of beautiful. And its existence kinds of flies in the face of the cynicism of the game. It says there are beautiful things out there yet to be discovered. They might be scary. They might be lovely. There is no way to know what lies in the future. Your past may be riddled with pain. You may be caught in despair. But what if the future is nice?
The game says you have to live anyway. And maybe, maybe, you just have to… let it go. That’s such a difficult thing to do. My sister recently suggested to me that maybe the universe hasn’t let some things work out for me because it knows I get tightly attached to people. I will go where I am loved. It’s easy to tell someone you have to set things free, but in practice, doing it, that’s so difficult.
We fall in love with art. How do we let it go? Does letting it go… mean it was a waste of time?
Three - Bad Ends
People threw a fit about the end of the Game of Thrones TV series. Landings are really hard to stick. That’s why there’s so much weight put on it in gymnastics. If you don’t stick the landing, where will you put all your sticks? I’ve got an armful. We were outside playing Kicked Out and now I’ve got all these sticks and we can’t just throw them around outside. They’re important.
For me, the manga Bleach had a disappointing end. Towards the end of its run, The Promised Neverland stopped being super exciting to me. What happens if the end of something you love sucks? I mean, there’s no such thing as objective quality when it comes to art. That’s a myth. But okay, let’s take One Piece, a beloved piece of long-running art. What happens if we reach the ending and it isn't satisfying for whatever personal reason?
In art, can the means only ever be justified by the good ends?
No. It’s the journey, not the destination. It’s a cliche, but cliches exist for a reason.
The opening arc of the Promised Neverland is truly thrilling. I read it weekly as it was released. It kept me guessing both at the mysteries of the world and who was on what side. Each week I theorized and I read the comments of other readers. It was an excellent couple of minutes each week. Bleach has some truly gorgeous art. One of my favorite character bits in manga comes from Ulquiorra’s death scene. The sudden ending to the Thousand Year Blood War arc doesn’t change any of that enjoyment. I really like the idea of the Hell Arc and the one chapter we got. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Kaguya bit of Naruto either. Some people use their dislike of Avatar: The Last Airbender to hate the entire show that they otherwise quite love.
After playing Disco Elysium and being in the mood for another detective game, I played Tails Noir. Imagine if Disco Elysium was set in a world of furries and you don’t have perception checks. Vaguely gay, depressing, pretty much everyone sucks, suddenly a bit sci-fi at the end,left-leaning politically. I really enjoyed the vibe. It was cool and weird to have it be a raccoon detective. There was a nice sense of dread. The mystery of the worldbuilding was cool. But… it felt rushed? In my opinion, the ending was sudden. It felt like part of the game was missing. Admittedly, when I got to the end, my instinct was, “Well… what was the point? I just wasted my time.”
But… did I?
I’ve talked about this before, but maybe the most easily thought-of bad ending is when one of the characters wakes up and we realize it was all a dream. When you hit such an ending, you go back to that question I asked when I finished Tails Noir. What was the point? After all, none of that story that I was enjoying really happened.
To shorten a video I made a while ago that is, uh, a video… Yeah. Of course it didn’t happen. But you already knew that. You knew that when you opened the book or started the game or pressed play on a film. You knew from the start that this wasn’t real. The bothersome moment comes when the piece of art reminds you of that. Because then you can’t ask yourself, “What was the point?” in a whisper as you digest what you’ve consumed in the days and weeks that follow. It Was All A Dream forces you to ask it immediately. And that’s a question that causes distress.
It forces us to wonder what the point of anything is. Where does meaning come from? Why are we alive?
Four - Game of Life
Because we are. That’s all there is to it.
One of my favorite mangas is Katsura Hoshino’s D. Gray Man. Hoshino has had to take multiple extended breaks due to health issues. There was a good decade where I thought maybe there would be no more to it. And that was sad. But if working on it harmed her, then the story going unfinished was obviously the right call. I would reread what existed every now and then. The art was still beautiful. I still quite enjoyed the characters. It’s slowly been updating through the years. I’ve got no idea when it’ll finish or if it will. But I can still appreciate it and what it means to me.
Another manga that goes on extended hiatuses you may have heard of is Hunter x Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi, the mangaka behind YuYu Hakusho. It’s not necessarily my jam. It’s fine, but I’m not going to be bothered one way or the other if it isn’t finished, whereas I’ll definitely be sad if, say, One Piece or Chainsaw Man never reach their ends. People love Hunter x Hunter though. It’s had two anime adaptations. I have to ask… if it doesn’t finish, what happens to that love? Is it wasted? Did the ways in which the show touched the people it did suddenly not matter?
My favorite video game series for the longest time was the Dragon Age series. I played the first one when I was 15 or 16 and made my way through the next two when I got the chance. After that, we kept hearing about how Dragon Age 4 was on the way. Well, then some people behind it left. Then it seemed to get shelved. BioWare was working on something else. BioWare might be in a little bit of trouble. EA is doing some weird meddling. Is it even happening? What’s that? A very vague teaser trailer? That promise of life kept us going again. Then we went back to silence. Each of the previous games left us with loose ends. 3 practically shoved a cliffhanger for the world in our face. This year, 2024, Dragon Age 4 finally started to feed us. We got actual art. A hint of the story. It’s coming. Finally, we’re in the time of flying lizards and getting mages to seduce the handsome guys who hate mages and therefore make the love spicy and cool. I sincerely thought there wouldn’t be a fourth game, though. The mysteries would stay mysteries. But I still love Inquisition and Origins and 2 was a game that I played.
Though it didn’t have the same cliffhanger nature, the game series that truly holds first place in my heart and has since I was young, is Ratchet and Clank. For the longest time, after the PlayStation 3 future series, it seemed like maybe the series was dead. People didn’t like the movie that much, though I thought it was fine, as was the remake game. But that remake was the only PS4 game for the series. Was it dead? I didn’t see anything about it’s future. The series somehow still felt like it wasn’t finished. The Rift Apart came out. Fun game. One that says there’s more juice left to the series. What if there wasn’t? Would they suddenly stop mattering for my childhood? Two of the best friends I ever made in my life started or blossomed further because of the Ratchet and Clank series. Those friendships ended just like those games. Sometimes, they’re a sore spot. But they still made my life better.
To live means to hope. There will be more ContraPoints videos. But if there aren’t, say she decides to quit, her current videos still exist. I can watch them. I can enjoy them. You can reread the Game of Thrones series and live in that world once more. Hadestown begins again and we still sing the sad song because we hope it’ll change. Because the journey is enjoyable. Because we love art.
To live is to love. To love is to lose.
Is the point of being alive to reach the end of our time on this planet and have a collection of checkmarks on a list? No. It’s simply to live. The good times in a relationship were good, in part, because of you. The books you love are enjoyable, in part, because of you. Art is often a conversation between artist and audience. It mattered to you because you were there.
But rereading can sometimes put you in a trap. Despite knowing that the series ends without an ending or with a disappointing one, you can rebuild that anticipation from your first read. Then you get to the stopping point and you reopen the wounds of disappointment. It’s the spiral of going back to an avoidant ex who always pushes you away after he says he loves you. The love is nice, the memories are nice, you’re attempting to do something worthwhile and meaningful… but it can be a form of self-harm. You get to the end, and even though you expect it now… the hole is still there. And you see it. You know it exists.
Seeing it hurts.
Why does it hurt?
Five - Das Ding
Outside of mathematical certainty, how could we know a black hole exists? By definition, after all, no light can escape, so technically it isn’t visible. Well, that’s also how we can see it. Sometimes we know what’s there by determining what isn’t. There should be light here. There isn’t. The light is swirling. It’s trapped. It’s getting flushed away.
Imagine a pit deep inside your belly. You fill your gut, and yet the pit is there, untouched, falling, dark. It’s not the same thing as depression, though there is an analogy there. Acknowledging the hole can lead to an existential depression, but I don’t think it’s right to say it is that. Or perhaps I’m wrong. I’m speaking as a depressed individual guessing at what it’s like for more healthy people. But… have you ever known anyone to be truly satisfied? Not content, not able to appreciate things, not happy. Satisfied. Sated. No desire for more in any way shape or form. I don’t.
If we have a hole inside of us, what do we do with it? Food won’t fill it. Alcohol and drugs fail. Adrenaline doesn’t manage it. Sex can’t. Although love is amazing…
How do wind instruments make noise? Metal or wood or plastic forms tubs of various kinds. To put it another, we form something around a hole. That something formed makes music. Art of black holes is beautiful because of the depiction of swirling light. Even though the light can never satisfy the black hole, it is still beautiful. Those stolen stars and light still have lives and energy sent into the universe. They matter. They mattered.
After the death of love, the only way to move forward is to love more. To love again. Which sounds so easy, but it isn’t. It’s really fucking hard. Disco Elysium makes that clear. Life makes that clear. Break-ups are hard. Depending on how they go, they can mess with your mind and your heart for a long time. But they don’t stop either of them. They don’t mean there won’t be more love. They don’t mean the love you gave wasn’t brilliant. We love again, scary as that is.
How does that relate to art? We can’t fill the hole, but we have to keep circling it. That’s part of why fanfic exists. It can add ends to things that don’t end. Or it can remove endings from things that do. We can keep circling… but fanfic forces us to look. So it can still be painful. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. In part, it’s comfort. It can help us relive better times. It is good to revisit the things we love to a certain extent. It reminds us that there are good times and good art. We can love things. We have the possibility. But nostalgia is a mind’s trick, to quote the sage of our age, T Swizzle. Ultimately, nostalgia keeps us on the edge of the hole. If it never ends, rereading Game of Thrones might continue to hurt. Fanfic might continue to hurt. The hole is terrifying.
The only thing to do is to do the scary thing. You try again. You find more art to love. And the move you love, the more light you have, the more beautiful your life shaped around the hole is. The smaller the emptiness seems. The safer you feel.
I wrote a screenplay about the pressures of creating art, especially during the middle of the covid pandemic, fresh out of college, depressed, seeing post after post about how Shakespeare wrote Lear during a pandemic. It was heavy. And I wasn’t making a capital G Great Work. That hurt. A weird relationship had me feeling like if only I could make something great, I would finally be loved as much as I want, and if I was loved so much, the hole would finally go away. It would be filled. I would be healthy. Right before I wrote this, I turned that screenplay into a stageplay. It had me thinking a lot about the attempts to fill the emptiness and make it go away.
When you get an idea that perhaps the hole cannot be filled, that’s scary. It’s existential. It’s depressing. What’s the point if we’re never satisfied?
I think the point is in trying to fill the hole. The beauty of the light is in watching how it swirls as it falls into the darkness. We cannot do it. That does not mean it isn’t a worthy endeavor.
If a series ends, if it becomes a missing person whose body is never found, you have to mourn it. And then, stupid as it sounds, hard as it is to do, you find something new to love. We find people and art and causes to put pieces of our souls inside. And they too will end. And hurt. And our soul takes time to grow new parts. And we do it again. Over and over until we end. Life is annoying and beautiful in that melancholic sort of way.
If the Winds of Winter is a death rattle, we find the breath of life somewhere else.
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