1.A. On Closure in Stories

How we deal with the stream of life

Beginnings and Endings

Birth and death. Question and answer. Theory and hypothesis. Action and consequence. All of these things have one thing in common – something is articulated, and we formulate a response. Something begins, it is explored, and then, it ends. Books, issues, lives, questions, theories – all of these things are opened, and then closed. They exist, we come to grips with them, and then, we move on. Opening and closing.

This omnipresent structure is reflected in how we tell stories – both the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell each other. Stories rise to a conflict, and then end when the conflict is resolved, one for every scene and every chapter that ties together a cohesive whole. For the one most important and all-pervasive story that we have, however, this is not the case.

History does not end. History marches on, no matter what. Wars may stop, ages may disappear, but their consequences still echo to this day. The American Civil War is part of the reason the United States continued to be united states. Even as religiosity declines, churches still stand all around the world – a testament to what came before. My aunt still thinks leaving the lights on helps dry a wet bathroom, because light bulbs used to be incandescent and give off heat, but I have LED’s.

We come, therefore, to a fundamental contradiction. We see things in beginnings and endings, but the world we are in has no endings, the past naturally feeding into the present, and thereby, the future. The mere act of setting boundaries, declaring the beginnings and endings of things, or defining them at all, is a subjective and political act, where agreeing on the definitions of those things is a prerequisite for any form of meaningful dialogue.

This question is broad and vast, and could easily consume lifetimes of thought, so to keep things practicable, I will restrain my ideas to a particular field – storytelling. As luck would have it, I happened to watch/read two stories back to back that dealt with the issue in ways that were polar opposites, providing an illustrative contrast.

A Tight, Closed Script

In a very characteristic hint of laziness, I decided to binge an anime I’d only heard about, but never been able to watch – Great Pretender, which I only knew from the “Meanwhile in America…” meme and its use of Freddie Mercury’s “The Great Pretender” as an ending theme. On a whim, I decided to leech off the family Netflix account and give it a watch. The show follows Makoto Edamura, a young Japanese man who makes a living as a con artist, and, by attempting to scam the wrong person, becomes roped into conning a Hollywood producer-cum-drug-dealer and joining his erstwhile target’s ring of glamorous international conmen with a heart of gold and a vow to never kill. Their adventures were con job capers lasting three to four episodes each, setting up a villain with a clear evil goal, the villain’s sympathetic accomplice who serves to complicate the scam, the crew member with a personal stake in the heist, all of which are capped off with high-stakes confidence game set to rousing music and a colorful, stylized visual style that oozes verve. Each story beat, scene, and line of dialogue moves fast and never overstays its welcome, like a conman talking quickly before you can get your bearings. It’s a fun romp with great character writing, a show that’s easy to watch and doesn’t take itself too seriously – something that I can appreciate when a lot of other media is trying to get a message out.

The poster just oozes cool.

How good is it? I binged the whole thing in a day at 1.5x speed, skipping openings and endings just to take it all in faster. I’d say it was a good watch, leaving behind an eagerness to find out what other capers the gang would get up to next, despite the epilogue showing them having gone their separate ways – as they are implied to have done after every con before. If they’ve come back together before, they can do it again – inviting us to continue their story ourselves.

Great Pretender shows us its cast in their finest moments, and invites us to fill in the gaps. In the same way that the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, told through Watson’s records, do not cover the meals they eat at Baker Street, or how they split the rent at the end of the month, the Great Pretender only shows us the cast’s highs, short stories garnished with detail but keeping focus on the highlights of their life. Callbacks to previous cases and details that share significance across arcs are a staple of this genre and Great Pretender follows in this tradition to a degree that may surprise you.

Still, the show’s arcs appear as discrete chapters in our protagonist’s lives, each one oriented around a con job, with a clear beginning, middle, and end for each. This is a progression that resembles the theatre – characters enter the stage, act out their part, and leave, showing us the best of their lives and leaving the gaps for us to fill in. What we see is the characters in their distilled form – rises and falls that may realistically have taken much longer showed to us in mere minutes, jammed together over the course of a few episodes. Issues must be brought up, explored, and then resolved as soon as possible against the ticking clock of both the conjob and the episode runtime. The script, the plot, the action, the characters – all are tightly controlled and integrated to ensure that as many loose ends as desired are tied up at the end (some loose ends are left for a sequel). This is what I call a “tight” story.

Tight stories hew closely to classic narrative structures – in this case, the East Asian model of kishotenketsu, since Great Pretender is still a Japanese construction. Helpfully, I have already described the cons in that way – Makoto is roped into another con, the plan encounters a hitch thanks to the team member with an existing connection, the team pulls together, pushes through, and inevitably succeeds at scamming the mark. Rinse and repeat, keeping the camera, and the viewer’s perspective, on the action at all times, rather than the lives said characters may lead. This naturally produces intense, shorter stories with everything having to be tightly written to mesh together in a single, flowing narrative that delivers its theme with pinpoint accuracy – in the Great Pretender’s case, forgiveness, and trying to get a second chance. This approach, however, leaves little time for slower moments of wolrdbuilding, introspection, and leaving questions in the air about how characters will develop in crucial moments, as the fast-paced and tightly-woven story doesn’t allow it. The series itself falls victim to this, with the ending of the last case being panned by many of the series’ fans for how unrealistic it is, despite pretty much following in the footsteps of the first three when it comes to the final consequences of the whole con job.

Tight stories give us closure, when in real life, there is none. Our lives are not divided into verses and chapters, each introducing us as our own unique character that doesn’t develop. We do boring things like order at fast food joints or take long drives, choices that truly don’t matter in the long run but are still incredibly important. “Opening a new chapter in one’s life” marks something unusual – a clear discontinuity of your situation before and after the event, and a necessary exploration of the consequences of such an event.

As luck would have it, I recently got into another anime that shows precisely that – Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.

The Hero Comes Marching Home Again

Frieren begins, as the title says, after the end. In the very first chapter, the Demon King, terror of the whole world and bane of humanity, has been beaten, and the Hero’s Party, after a ten-year journey, is finally headed home. Composed of the human hero Himmel, his priest sidekick Heiter, the dwarven warrior Eisen, and the long-lived elf mage, Frieren, the party returns victorious after their ten year adventure, telling their stoic elf mage that she’s changed over their adventure. Frieren wonders how ten years is supposed to change she who has lived over a thousand years, which her party just chuckles knowingly at. They promise to meet back up at the capital in fifty years for the return of the meteor shower that happened to coincide with their return.

Behold, the Hero Party! Half of them are dead within the first few episodes/chapters.

In the very same chapter, Frieren returns fifty years later to find the humans as old men, the dwarf no longer able to fight, and Frieren herself looking the same as ever. They meet up to watch the meteor shower at a secret place, reminisce, and turn in for the night.

The next day, Himmel, the hero, is dead, and a funeral is held where the cold and stoic Frieren weeps openly. Wishing to relive her life-changing ten-year journey, she leaves after the funeral, which kicks off the rest of the story – Frieren’s journey around the world she helped save. Despite having defeated the Demon Lord, however, more mundane monsters, demons, and all the troubles you’d expect from a fantasy world still beset the people, reminding us that life, even after the story is over, simply goes on.

This presents a stark contrast to the world of the Great Pretender, where the protagonists just about stop existing between con jobs, which have very well-defined beginnings, middles, and ends. Frieren is a story set after the end of the story, a meandering wander where a millennium-year old elf wanders across the world, reliving the journey that changed her so. While the former waves away things like consequences in favor of a glorious heist, the latter is steeped in the consequences of the journey already taken. People still remember when the Hero Party rolled through town, did some errands, defeated a menacing monster, and left, asking only for a statue of them to be cast as payment. These statues are still there – some maintained, some dirty, but all still standing there almost like waypoints for Frieren to follow and reminisce at.

The slower-paced, looser story of a journey without a tight timer, allows Frieren to explore the consequences of the Hero Party’s actions, how people and things have changed since then. In stark contrast to the Great Pretender, Frieren has the space to ask questions and leave them open, letting our minds wonder what certain details might mean, answering only a few chapters later. Unlike an ephemeral con job, this time our focus is the thousand-year old mage Frieren, with all the differences that implies to our sense and value of time. Frieren, left unsupervised, sleeps in until noon, spends months in the same town and feel her time was too short, and takes frequent detours on her journey. The stories of our lives are like that – we focus on our great victories, the final, defining burst of effort that leads up to our successes, leaving out the many years we spend wandering, looking for our niche, perfecting our craft, and building up to that great victory, unsure if it will ever come.

In Temporary Closing

The fundamental difference between these two works is how they view closure. In Great Pretender, endings close a story – the consequences of past events do not greatly change the future. Frieren, meanwhile, explicitly embraces stories bleeding across the ending barrier, showing us those events as remembered from the future, and what aftermath they left behind – often closing more than one story at once, or opening one after closing another. Despite Great Pretender’s setting in a world much like ours, it feels like a story floating in the air, buoyed by its lack of attachment and the fantastical wealth and deeds on display, while Frieren, despite being in a fantasy setting, feels grounded in its own history, making it seem more relatable than a high-stakes con ring. The key ingredient is this -  Great Pretender is non path-dependent, while Frieren is very much path-dependent.

Path dependency is, simply put, an acknowledgement that history matters – that past decisions and events influence others going forward. Its relative strength or weakness helps set the tone of the story – one that is less path dependent has a more fantastic, heady feel, while one that is more will bring out a more grounded and complex flavor. History is the same way – the textbook version of history from grade school or high school is presented as episodes on a timeline, while the version you get from a history education leaves in all the warts and contradictory evidence, forcing you to form your own theories and ideas. This at minimum takes time, energy, and interest – all finite resources that one would likely rather spend on marketable skills than philosophical quandaries. This, I feel, is a key element in how the world has changed.

With more and more to know to greater and greater depth, the breadth and depth of what is considered “common knowledge” expands to the point that we become a diffuse cloud with little unifying culture – much like what happened when the Internet went mainstream. This incredibly complex environment scrambles the normal common sense of path dependency by turning everything into a path - it’s impossible to track a particular beast in the tracks of a whole herd. Humans being a social species, we then naturally flock to peers to attempt to validate our decisions on what and how much of anything to know, creating little echo chambers, safe spaces, and peer groups. What is sought now above all is escape – escape from complexity and having to think, and think about why you think, and think about why that is so, hence the increasing dogmatism in public speech. This forms a comforting blanket of certainty against the cold complexity of the real world, the history, the facts, shorn of context and delivered raw, to our detriment.

Faced with a world even more complicated than Frieren, we are forced to chop our lives into clearly-delineated con jobs where we know we’ll pull it off before it even begins. That is my (very temporary) conclusion.

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I’m cross-posting this my Substack, The Professional Amateur. The goal of The Professional Amateur is as my soapbox on things I think are important enough that they cannot be left to professionals – an introduction to the stack is here. Have a look and see if it interests you.