I Need Endings

Why do I like games with an ending? I like closure. I like a finality. Not necessarily in the world and characters and story but to the game itself. Games that have no finality would be something like Minecraft where you play and play but never reach an end. You can always set an end goal for yourself but it's never an actual ending.

I need closure because I don't like the concept of deriving my own story with my own understandings when there's clearly a story to be told by the creator. I think ambiguity is lazy writing unless the impact of said ambiguity is irrelevant. This is why games like Dark Souls don't really matter much to me. The idea that I have to guess what everything is and everything is what I want it to be is not true. For every creation, there is a canon. I want to know that canon. Whether or not I like it (with regards to some animes I've watched) is irrelevant. At least I know that the story I understood is the story the creator wanted to tell.

Some people would disagree with me and I think that's fine. I mean, I did explain why I loved Etrian Odyssey. But creating my own characters is very different to interpreting my own story. It's the same with some shows nowadays where they're openly changing the sex and race of their characters from their original source material.

For example, the black Hermione for the Harry Potter screen play. I don't mind that. I'm not a racist bigot. What I do mind is that J.K. Rowling said it's fine because Hermione's race was never stated in the book and so it can be anything. Which it can't. If I think she's white, another person thinks she's black and one more person thinks she's Asian, what the hell is she? There is no decisive point for that character and that's very annoying. If it was a nameless character that served as the reader's viewpoint, then that makes sense. After all, the character can be anyone because THAT was how the character was created. That's who the character was intended to be.

These are all just relevant extensions to my initial rant about why I need endings. It's the same reason. I just want to know the canon ending decided by the creator as opposed to some ambiguous nonsense thrown at me just so that 'everyone can get their own story'. In video games, this can be bypassed by a morality system and multiple endings which can all be considered canon if and only if there is no direct sequel that plays from that. I guess Dragon Age did this pretty well in that they can write whatever ending you got into their sequels.

This isn't the case with books because they aren't game books (haven't heard that in a while) most of the time. They're linear stories told to us. In that way, they should be fully told to us as opposed to us making some stuff up. Creating the images in our heads about how certain things look or how certain scenes play out, sure. That can't be helped. That IS an actual part of reading a book. But not the damn story itself.

And please don't get me started on what happens if the author dies midway through. God help me then.