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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   30773 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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The real world doesn’t have “a plot”. It’s not a series of carefully-woven interlocking events all building toward some satisfying conclusion. To the extent that Martin is going to fail to land the plane of the series, it’s because a novel must to some extent differ from the real world in that sense, and Martin couldn’t thread the needle between the parts of the form which are necessary, and the parts which can be effectively deconstructed. To that extent, I agree that a novel can’t simply be a bunch of Things Happening. But I don’t fault Martin for making the experimental effort to see just how far the deconstruction could be taken before it fell apart.

This is really what plagues the conclusions to a lot of media that attempt to be unvarnished reality. The main ones that come to mind are the finales of The Wire, Seinfeld, and The Sopranos.

You can have all the chickens come home to roost and rug-pull your universe (Seinfeld).

You can treat it like a nihilistic meta pop song that has no ending and simply fade out (The Sopranos) and rug-pull your audience (What did you think was going to happen?)

Or you can attempt to have your cake and eat it, too (The Wire) and rug-pull both; collapse the hard-fought reality into a one-dimensional fable to say it's all, like, cyclical and meta, man. Vanitas vanitatum, dude.

None of them are cathartic by design, but I'd rather be audience to the creation betraying the creator than the creator betraying the creation. But either is still preferable to betraying both. That needle can be thread (see season 3 of The Wire, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Blood Meridian). When it's done well, there is at least an ambiguous hope in the nature of the cyclicality that implies something different.

But Martin wants The Last Question and isn't disciplined enough to get anywhere close to it.

Another part of me thinks that he might have done this all unconsciously by design. That Martin calls his house Terrapin Station is so wonderfully meta that perhaps he just wanted to rug-pull everyone from the beginning:

The storyteller makes no choice

Soon you will not hear his voice

His job is to shed light

And not to master

Since the end is never told

We pay the teller off in gold

In hopes he will come back

But he cannot be bought or sold

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