QC

Simplest examples of this are Aesop's fable-type stories with "morals." The stories go: someone did a thing and gets punished, that means it was bad. Or: someone did a thing and gets rewarded, that means it was good. Clear reinforcement learning analogy (stories = episodes).

There's a flavor of shonen anime ending I love (e.g. Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill) where the final battle with the bad guys is structured so that every ally, weapon, skill, etc. the good guys earn gets to contribute. That means all those things were good. Awesome!

More sophisticated: twist endings (e.g. Memento) where the audience has been led to expect the various events to have one meaning but the ending reveals something that changes the meaning of all the other events in retrospect. Satisfying if done well.

From this point of view, everything that happens in a story makes a promise, that the thing will end up having some kind of meaning given to it by the ending, and ideally these meanings will tie together cohesively and satisfyingly. Bad stories + endings break these promises.

(Postmodern stories + endings might break these promises deliberately, as commentary on meaning-making, or w/e. But for now let's look at stories that are trying to be good in a non-postmodern sense and failing.)

Ex: anime often has "filler arcs," meaning it's based on a manga, but the anime got up to the latest manga chapter, so it has to create filler to kill time until the manga updates. Everything that happens in a filler arc is by default meaningless, because the manga ignores it...

...and so it won't matter once the anime starts following the manga again. So it's hard for there to be e.g. character or plot development in a filler. At best filler can tell good self-contained stories that don't really feed into the larger narrative.

Sometimes the anime overtakes the manga so hard the anime has to figure out an ending on its own, which often sucks. This is basically what happened with #GameOfThrones, as @Shvartacus pointed out:https://twitter.com/Shvartacus/status/1123258428686721025 …

The ending of GoT abandons tons of plot threads, making many meanings unclear. Ex #1: Arya learns how to change faces. Sweet! She never uses this ability in Season 8, against the Night King, or Cersei, or Daenerys. So what did it mean? Nothing?

Ex #2: Jon was revealed to be Aegon Targaryen, but the only function this served in Season 8 was to distance him, Tyrion, and Varys from Daenerys. The finale never mentions his claim to the throne. He's named after Aegon the Conqueror! Did that end up meaning anything?

Ex #3: what's the deal with all the magic / religion / prophecy? The Lord of Light kept Melisandre and Beric alive to help out with the Long Night, and revived Jon. Didn't seem to intervene in King's Landing except through Jon. Who ends up being Azor Ahai? Where's Lightbringer?

If Jon is Azor Ahai then why was Arya the one to kill the Night King? If there's some kind of broader point being made about the supernatural then what the hell is it? The finale doesn't address any of this, leaving it up to fans to try to read stuff into it.

On that note let's talk about "themes." From this POV themes are consistent patterns in the meanings of events. You could say early GoT has a theme like "actions have consequences," and what that means is that events consistently have a particular pattern of meaning...

...involving characters' actions propagating wildly through the rest of the story. Jaime pushes Bran out of a window -> Catelyn arrests Tyrion -> Tywin goes to war, etc. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Read a review that points out "actions have consequences" stops applying later. I haven't watched S4-7 so here's a S8 example: one of Varys's last scenes is him hurriedly writing letters to people about Jon being Aegon. This scene is never followed up on. No consequence.

Overall thinking and writing about this has given me a stronger appreciation of the nature of the difficulty in writing a good ending. That includes e.g. ending this thread! What was I building to? What did all of these tweets mean?

Here's one possible ending: the process of meaning-making does not actually end at the ending, of course. After a story ends it gets digested by its audience and the audience is an active participant in meaning-making. It may e.g. come up with meanings unintended by the author.

Audiences construct fan theories to guess at the meanings of events, and sometimes the ending is so unsatisfying audiences prefer their fan theories to the "official" meanings.

Audiences also write fanfiction that offers better or at least differently exciting meanings. On that note @AliceShipwise is almost done writing a totally original S8 script and it's fantastic: https://www.aliceshipwise.com/gameofthrones/scripts/S08E01_fealty_part1.html …

There is a beautiful kind of freedom that opens up in this environment. It becomes reductive to talk about "the" meaning of anything that happens in the story. There is a multiverse of meaning, represented in fan theories, fanfiction, headcanons, etc.

IOW this whole thread was about @Meaningness all along! "Meaningness is an interactional dynamic that arises between oneself and one's situation. ... The only kind that exists is nebulous: ambiguous, fluctuating, uncertain; like a dance, not like a statue."

"That might seem unsatisfactory at first. However, once you accept that meaning is like that, you can see that it's actually much better than the hypothetical solid kind of meaning. It provides freedom and creativity and exploration and lightness, where the given-by-God...