[Warning: This essay contains spoilers for The Last of Us and Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as Mass Effect. I’m talking about endings here, so if you see a thing, just kind of assume spoilers are on the table. Also, yes this is late, but it’s also like twice as long as my usual posts, and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, so them’s the breaks.]
Ending a story is hard. Hell, getting a series off the ground is hard. Of the three series I’ve started – The Nightmare Cycle, The Memory Bearers, and The Meaning Wars – only one is complete.
(I still have plans to finish the first two, but quite frankly, book 2 for The Nightmare Cycle took ten years to write…and when I was finished last year, I decided I wasn’t happy with it, and that it needs a complete rewrite. The good news is, I’m a much faster writer than I used to be, so that’s part of my plan for 2026 and 2027; to finish The Nightmare Cycle. The Memory Bearers takes place in the same world, and will involve consequences from The Nightmare Cycle, so that’s why I haven’t been able to continue and finish that series yet, either!
That and, you know, the whole “adjusting to parenthood and scheduling” thing. And the hyperfixation committee decreeing exactly what I’m allowed to focus on, and when. Wheee. But I digress severely.)
Series are hard, yo
I’m going to focus mostly on books, because that’s my primary artistic storytelling medium, but I will reference other narratives to reinforce my point, which I think is broadly applicable to most narrative mediums, including a lot of nonfiction.
There are a lot of authors out there with series that have been started, get one book deep, and then – either due to personal reasons or publishing company-imposed limitations – don’t get to finish. (I’m looking at you, company that won’t let Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant release the sequel to Into the Drowning Deep!)
However, when some authors get big enough, like George R R Martin or Patrick Rothfuss, they can set their own schedules.
Now, I wrote an analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire’s failure to launch some years ago, but the example has certainly stuck in my mind.
The thing that led to my disgruntlement, touched on there, is the issue of the Red Wedding. Now, at the start of the book series, we get a rather hamfisted foreshadowing that Ned Stark is gonna bite it. His death felt entirely fair and unsurprising. Again, intense foreshadowing.
Book 1 starts with a family sundered, and emotionally, that should mean that the end of the series brings all of the family members back together, damaged but surviving, to recuperate together. That is the emotional core of the story of Game of Thrones that holds the first couple of books together.
This is a powerful storytelling concept, and it’s also the reason the series fell the fuck apart. In book 3, when Caitlin and Rob Stark are horribly and brutally murdered, Martin threw a subversive curveball in the equation.
However, killing family members means that the reunion is impossible before it happens. By killing off his probable king, instead of, you know, badly disabling him or injuring him in some way, Martin effectively slew the emotional core of his own story.
It’s easy to see the evidence; without the emotional anchoring of their protagonist family for us to cling to, books 4 and 5 are a rambling mess. Now that so many years have passed since book 6’s expected due date, it’s pretty obvious that Martin is hopelessly stuck.
I’m not going to say he should pass the writing on to some other author because he might die soon. (In fact, you should never say that to an author; I can’t express how phenomenally rude and inconsiderate it is.) What I do think is that any remaining fans with a lingering sense of hope…need to mourn the series and move on.
By waiting too long to publish, and by destroying the emotional anchor point of the story, Martin broke the emotional contract.
What’s an emotional contract?
I hasten to add that I’m sympathetic to other authors who get partway through a series and get completely stuck, or who start a series and don’t finish it. After all, I have my own context with that.
In the current romance writing world, there’s a publishing norm that’s become so hard and fast, it’s getting ossified: genre romance novels must end happily, with the couple/people in relationships together. It wasn’t always like this, and I personally think that less predictable love stories are due for a comeback. However, it’s important to signal to people that a story may be tragic, or at least that it’s meant to be less predictable. Otherwise, readers will respond VERY poorly to a broken emotional contract.
There’s that phrase again! An emotional contract is an implicit agreement with readers to finish a story in a satisfying manner.
The thing is, this concept transcends narrative medium and genre. Whether it’s a twenty-five-part story time on Tiktok, a prestige TV drama, or a niche genre book series – the audience expects a satisfying ending.
The blowup around Mass Effect is a pretty great example of the ball getting dropped. Now, the writing was very complex there, so it was going to be hard to make everyone happy with the myriad different relationships – but by promising a happy ending with some characters’ romances, and showing the importance of teamwork and the hope of survival in previous games, the third game’s ending was in conflict with itself. Killing off Shepard might have been okay in a vacuum, but given the themes of previous games, a lot of people felt betrayed. People would even have been willing to sacrifice Shepard…if they felt more autonomy over the ending’s decisions. The backlash was so famous and so bad that the gaming company was bombarded with three-colour cupcake orders, among other forms of trolling, and eventually had to go back and remaster the ending.
Completely unrelated illustration, but it’s progress in my attempt at a year-long drawing-a-day effort.
What’s satisfying?
People tend to get hung up on specific details and what they think they’ve been promised, which is a huge issue – the amount of entitlement people have towards creative media is pretty frustrating, and that entitlement also transcends genre, unfortunately.
An emotional contract is formed in stages. You’ll all have to forgive me for referencing the Hero’s Journey structurally a bit – but I’m commenting primarily on what I’ve seen of stories that are either written or translated into English, and mostly, published within the cultural milieu of North America and Europe.
The first part is the setup, where the status quo is explained and demonstrated. Then we get a disruption, where the desire/goal is established. In, say, the game Mass Effect, which I’ve also spilled a lot of digital ink thinking about, the fundamental goal is “handle the Reaper threat”. In like 99% of romance novels, the fundamental goal is connection and union with one or more love interests. In a mystery novel, it might be the setup of the fundamental question – you know, “Who killed Roger Akroyd” or whatnot. Fantasy and science fiction can have a whole range of situations, including any of the previous questions, or others, but there’s still usually some sort of question being asked at the start of the book. (I mean, that’s why it’s called speculative fiction, really.) In a horror novel, the desire or goal is usually just survival, but horror has different expectations, and as long as the ending is satisfying, audiences are pretty tolerant of a range between happy, bittersweet, tragic, and deeply upsetting endings.
Through the plot arc or arcs, we see the establishment of stakes (i.e. the risk versus reward for a character pursuing their desire). We see hints of the consequences of not having the goal or desire fulfilled, as well as hints of what attainment will lead to. Different stories and formats have different stakes, structures, and interruptions; for instance, video games have a very different structure than a TV series, even though they’re usually both visually-focused mediums. Regardless of medium, the end of a story usually comes from either the attainment of the desire/goal, or the fallout and results of its attainment.
The problems come into play when either a) a series simply never finishes, leaving its question unanswered, or b) audiences are unhappy with the attainment.
The delicate dance of audience dissatisfaction
A lot of authors claim to be writing for themselves, but while this is fundamentally true to an extent, writing is also a form of communication. It is possible to write entirely for yourself – if you don’t publish or share your work with anyone, ever. Communicating with yourself is still a valuable and worthwhile pursuit, but writing always represents an act of communication.
Writing is also the absolute cheapest medium in terms of raw production, which is probably why it’s so popular; it also underpins many other art forms and narratives. No matter how a story is produced, whether that’s a video game or a podcast or a grand movie, it starts with being written down.
However, the more expensive the production, the greater the weight of the audience expectations. Authors can often afford to piss off their audiences a bit more – in theory – but the greater one’s prestige or recognition, the more audiences will develop expectations based on previous works. This is unavoidable, since humans are pattern-seeking creatures, just like many other animals. And that’s fine! The existence of patterns is morally neutral, but much less so once we get into the specifics of those patterns.
For instance, in true crime narratives, there’s a common emphasis on the heroism of law enforcement. Given that I’ve gone on the record many times as being against the concept of policing, especially as it currently exists, myself and other people find this quite objectionable. Still, even true crime and other non-fiction narratives follow narrative structures that parallel those in fiction. “Reality” TV still uses a degree of scripting, and often presents unpleasant characters who eventually suffer downfalls and other inconveniences, in the morality plays of our time.
In The Last of Us’s TV show adaptation, audiences have been incredibly pissed off about the death of Pedro Pascal’s character, Joel. While shifting the focus to Ellie’s character is fine, killing Joel off broke the emotional contract of a found family. It’s okay to kill some members of a found family in a situation with multiple characters – after all, look at D’Argo’s heroic sacrifice in the big finale of Farscape, which also has a pretty satisfying ending. But when there’s only two people in the found family, killing one off…destroys the found family. Emotional contract, broken. Result? Not just a few grumbles, but an internet full of fans lashing out.
Why is satisfaction important?
Life is unpredictable, chaotic, and unorganized. Humans impose structural narratives to keep ourselves from going fucking insane and to make sense of the world. Narratives also help us articulate our desires or goals, or relay values. Stories mean a lot, blah blah blah, power of story is significant. (I’ll be dissecting the whole “power of story” fetishization in a future article, by the way.)
Basically, we crave stories so we can get something that real life seldom offers. Abusers go unpunished, loved ones leave us and don’t forgive our trespasses, and sometimes love falls apart. On the other hand, sometimes we can only make sense of our triumphs and achievements with the benefit of hindsight. Not everything in our lives is a story of perpetual loss, attrition, and entropy. Or, you can look at it that way, but you might go insane, and even the nihilists and existentialists agree that in a world without divinely ordered meaning, we have to make and find our own.
Enter the narrative.
The practical upshot of all this is simple: life is fundamentally dissatisfying, and to avoid getting lost in it, we want our stories to make sense. Having a story take a sharp left turn – for example, a conventionally plotted romance novel having a shocking twist ending that leaves the main couple forever sundered – breaks the emotional contract. Like a hull breach in a space craft, it exposes us to the deeply dissatisfying chaos outside.
Now, don’t get it twisted – it’s okay to have unpredictable endings, as long as you set the audience up for an expectation of unpredictability. To put it mildly, storytelling and its conventions have changed a lot over the centuries, as values and audience desires have changed, too. In mythology, whether that’s the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or The Journey to the West, narratives served to organize and teach morality and apply structure from a divinely ordained perspective. Wealthy aristocrats and royalty ruled by divine right, but could be toppled if a particularly clever and righteous beggar or lower-class person proved to be their better. In this way, mythology tends to be fundamentally conservative. It’s okay for Zeus to assault beautiful women, because that’s how heroes are born, after all. (PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS REASONING; I’M JUST EXPLAINING MY BEST UNDERSTANDING OF ANCIENT LOGIC.)
The line between instructive and entertaining fiction and narratives gets more and more blurry the farther back you go. The modern era clearly distinguishes between these categories, but it wasn’t always so. Still, every story in every format sets up a promise, and has to deliver.
Promises, promises
Partly to organize the chaos of the world, both humans and social animals have come up with concepts of agreement and promises. A pack of wolves might not sit down and hash out a contract to share and divide up their kills evenly, but they have an implicit agreement to work together and share food. Domesticated dogs, cats, and other animals understand that doing a trick or obeying a command leads to some sort of reward.
A promise is inherently transactional; it means giving something to get something. The thing given in return might just be trust, but that emotional and social capital has a very real value. Audiences give us their attention and money; we give them entertainment, instruction, or a mixture of both. Again, I have to emphasize that even non-fiction follows this structure; you wouldn’t still be reading this essay, two thousand words deep, if not for the implicit promise that I’m going to explain something of interest or value.
So let’s circle back, at long last, to the beginning thesis: emotional contracts underpin all narratives, fiction or non-fiction, and creatives break those contracts at their own peril. An example of deeply satisfying emotional contract fulfillment would be, say, the ending of Return of the Jedi or Return of the King, just to choose the absolute simplest examples I can think of. In Jedi, Luke is at peace with his father’s legacy, the insurgent communal anarchist rebel Ewoks survive and escape, the Death Star is destroyed, and Han and Leia are together. It’s everything we’re told to hope for through the original trilogy. Return of the King foreshadows the bittersweet twist of Frodo’s parting throughout the narrative by showing how the Ring damages its keepers, even the most stalwart and resistant. But even so, we’re still promised that eventually, Sam and Frodo will be reunited some day in the West, aka Elf Heaven.
What do writers need to know?
Emotional contracts might be very specific (“This couple will get together”) or very broad (“This story will be completed”) but failing to fulfill them introduces discomfort and chaos. A little discomfort and chaos is absolutely a good thing, because a completely predictable narrative is boring. It doesn’t satisfy the fundamental need to create meaning and order out of our chaotic lives. Too much chaos, however, and too many arbitrary changes, result in something like season 8 of Game of Thrones, which was so widely reviled that it retroactively pretty much killed the fandom.
Metanarrative actions can also destroy an emotional contract. JK Rowling, for instance, made a big point in the Harry Potter books of standing up for marginalized and bullied people. (How well she succeeded at that is a matter of some debate, but the broad strokes were there in the original work). When she turned on trans people and revealed virulent hate in her heart, she broke the emotional contract implied by the values of her series.
I’m not saying writers have to be as heroic as their characters, but if your work conveys broad-strokes values, it’s probably a good idea to try and follow those values in your professional life. Everyone makes mistakes, and the internet can be unforgiving, but if you develop a fanbase, it’s also like, worth having a personal ethos and trying to be consistent with it.
The slippery bits and caveats
Obviously, there’s a giant “But…” in my conception of emotional contracts, and that is – some audience members are going to misinterpret the specifics for the broad strokes. That is, there are going to be people angry that their particular ship wasn’t rewarded. Now, again, this is slippery, because we’re touching on the concept of queerbaiting just by implicating ships. It’s not 2009 or 2011 anymore, and the representation of queer relationships has definitely increased in the last ten to fifteen years, but I would caution my fellow authors in particular about watching out for queerbaiting. In my experience, the people who see a few minutes of contact and get excited about a potential ship are pretty self-aware and reasonably self-deprecating. It’s mostly when a relationship spans the long term, has a lot of focus, and is heavily built up that authors get into trouble for not fulfilling reader expectations.
Now, you’re just not going to make everyone happy. That’s human nature. But it’s very important to go over a particular project and make sure that the biggest promises that were set up actually get fulfilled.
(And that, among other reasons, is why I wasn’t happy enough with my first draft of Monsters and Fools, the sequel to Underlighters, and why I’m rewriting the whole damn thing.)
If there’s a particular couple that you’ve spent a lot of ink and time on, get them together OR have a damned good reason for them to not end up together. If there’s an underlying philosophical point in your work, even if you’ve outgrown it, just fulfill it and write something more mature in the next book or series, instead of trying to retcon the story to fit your new ideals. (ASK ME HOW I KNOW.) Villains don’t always have to die, but the fundamental questions asked by a work do need to be answered.
So get out there, and answer some questions!
I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out.
Meanwhile, I’m going to make progress on wrapping up the enormous private online tabletop roleplay game I’ve been working on. After that, I feel mortally compelled to work on the gothic horror rewrite of my first novel ever, a standalone that’s going to feature themes of gender dysphoria, colonization, and a tech oligarch villain. I’ve been struggling with Synchronicity (different title coming; I’m thinking “The Violent Ones”) since a former friend figuratively ripped its original draft to shreds and convinced me it was unsalvageably bad, in need of wholesale rewrites.
I kind of wish I’d just published that messy baby as my first novel anyway, buuuuuuuut I also know that my ideas for this complete rewrite are going to be a banger, and I’m going to do my best to do justice to it, on behalf of my shy, petrified teenage self, who hoped so dearly to release her first novel ever to the wide world, and to be a child prodigy.
Anyway, happy writing to all of us!
If you liked this article, and boy I hope you did, please do give me a subscribe, or take a peek at my Patreon and Substack. I’m trying to keep my stuff accessible and not paywalled, and your support helps me with that goal.
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A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: Website Amazon Substack Patreon Ko-fi Instagram Bluesky Mastodon Tumblr Medium OG Blog Facebook
