What would you change? The worst ending thread.

[H4run]

It means it is fiction based IN history.

People who claim "Anjin San or Blackthorne is William Adam while Mariko is the famous Christian daughter of Akechi Mitsuhide" are ignoring that fiction is made up.

I just realize the discussion were somewhat evolving and Valka was involved.
I don't know what we are trying to argue here lol, it's quite established that Shogun's key characters were all historical figure that got renamed by James Clavell, the plot also pretty much taking from the reference from real event during that time, hence by definition it's historical novel.

To say that "Blackthrone is not Anjin San" is also pretty much incorrect, it is well established fact that he is suppose to represent him, the altered name doesn't changed that, there are numerous account this novel has been review by comparing it to its historical reference, the author doesn't say any rejection about it. He is not simply borrowed the idea of William Adams to create a totally new character, he is pretty much historical to the surrounding characters and event during that time. Hence it is clear once again it is a historical novel.

However my previous argument is that if it's a fiction novel, I don't satisfy with the ending, but if lets say the author decide to remain loyal to the historical narration it will be much better and satisfying in my opinion as a appreciator of his works. So either or pretty much the same, it is what it is.

 

[Zkribbler]

Valka, why are we arguing? We're saying the same thing.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

There's a book called The Last Gasp. It probably qualifies as obscure. Way back in the eighties it was a novel about apocalyptic environmental collapse, way ahead of its time.

It had a rare style, in that there was no consistent protagonist; the guy who "saw it coming" and set out to raise the alarm was obviously the hero for the first eighty pages or so. He fought through vast indifference, government agencies trying to shut him up, including the kind of agencies that shut people up by just disappearing them, and persevered through it all as the climate started shifting and proved him right. It appeared that he had saved the day, then there was a blank page and part two picked up ten years later or so, where a new protagonist is trying to deal with the fallout from the fact that the actions of our first hero had unexpected consequences and the situation was actually made substantially worse.

Following through four parts with time gaps in between we see increasingly desperate protagonists trying progressively more extreme measures to save the planet overcoming obstacles of indifference and/or outright evil, only to ride the uncontrollable dragon into the void...until all of a sudden in the last thirty pages everyone blasts off into orbiting habitats and lives happily ever after. The book passed around my crewmates on the boat, and every one of us thought it was incredibly powerful, until in an obvious sop to the publisher a bizarre 'happy ending' got stitched onto it.

 

[Zkribbler]

I don't satisfy with the ending, but if lets say the author decide to remain loyal to the historical narration it will be much better ...

Spoiler Spoiler :

This is what I don't understand. How?

IMHO, the raison d'etre of the novel is the ending: Japan's most powerful person places his best and only friend in a sisyphusian trap, whereby Blackthorne shall forever fail in his attempts to leave Japan because of the Shogun's desperate and selfish need of a friend.

How is Adams' life better than this fictional ending? Indeed, without Toranaga's Machiavellian manipulation, could the novel even have an ending?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Valka, why are we arguing? We're saying the same thing.

You're the one who started arguing with me, by giving the impression that Shogun was not based on historical events because Clavell didn't use the same names as the historical people and altered some other aspects. You also seemed to say that I was saying that historical novels can't contain fictional elements.

Of course it's historical fiction. After all, Shogun is a novel, not a biography, and it's certainly not a textbook or reference book. And I do know that fiction is a part of historical novels - after all, they are classed as historical fiction.

So it's an argument based on a minor point of semantics. As long as we both agree that historical fiction contains elements of fiction, that Shogun was based on historical events, and that even though characters' names were changed, the characters used were based on the real historical people involved in these events, I think we can call a truce and share a (including @haroon, for being the peacemaker here ).

an obvious sop to the publisher a bizarre 'happy ending' got stitched onto it.

This is what annoyed me about the 1990 movie version of The Handmaid's Tale (starred Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, and Robert Duvall). The novel has an ambiguous ending. We don't know if Offred is being taken away to prison and execution, or if she's being taken to safety by the MayDay organization. It's left to the readers' imagination.

But the movie ruined what could have been a powerful ending, with the audience not knowing if Offred has been betrayed and the state vowing to track down the MayDay rebels and execute them... and instead tacks on a happy ending where Offred is free (although not reunited with her kidnapped daughter). Seems that Canadian audiences were okay with the ambiguous ending of the novel, but American movie audiences couldn't handle that and needed a "happy ending". It wouldn't surprise me if some of these same people are those who keep wailing and whining about the Season 2 ending of the TV series where Offred's baby is sent to Canada with an escaping Handmaid ("what's the baby going to eat? She'll DIE!!!!! ). (seriously, people, they have baby formula in Canada )

Honestly, there are times when a happy ending is not the right choice.

 

[AmazonQueen]

When The Ragged-trousered Philanthrophists was first published the author's ending was cut and the novel ended with the hero having committed suicide. Happily the original ending was restored in later copies where another character takes up the hero's work after his death.

 

[H4run]

Spoiler Spoiler :

This is what I don't understand. How?

IMHO, the raison d'etre of the novel is the ending: Japan's most powerful person places his best and only friend in a sisyphusian trap, whereby Blackthorne shall forever fail in his attempts to leave Japan because of the Shogun's desperate and selfish need of a friend.

How is Adams' life better than this fictional ending? Indeed, without Toranaga's Machiavellian manipulation, could the novel even have an ending?

IMHO Williams Adam real life ending were more novel and interesting, Ieyashu gave him the permission to go back to his family in England but Adam chose to remain in Japan.

And he married overthere and had a son who not only inherited his authority but also his name Miura Anjin (san)

 

[Zkribbler]

...we can call a truce and share a (including @haroon, for being the peacemaker here ).

 

[Zkribbler]

If you could change an ending to a movie, tv series or even a book, which would it be? Let's not get too obscure please.

Stripes, Home Office, and Wedding Crashers all started out as great movies, but halfway through, the writers decided to throw in a plot and ruined everything.

How to fix them? I don't know.

 

[lymond]

The Borgias. .

Ah..such a great show while it lasted. Tried watching a bit of the other one but the Murican actors kinda ruined that one for me. The French King Charles VIII was fantastic in The Borgias..loved every second he was on the screen. Neil Jordan needs to do more stuff for TV...I always loved his movies. I hope he get a real juicy bit of source material to adapt in the future.

Dexter...loved that show but the last season was rubbish...well, pretty much at the point his adopted Sister was encouraged to express her love for him it just went down down down. No reason to do that and still have her be loyal to him.

Battlestar Galactica ended fine. Really an almost perfect series from start to end. I sometimes rue that I cannot just watch that series completely fresh from the start with no clue of what's going on. Definitely a masterpiece of television.

Ha..on a bit of a cheese note...the Merlin ending was a total junkfest. (yeah..I watched it! Sue me!)

I think the could easily do a new Rome now..there is a lot to work with.

Wow..ha..never thought I'd see a discussion of Shogun here. That is old as sin..

 

[Kyriakos]

Game of Thrones ending was garbage.

 

[Zkribbler]

H.G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes.

At the height of the climatic aero-battle, the main character makes a piloting error and crashes into the ground. Wha...?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Ah..such a great show while it lasted. Tried watching a bit of the other one but the Murican actors kinda ruined that one for me. The French King Charles VIII was fantastic in The Borgias..loved every second he was on the screen. Neil Jordan needs to do more stuff for TV...I always loved his movies. I hope he get a real juicy bit of source material to adapt in the future.

There's some really good Borgias fanfic, on fanfiction.net and Archive Of Our Own. It ranges from setting the show in the 20th/21st century (after all, they're often referred to as the "original crime family"), various crossovers (can't vouch for any with Assassin's Creed since I never played that), outright comedy (Pope Alexander is on a literal witch hunt and when a sorceror tries to turn Cesare into a dragon - a foul creature that Alexander will have to destroy - he misses and accidentally turns Micheletto into a dragon instead. But fortunately Micheletto retains enough self-identity to convince the Pope that he's every bit as useful and loyal as a dragon as he is as a human assassin, and so the story goes for three chapters (unfortunately the author stopped writing it so we don't get to see if Micheletto ever gets turned back into a human again), to various serious endings to the series. A couple of those always have me reaching for the Kleenex; there are some excellent fanfic writers who are good at writing Cesare's death and Lucrezia's reaction to it (by that time she's married into the d'Este family and has several children).

Fandom is divided over the incest angle. Some are angry that Jordan "went there" and others say that while brother-sister incest bothers them, the actors have such amazing chemistry and are so good at portraying the different layers of emotion Cesare and Lucrezia feel for each other, that they don't care - it's just so amazing how good those two are. The 2-hour wrapup script does a complete 180 turnaround on that, btw, and it's obvious in this script that both of them regret what happened at the end of the third season.

I think the could easily do a new Rome now..there is a lot to work with.

As long as they don't muck up the Julio-Claudian lineage as they did in Rome... most viewers wouldn't know the difference, but I've been studying this stuff since I first saw I, Claudius in the '70s, and have a better than average grasp of how the various branches of that family were intermarried and interrelated, and how to completely wreck history by eliminating one particular person.

Wow..ha..never thought I'd see a discussion of Shogun here. That is old as sin..

This is a forum of Civ players. Where else would you see a discussion of Shogun?

 

[old_andy]

Game of Thrones ending was garbage.

So, you liked my ending better then?

also, just because I can't resist...


Return of the Jedi:
Everyone dies at the end, closing shot of all the stupid fireworks going off because why the hell not, as well as a nice lovey-dovey ghost shot behind Darth Vaders funeral pyre with Yoda, Obi Wan, Anakin, Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie all standing around looking semi-transparent and relieved that they can now happily live off of their residuals, resulting in the next trilogy being something completely different and hopefully not sucking so bad. With R2D2 and C3PO as the main leads.

 

[rah]

Sienfeld.

 

[old_andy]

The best ending for Supernatural would be if it ended 6 seasons ago.

Still love the car though..

 

[civvver]

Sons of Anarchy. The ending left a lot of questions unanswered. Like when Gemma burns all those letters at Wayne's trailer. Just a lot of storylines they completely forgot about.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Sons of Anarchy. The ending left a lot of questions unanswered. Like when Gemma burns all those letters at Wayne's trailer. Just a lot of storylines they completely forgot about.

Gee, I thought it made perfect sense. There were a couple of things that were dropped from the story line, but they weren't integral to the ending. I thought the ending was a bit of a masterpiece of story telling to be honest, especially when you consider that the whole series is simply a retelling of Hamlet (which is nothing but a tired trope to begin with).

 

[civvver]

The ending made sense and was well done, there were just loose ends in my opinion. They made a huge deal out of John Teller's manifesto and stuff back in the early seasons, and we never really found out what happened to him. It was all kind of dropped. The end was still much better than most I suppose.

Oh I forgot, The Americans. Very anti climatic ending which is genius in a way since that's kind of how the cold war fizzled out. But I was very much hoping one of them would die or get caught or something.

 

[Leifmk]

Dexter...loved that show but the last season was rubbish...well, pretty much at the point his adopted Sister was encouraged to express her love for him it just went down down down. No reason to do that and still have her be loyal to him.

Basically they should have just ended that show after season 4 (the one with John Lithgow) because the season finale of that would have been a wonderful (and thematically appropriately dark/messed up) end to the show as a whole. Instead we got four more seasons of asymptotically increasing stupidity until it all disappeared over the event horizon of stupid.