Something Ends, Something Begins
Two of my favorite likes have ended in the past few days. Except that they didn't end, really. But they did. Am I making sense? Probably not.
Let me start over.
Adventure Time, for those not aware, is an animated show for kids and not-kids. It's about a human kid named Finn who loves adventure living in a treehouse-home with his brother, a shapeshifting talking dog named Jake, a magical world with princesses and wizards. On a different level, it's a show created by a guy who was trying to turn his love of storytelling through RPGs - especially Dungeons & Dragons - into a fun cartoon. And on another level than that, it's a world that grew with some of the sharpest character and world development I've seen. A buffoonish villain, the Ice King, is revealed to be a tragic victim of curse and is incapable of remembering his prior existence. Finn is the only human in a world of magical creatures, and eventually he goes to find out what happened to his parents. The world he lives in turns out to be our world, a thousand years after a terrible nuclear war that some of the characters actually lived through. It's the sort of show I wish had been on when I was young; the idea that maybe life could've gone on would've been comforting in some way to a kid who was constantly terrified that the world was going to end in a nuclear war.
After 10 seasons, it finally wrapped up. Without spoiling too much (I recommend the show whole-heartedly), the show doesn't truly 'end'; while stories are wrapped up, and some characters pass on or are otherwise lost, for the most part the heroes go on with their lives. The framing is 1000 years beyond the normal setting of the show, which has been seen a couple times before, and we see another couple of adventurers, similar to but not really Finn and Jake. The stories continue, even if this one in particular came to an end.
And this brings me to the other ending. The Fall of Gondolin by JRR Tolkien was published a few days ago. The Hobbit was the first true work of fiction that I read as a kid, and I grew to love all his Middle Earth books, devouring them again and again, pouring over maps and genealogies and timelines for over 40 years of my life. Tolkien himself died shortly after I was born (otherwise I probably would have deluged him with letters asking questions about his novels, as other people actually did), but his son Christopher's work to bring the stories that he had always wanted to publish to life, followed by a examination of how he constructed his stories, constantly brought forth new material to go over. Christopher is 94 now, and The Fall of Gondolin is the last book that he put together about his father's materials; it's fitting because the very first Middle Earth story his father wrote was this very one, written in notebooks while fighting in World War I. It's where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings began; indeed, when Tolkien was writing his sweet nothing of a children's tale for his kids, he threw in references to "Gondolin" and the battles there to give some depth to the world, because it was always on his mind. So, it's fitting that the story, as it were, ends where it begins.
"'In the end'? Nothing ends... nothing ever ends." wrote Alan Moore in Watchmen; a fitting statement from someone in the middle of his own finale, the aptly named The Tempest deliberately evoking thoughts of Shakespeare's final work and the final story of Neil Gaiman's legendary Sandman series. The Tempest plans to not only wrap up his extended series of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but mark his exit from comics altogether. Yet his entire story universe consists of other story universes, where are the fantastic fiction set on Earth meets; Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, all present (in one form or another). Stories draw on older stories, merge, mix, separate, and inspire new creations.
And that cycles back to myself, I suppose. In the general sense, my recent writings (the short story I'm working on, which at this point is mostly written and just needs to be converted from scribblings to electronic form) are more about exploring what has shaped me; my forever-under-construction interactive fiction game has more direct references (the four elements from Adventure Time - fire, ice, slime and candy - replacing the classical elements, for instance). Hopefully, what I will take away from this post is the concept of eventually bringing something to an end, a finished work that can lead to again starting something new.
Let me start over.
Adventure Time, for those not aware, is an animated show for kids and not-kids. It's about a human kid named Finn who loves adventure living in a treehouse-home with his brother, a shapeshifting talking dog named Jake, a magical world with princesses and wizards. On a different level, it's a show created by a guy who was trying to turn his love of storytelling through RPGs - especially Dungeons & Dragons - into a fun cartoon. And on another level than that, it's a world that grew with some of the sharpest character and world development I've seen. A buffoonish villain, the Ice King, is revealed to be a tragic victim of curse and is incapable of remembering his prior existence. Finn is the only human in a world of magical creatures, and eventually he goes to find out what happened to his parents. The world he lives in turns out to be our world, a thousand years after a terrible nuclear war that some of the characters actually lived through. It's the sort of show I wish had been on when I was young; the idea that maybe life could've gone on would've been comforting in some way to a kid who was constantly terrified that the world was going to end in a nuclear war.
After 10 seasons, it finally wrapped up. Without spoiling too much (I recommend the show whole-heartedly), the show doesn't truly 'end'; while stories are wrapped up, and some characters pass on or are otherwise lost, for the most part the heroes go on with their lives. The framing is 1000 years beyond the normal setting of the show, which has been seen a couple times before, and we see another couple of adventurers, similar to but not really Finn and Jake. The stories continue, even if this one in particular came to an end.
And this brings me to the other ending. The Fall of Gondolin by JRR Tolkien was published a few days ago. The Hobbit was the first true work of fiction that I read as a kid, and I grew to love all his Middle Earth books, devouring them again and again, pouring over maps and genealogies and timelines for over 40 years of my life. Tolkien himself died shortly after I was born (otherwise I probably would have deluged him with letters asking questions about his novels, as other people actually did), but his son Christopher's work to bring the stories that he had always wanted to publish to life, followed by a examination of how he constructed his stories, constantly brought forth new material to go over. Christopher is 94 now, and The Fall of Gondolin is the last book that he put together about his father's materials; it's fitting because the very first Middle Earth story his father wrote was this very one, written in notebooks while fighting in World War I. It's where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings began; indeed, when Tolkien was writing his sweet nothing of a children's tale for his kids, he threw in references to "Gondolin" and the battles there to give some depth to the world, because it was always on his mind. So, it's fitting that the story, as it were, ends where it begins.
"'In the end'? Nothing ends... nothing ever ends." wrote Alan Moore in Watchmen; a fitting statement from someone in the middle of his own finale, the aptly named The Tempest deliberately evoking thoughts of Shakespeare's final work and the final story of Neil Gaiman's legendary Sandman series. The Tempest plans to not only wrap up his extended series of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but mark his exit from comics altogether. Yet his entire story universe consists of other story universes, where are the fantastic fiction set on Earth meets; Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, all present (in one form or another). Stories draw on older stories, merge, mix, separate, and inspire new creations.
And that cycles back to myself, I suppose. In the general sense, my recent writings (the short story I'm working on, which at this point is mostly written and just needs to be converted from scribblings to electronic form) are more about exploring what has shaped me; my forever-under-construction interactive fiction game has more direct references (the four elements from Adventure Time - fire, ice, slime and candy - replacing the classical elements, for instance). Hopefully, what I will take away from this post is the concept of eventually bringing something to an end, a finished work that can lead to again starting something new.
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