505 – Disappointing Endings

The Mythcreant Podcast

It’s hardly a secret that endings are often disappointing. A story’s finale is often the most difficult part to write, as it has the burden of making good on the story’s earlier promises. But what makes an ending disappointing, and why do we feel that way? This week, we’re discussing mechanics of a disappointing ending and how we can avoid such gristly fates for our stories.

Show Notes

• Cliffhanger
• ANTS
• Game of Thrones
• Mass Effect Three
• Battlestar Galactica
• Outlining vs Discovery Writing
• My Lady Jane
• The Acolyte
• Great Gatsby
• Velocity of Revolution
• The Art of Prophecy
• Magia Record
• The Sleepless
• The Factory Witches of Lowell

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Bunny: Hello, and welcome folks to an episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is…

Chris: Chris

Bunny: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: And this is the end of the Mythcreant Podcast. I am so sorry everyone. I know it’s very sudden and jarring and a lot of things are unfulfilled, and we also intimated at the end of other episodes that we might do more of them. But you have to understand the importance of making a point. And this is real life. Podcasts end this way in real life, so you can’t be mad. [Chris and Oren laugh]

Oren: Oh man, they do. Although, to make it really realistic, we would’ve not said anything. It just would’ve been like a normal episode, and then we just never upload any more. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: That’s true. That would’ve been far more disappointing.

Oren: Way more real.

Bunny: But since we have ended this podcast, you’re hearing us end it. But nobody is actually seeing us end the podcast. And despite all of them weeping over the end of the podcast, nobody actually saw or proved that the podcast was dead. So, maybe there’ll be a hackneyed sequel.

Oren: There was no pod body. [laughter]

Chris: Yeah, there’s a dramatic ending, and then the sequel gets canceled. [laughter] This will always have…

Oren: We’re in the streaming era now. There’s not gonna be a sequel. [laughter]

Bunny: We’re stuck in streaming hell. Even though we’re not on any streaming platforms, it’s just reality now. [Oren laughs] For some reason, we are at the will of Netflix, despite not being associated with Netflix in any way.

Oren: We’re just part of the extended Netflix universe.

Bunny: Yeah. So a couple weeks ago we talked about cliffhangers, and while I think that’s a pretty crummy way to end something, and it is disappointing, I’m not sure that’s exactly what people mean when they say disappointing. Certainly if the cliffhanger is never resolved, that’s super disappointing. But, you know, at least the cliffhanger implies there’s something afterward and that eventually you’ll get some sort of resolution, whereas I feel like a lot of the disappointing endings are–that. They’re endings. Like, there’s not an implication that it will continue.

Oren: Yeah. Cliffhanger endings are frustrating. I don’t like them, but I wouldn’t describe most of them as disappointing. Usually with cliffhangers, the disappointment comes either in there never being a follow-up because of production issues, or the follow-up arriving, and it not living up to the hype that the cliffhanger created.

Chris: Right…

Bunny: Yeah. I mean, it’s cognizantly not an ending.

Chris: What can happen with cliffhangers, or something that is kind of similar to cliffhangers where you just don’t have an ending, that the story just, again, stops at that point, is that people tend to feel cheated.

Bunny: Right.

Chris: Right. But that’s not really the same thing as, oh no, we got our, like, final and permanent resolution, and it was super disappointing.

Bunny: Right, exactly. If there’s a cliffhanger, what’s disappointing is the fact that the show was canceled or something, and, you know, not necessarily the cliffhanger itself. It’s disappointing that the cliffhanger was left as a cliffhanger.

Oren: Right.

Bunny: Or sometimes it’s hilarious, as in the case of that old Super Mario Bros. movie. [laughter]

Chris: It’s like somebody promised you cake, and it’s the difference between them just not giving you the cake they promised, or them giving you the cake, and it’s just awful. It’s the worst cake you’ve ever tasted.

Bunny: [laughing] Right. That’s a good metaphor. I think that broadly, disappointment comes from a lack of resolution, or I guess in Mythcreants lingo, a lack of satisfaction.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: The most elusive of the ANTS.

Bunny: Yes. It’s the ANTSss, because it’s mysterious. So when people talk about endings that were disappointing, they might talk about a mystery being resolved in a way that is contrived, or hasty, or like the authors are scrambling to wrap things up, and it doesn’t feel good. They might also talk about forcing a conclusion that doesn’t make sense from the setup, like Game of Thrones.

Oren: Yeah. [Bunny laughs] I would put Game of Thrones firmly in the, like, contrived endings. Because it just obviously does not make sense, right? Like the ending they wanted does not work with the setup they had, and they just did it anyway. And that kind of ending tends to, I would say, get the most attention, because it’s really easy to identify, and so it’s very easy to dunk on. And so we just do that for a while, whenever there’s a big popular story that has a really unsatisfying ending. It was the same thing with Mass Effect 3, like it was super contrived, and Battlestar Galactica, and there’s all these examples. There are other kinds of disappointing endings, but in my experience, those are the most famous ones.

Chris: Yeah. I think, again, a disappointing ending could be just about anything, because endings really do come with tons of requirements, and everything has to go right for people to be happy with the ending, pretty much.

Bunny: Right. It’s hard to stick landings. Especially if you’re someone like me who kind of plots as they go along, and, you know, doesn’t always have the end in sight when they’re writing the middle. And ideally that’s the sort of thing you would edit, but sometimes it seems like it’s just not. [laughter]

Oren: Yeah. On the other hand, I don’t wanna. [laughing]

Bunny: Ah, yeah. On the other hand, it’s hard.

Chris: So yeah, I mean, I do think the saving grace of endings is that you have the entire story to put pieces into place, unlike the beginning where you’re starting from nothing. But at the same time, yeah, some people like to kind of discovery write, or pants, or whatever you call it, and nobody likes to revise. Actually, well, that is not true. We have found the people who like to revise; they exist on our Discord server.

Oren: They’re strange and scary. [everyone laughs] Like a Deep One situation over here. What’s going on?

Chris: So some people do like to revise. Good for them. It must be–life must be good.

Bunny: Must be nice. [everyone laughs]

Oren: One kind of disappointing ending that I find much more often in books than in movies or TV is the big arc, the most important arc, whatever, the throughline, getting resolved by someone other than the main character…

Bunny: Oh yeah. Some guy…

Oren: Or main characters, and I think the reason that it’s more common in books is–this is my own personal hypothesis–is that with movies and TV, they gotta pay a lot for their lead actors. And so they’re gonna get the most use out of them that they can, whereas with books, the author’s not paying for any particular character. And so it can be very easy for the author to just sideline their protagonists in favor of someone else they might like better, or for some other weird reason, right?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I will say that movies and TV shows generally have a lot more people involved with the story. For movies in particular, you might have one person who wrote the original screenplay, and then it’s changed so much that they still get credit for the screenplay, but none of the lines are theirs anymore.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: [laughing] It’s like that’s not an inconceivable thing to happen. And I do think that not giving the main character the star role in the end is a pretty big mistake that requires a writer who is kind of following their whims a little bit. And at some point, I think with so many people reviewing and giving input on scripts when you have something that’s super high-budget, I think that’s a problem that probably just gets ironed out.

Bunny: The flip side of that is the hero whose story has ballooned so out of proportion that it’s just as disappointing that they solve it in any way other than something equally proportionate. Like, the author has gotten beyond the scope that the hero could realistically affect. So the hero scolds some baddies and everything’s better. That’s also disappointing.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Why we made the problem too hard?

Bunny: Right?

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yeah. I mean that one is a little bit harder problem to solve. I mean, you can’t be hunting for reasons why the main character can affect events at all or can be the hero of the story. That’s gonna affect the entire thing. And I think for a movie or TV show that’s not gonna–I don’t know. Have we, Oren, have you ever seen a movie or TV show where the main character was just not in the position to make any change on the plot?

Oren: Uh, not off the top of my head. I’m not gonna rule it out entirely. There may have been…

Chris: There’s probably some show that has, like, an ensemble cast, and one person is supposed to be in the main character, but they’re like the humble, relatable character…

Oren: The closest I would…

Chris: …and they don’t have a lot of agency.

Oren: Right. The closest that I’ve seen recently that does something like that is actually My Lady Jane, that we were talking about last week.

Chris: But she does have the power to affect events. They just won’t give her any agency for some reason.

Oren: Right. It’s not that she’s underpowered. If anything, she’s kind of overpowered, but her skills never matter, which is…

Chris: They just don’t let any of her plans actually work. It’s amazing how little agency she has.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: For being the queen.

Chris: But they still put her at the center of events, and they have her come up with plans and try to enact the plans. So they just, I think they just had, because they’re following kind of this historical template where they want things to be similar to real life events, but, like, different in key ways. I think that this was an issue of “But if the protagonist had agency, then she would win all the time. And then we wouldn’t have half these things happen.” And I think that’s what they were struggling with.

Oren: Oh! I actually did think of a TV show that did exactly this, what we’re talking about.

Chris: Oh yeah?

Oren: Acolyte.

Chris: Oh! Yeah, Acolyte has that problem.

Oren: Spoilers for Acolyte, I guess. I wanna be careful when I critique Acolyte because a lot of weirdos are, like, gleefully mad about it not being very good. And I don’t want to be one of those people, but it does have an issue where the main character can’t do anything, and so she spends most of the story just following other characters around. And I do not know what the thought process was on that. Like, I’m genuinely confused why they thought that was a good idea.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I see how it happens. You want a humble protagonist who is involved in events that are bigger than them in some way. Then you’re not thinking too hard about the logistics of, okay, how are they gonna actually make a difference here?

Oren: Yeah. It’s just, I would expect it to go the other way and have her do things despite not having the skills for it and being a little contrived. That’s the normal way that this goes. But no, instead it’s like, yeah, she’s a normal, like, mechanic surrounded by Jedi, and most of the problems in this story can be solved with lightsabers. So she watches them do that. [laughter] I mean, realistic, I guess.

Bunny: Definitely a story that got beyond its scope was The Velocity of Revolution, which I know I’ve talked about before. The ending was also just generally confusing, which is another way to get disappointment. Nobody knows what’s happening.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: I had a couple people, a couple friends that happened with The Great Gatsby, like they didn’t realize that Gatsby had been shot, which caused some confusion and, uh, it’s kind of important to the end of the story.

Oren: Great Gatsby? More like the okay Gatsby.

Bunny: The disappointing Gatsby. [Oren laughs] But The Velocity of Revolution, the problem that the story ended up tackling was this deeply entrenched caste system, systemic racism, colonial occupation. And the story is about motorcycles and mushrooms, like, [sigh] it turns out going really fast with a, like, a lady who’s infused with mushrooms makes all the foreigners sick, and then they go away.

Oren: Gotta go fast!

Bunny: Gotta go fast. [laughter]

Chris: It’s such a strange story.

Bunny: And that just was like, this is too big a problem for going fast with some mushrooms, you know?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: Like, the story was correctly about fighting these systemic issues, and it was very concerned with them, but the ending–that just didn’t work.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: There’s also the stories where the writer’s just really uninterested in solving the big problems, and I’m thinking of City of Brass here.

Oren: Yeah, City of Brass was at least theoretically the first book, so I guess maybe if we stuck around, maybe there would’ve been more of that, but it was so badly handled that I wasn’t interested in finding out.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I will say, if you have a series, again, it’s going back to the, like, is it that the cake tastes bad, or do you not have any cake?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right, like people expect to get at least one piece of cake at the end of each book of the series.

Bunny: [small voice] May I have more?

Oren: Here’s a setup where there’s this group of people who is horribly oppressed to a degree that would make most human oppression stop and ask them to chill out. And you just keep thinking, okay, maybe the protagonist is going to help a little bit. She never does. And then at the end the oppression gets worse because it turns out the oppressed people were evil. Like, what? What was that? I guess that was a disappointing ending. [Bunny laughs] I mean, maybe an enraging ending would be a better way to describe it. I don’t know.

Bunny: It just definitely falls under general confusion, I think. Based on that description as well.

Oren: A kind of disappointing ending that you all don’t have to deal with all that often because you don’t read unpublished client manuscripts [Bunny laughs] is just not resolving the ending. Like, most published stories remember to do that. But if you’re new to writing, sometimes you just get to the end and you don’t know how to resolve it. So the story just ends.

Chris: I mean, especially if you don’t have a throughline or don’t know what your throughline is.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right, it may just end at some point. Or what I’ll see is the writer doesn’t have a throughline, but they still understand that there’s supposed to be this thing called a climax that’s exciting.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So they’ll write just kind of like a meandering story, and then they’ll bring in a sudden action scene sometimes, which doesn’t really fit the rest of the story, to be the climax. And then when the action scene is over the story just ends. But again, the action scene isn’t really part of a larger plot, right?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It’s just some random action. So it’s still not satisfying, because we don’t, again, have that structure in place.

Oren: Yeah. This is a weirdly specific one, but I have seen this at least a couple times, which is a story that starts off with what looks like an interesting arc and then just shunts it aside, and it’s like, “Nope, we’re not doing that.” And then the whole book is spent getting back to doing that arc again.

Bunny: [laughing] No…

Oren: And the most obvious example is from The Art of Prophecy, where we start with the main character as a mentor, and she’s gonna train this young chosen one, and then she doesn’t do that. And we spend the entire book getting back to the point where now she’s gonna train the young chosen one. And it is like, I don’t know, man, you could’ve done that at the start of the book. You didn’t need the rest of this book. We could’ve just started there.

Bunny: Follow the hook.

Chris: It’s what we call zero movement.

Oren: Yeah, we just went in a giant circle. [laughter] I see that sometimes. That’s a specific kind of disappointing ending. Chris mentioned the one where like there’s kind of a meandering story, and then we pivot to sudden violence at the end. A similar but legally distinct kind of disappointing ending to that is a weird sudden pivot at the end where suddenly the ending is about something not what the rest of the show was about, or the rest of the story, whatever it was. Like the anime Magia Record does this, where we have the whole series, we’re getting ready to deal with these two villains, but then it turns out we talk those villains down. So the final boss is against some rando who we’ve seen once or twice.

Bunny: It’s, you have a story about raising unicorns, and all the unicorn trainers are competing to raise the best unicorn, and don’t do drugs, kids, goodbye. [everyone laughs]

Oren: Or, like, at the end of Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet where the whole thing is this kind of cozy, low-stakes, low-tension story. And then suddenly a character dies at the end in, like, this really unpleasant way. And it’s just to set up the next book, right? It has nothing to do with any of the arcs that were happening in the first book. That sort of ending.

Chris: Yeah. To get into more complex territory, obviously you want the ending to feel earned. Besides the main character having some agency and actually making a difference in the ending, they also have to earn the ending, which is where you get a lot of the more complex problems with having good turning points, and karma, and foreshadowing, sometimes.

I recently read a pretty good book, The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. And that one, you know–little spoilers–has like a side character come in and basically save the day at the end, but it’s supposed to be the main character earning that by being willing to sacrifice herself, and then that inspires the side character to come in. But it’s not quite there, because the side character is just so powerful that it doesn’t feel like that has been set up properly.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Okay, just being willing to sacrifice, you know, earned such a good ending that it’s okay for somebody to just, like, snap their fingers and there’s still–so it has a little bit deus ex machina feel, which is when you have just a great ending come out of nowhere, and nobody earns it, and there’s no foreshadowing, and it’s totally unexpected just because…

Bunny: You still want some sacrifice.

Chris: Right, just because of the scale. The scale of the help was just disproportionate. That one was also really funny because we actually had a perfectly good explanation where we had an army that was gonna come in to save them, they just weren’t there yet. And so all we had to do was just have them hold out until the army arrives to take care of the rest. But instead, we have, like, deus ex machina friend.

Oren: Thanks, deus ex machina friend.

Chris: [laughing] So it was just, it was also just very unnecessary.

Bunny: Always helpful to have one of those.

Chris: Yeah. But other issues with, you know, again, an ending that feels earned. Right? You don’t want anything to be handed to the protagonist on a silver platter. Where somebody else is just like, “Here, I’ll just do this for you.” You don’t want that. You don’t want the outcome to feel like it’s entirely luck or fate. And so again, they have to do something and–slightly different flavor of karmic problem–you want the actual polarity of the karma to fit, so you don’t want an asshole that readers hate to just be rewarded at the end. [laughing]

Oren: Wow. But it’s so edgy though. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: That it is, and going off of that, when the story just kind of…ugh, yeah. This is me segueing into complaining about Sleepless again.

Oren: Hooray!

Bunny: I think this goes back to, like, the sort of karma–I guess this might be karma–but an ending that is just, like, dismal? Like, okay, the book kind of scolds you for expecting a better ending.

Oren: Oh, no.

Bunny: Basically, what happens is the world kind of ends worse than it begins. These dangerous sleepless drugs are booming in popularity. They don’t really know why the sleepless are having memory holes, and then the protagonist goes to prison, and it ends with the protagonist narrating from prison. I get that there were big issues on the stage, and I expected a resolution on the scale of those issues. So, like, why are you scolding me for expecting the big corporations to get some comeuppance, when the story was about getting, like, bringing comeuppance to the corporations, right?

Chris: I mean, that just sounds like it’s unresolved, because, I don’t know, is the protagonist gonna be in the prison for the rest of his life, or…?

Bunny: No, he’s just there for now, but he does narrate about how, like, explicitly about how nothing changes. How the story didn’t affect anything in the long run, how the society is still awful. And it’s, like, okay, maybe that’s true…

Chris: But that’s telling and not showing. I do feel like, okay, let’s say we wanted a downward turn. We wanted a, like, tragic ending. So they’ve got these dystopian organizations that are doing bad. Their goal is to change them, defeat them, whatever. And we want a tragic outcome where they fail to do so. And in order to resolve the tension, that failure needs to be permanent, right? It needs to feel like there is no possibility that this is gonna be turned around. And it sounds like what happens is the main character just tells people, “Oh yeah, nothing changes,” without actually showing why it’s not possible to turn things around.

Bunny: And it’s also not a tragedy. Like, it’s a mystery story, and he solved the mystery successfully, and then…nothing happens.

Chris: But he’s also trying to…

Bunny: It ends in, like, depressing jail, about as miserable as it can be. Like, he steps out of the jail, and that’s the end. But the last chapter, which drags on, it’s all about like, “Oh, it’s Christmas now, and there’s really sad tinsel around, and now I can kind of faintly smell fresh air outside. Man, wish I could be out there.” It’s just dismal.

Chris: Did the protagonist do something to earn being in jail here?

Bunny: Here, he’s talking about the villain here, I’m pretty sure. “Whenever I think of him now, I ask myself, what was the point?”

Chris: [laughing] This just has all the hallmarks of a writer who believes themself to be clever. It’s like, look, I’m not gonna make a pat ending. I’m gonna make it an ending that’s rebellious.

Bunny: Yeah. This is talking about his villainous friend. “Despite his efforts, the lies and manipulations, despite his ultimate sacrifice, the world still ended up the way it is. Was it all worth it? Simon probably thought so, but I’m here alive, and I know damn better.” Like, the conclusion is the world is awful. Thanks for reading.

Oren: There is a subreddit called “I’m 14, and this is deep,” and I cannot help but feel like that’s where this ending belongs. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: It does kind of feel like that. Like, maybe it’s setting up a sequel, but the ending was just so downer and frustrating that I wouldn’t pick up another book, even setting aside the world building.

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: Which, heh, visit the Bad Metaphors episode for that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, the fact that what you’re relating is what the protagonist says, again, strongly suggests that this outcome is not something that we see unfold. It’s something that is simply told and declared.

Bunny: Right. I think we’re supposed to get the sense that he has, like, the moral high ground? But, I don’t know. It’s…

Oren: I mean, authors sometimes like to scold their readers for not liking their endings. I’ve read a couple of books that do that. I don’t understand why you would do that. Like, it just, the thought of it makes me kind of recoil inside, because I want my readers to like my story, but some writers seem to enjoy that part, so I, I guess?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, defensive reactions are what they are, I guess.

Bunny: I was like, excuse me. I wanted to see some of the villains who are part of these corporations, like, pay a price, but it seems like, you know, nothing got better.

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: No, the mystery was solved, but ultimately nothing mattered, and that was disappointing to me.

Chris: It is really frustrating when authors seem to want to scold their readers for liking what they created, and this almost feels like an example of that where, okay, you successfully got me invested in this world and invested in seeing it change for the better. Now I’m just kind of being scolded for caring, a little bit, and that’s certainly frustrating.

And again, with the disappointing endings–yeah, if you’re trying to do everything right, and your readers aren’t happy, or you’re trying to do something different ,and your readers aren’t happy, it can be really frustrating. But they’re–it’d be frustrating for you, as well as them, but your readers aren’t happy because they cared about the story, right? They wouldn’t have as much reason to be frustrated with your ending if you hadn’t succeeded in roping them in.

Bunny: Right.

Chris: So I just–some cases you can kind of take that as a backwards compliment. Where they care enough about your story to get frustrated…

Bunny: Care enough about your story, but also be angry at you when you screwed it up? [laughing]

Chris: Yeah. But also on your end, I just think we should have some appreciation for the fact that we did things to get them really invested in a specific outcome. So it’s a little bit mean to then turn around and be like, [laughing] “Like what, you cared?”

Bunny: “You’re silly for caring.”

Chris: You’re silly for caring, when that’s our job, right?

Bunny: I mean, to paraphrase Jenny Nicholson, the worst thing a story can do is make you feel kind of stupid for being invested in it in the first place. And that’s probably at the heart of all of this disappointment, you know?

Chris: Yeah. Certainly, again, a lot of the things about endings that are most disappointing is there is some broken promise somewhere, some expectation that was not fulfilled, whether it’s, like, main character switcheroo, where we got you invested in a specific main character, and the main character was just shoved to the side so that somebody else could save the day. Or, you know, we brought in something that was a gruesome fight scene when that was not the expectation we set, or something like that.

Oren: All right. I have a conundrum to end the podcast on, because we’re getting close to the end. This is a riddle, if you will.

Bunny: Ooh.

Oren: So, okay. So…

Bunny: 43.

Oren: As we know, satisfaction is the feeling you get when you successfully resolve tension. Right, this is a basic ANTS principle. We got articles about it. So here’s the question. If the story never properly establishes tension, and you get to the end and there’s no satisfaction because of that, is that a disappointing ending? Or was the story just boring to start with? [Bunny laughs]

I’m thinking of something like The Factory Witches of Lowell, where they–which I know it sounds like I’m saying “The Factory Witches of LOL,” but I promise that’s not how it’s spelled–where it seems like they’re, they go on strike and it seems like it’s gonna be hard, but then it turns out that they’re magic and nobody else is. So they just use magic to solve all their problems. And so then we get to the end, and they solve the last problem with another magic spell, and it’s like, well, that was boring and disappointing. I felt like I was disappointed, but was I really disappointed in the ending, or was it just the entire story?

Chris: I mean, I do think that sometimes when the story’s slow, because we know that generally the goal is to escalate the tension as the story goes, we hope that it’ll turn around.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And stories don’t generally turn around. [laughing] I experience lots of stories. If there is a problem in the beginning, it’s very unlikely that that will get better that much. I mean, some stories do speed up a bit as the story continues, but the problem will keep showing itself later, even when the story gets tenser, usually.

Bunny: I mean, maybe it is satisfying, in that it gave you exactly what you expected. [Chris laughs]

Oren: That’s true. My expectations were not subverted. [Bunny laughs]

Chris: Yeah, geez. I have to say there are, going back to streaming, there are so many shows that would have so much more satisfying endings if they just had enough time. And it’s strange, because you can plot a story of any size that is satisfying.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And so I don’t know if part of the problem is that we have a bunch of show writers that are used to having a longer season, and so they just don’t know how to scale down for the length? Estimating complexity can be really difficult, or they thought they had more, and then parts were, like, unexpectedly cut out. Right? Or, there’s just expectations that the show will have a certain number of characters, and a certain amount of overhead and complexity, that simply can’t resolve satisfactorily in, like, eight episodes. But there’s just been, again, more and more streaming shows that have been a disappointment at the end, partly because there was not actually time to properly set up things, and properly explain things, and show characters doing things like changing their mind about stuff, or giving background and stuff, and all of those things. And that’s just, it’s been real disappointing.

Oren: Alright, well with that extremely fun moment to think about, [Bunny laughs] we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Bunny: You can almost call it…disappointing that we ended on that note.

Oren: Yeah, but if you didn’t like it, that’s actually your fault. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: Sometimes podcasts just end this way.

Chris: Well, I have to say, if you were disappointed in this episode, maybe if you supported us on Patreon, you’d be less disappointed. Did you think about that?

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants, and I don’t know, maybe with more money we can make it less disappointing for you.

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

Bunny: [spooky voice] Or will we? [everyone laughs] [Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.