As I write this, I realize that it might seem like I’m ending this newsletter, but actually I’m thinking about show endings since two I was watching finished this week. Both managed to avoid the common Thai BL trope of having time skip (though to be fair, GMMTV is the worst about this), which was great, but I don’t know if they were equally successful finales.
In most of my writing workshops, we talked a lot about endings and how difficult they are. Beginnings are hard, of course, but endings are the final impression of the work, and it’s hard to escape a bad ending while a weak beginning can be forgotten. Think Game of Thrones or the special episode of Jack & Joker, both of which managed to alienate their fans in different ways.
It’s hard, right, because you need to wrap up all the story elements in a satisfactory way, but in a way that doesn’t feel too contrived. And wrapping things up too much can be more frustrating to some people, while others like a friend of mine is like, actually I would like to see this couple all the way until they die.
That latter instinct is something I’ve noticed a lot of romances fall into, with a lot of fics, romance novels, and shows having some kind of flash-forward sequence at the end. It seems to be more common with slow-burn stories, which I suspect is partially because the “resolution” of the story is the couple getting together, but the writer wants to show that the relationship actually lasts. It’s hard to write denouement for romance, I think, because it’s more than just the end of a situation (the aftermath of a murder being solved, the cleanup post disaster), it’s the start of a new story, just one the audience won’t be seeing.
