Now Star Wars is a worn-out husk, a shell of itself, hobbling along and praying for a merciful end accompanied by a Wilhelm scream. Unless you are one of the people who made millions off the Star Wars franchise, this is a tragic trajectory. It is also the one countless games, movies, and shows are on these days\u2014except at light speed.<\/p>\n
Execs across numerous industries have decreed that everything must have franchise potential or it\u2019s not even getting across the starting line. Did your first season fail to find a mass audience or even fall out of the top ten too soon? You\u2019re done. Did your game win awards but not hit the magical dollar amount that spawns a sequel, spinoff, or both? Good luck testing the waters of independence, not that you have a choice. Microsoft, as alluded to in the previous sentence, is an easy and obvious target here, given that it just cut thousands of employees and multiple studios<\/a> in the name of focusing on its \u201cstrongest franchises<\/a>.\u201d Even those that had carved out inventive, prolific, and critically acclaimed niches doing their own thing, like Obsidian, are now back in the franchise mines<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n (Speaking of, the Fallout TV show spends way too much time revealing everything about how the series’ apocalyptic wasteland came to be. I didn’t need to know all of that! It detracts from the intrigue of the setting!)<\/p>\n The desire for everything to be a franchise, structurally, leads to one of two dead ends: Either a series or setting gets cut down before even reaching its prime<\/a> or it drones on and on and on until it\u2019s a Marvel-like<\/a> red thread conspiracy board tangle of interlocking setups and letdowns.<\/p>\n Moreover, franchises bring out the worst tendencies of fans: tribalism, obsession, fixation on fan service and stories being made to satisfy them (rather than to explore themes or allow an artist to connect with the world), rampant theorizing over the scantest of breadcrumb trails in trailers, and a general lack of perspective beyond their chosen franchises, because franchises are intentionally all-consuming. They\u2019re built to hook you and continually reel you in, little by little, until you forget what it was like to ever not have a giant hook in your mouth.<\/p>\n Good stories end\u2014often quickly, and without explaining or resolving everything. That\u2019s why they stick with us. That\u2019s why they burble up in our brains months or years later, and the absence of more, more, more gives us time to really consider what we\u2019ve experienced. That\u2019s what originally drove people to write fan fiction and form communities\u2014not an ever-expanding tapestry of glorified explanations for how a character ended up a certain way or a giant hand appearing in the sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n Blanks aren\u2019t meant to be filled in. The best notes aren\u2019t the ones you can barely discern competing in a cacophony; they ring out in empty air before going permanently silent. Then the show ends, and the audience realizes with mounting disappointment that they have to re-enter the real world. But they walk out of the venue nonetheless elated because they\u2019re equally aware that they just witnessed something special, something one of a kind. Endings are painful, but that\u2019s why we remember them.<\/p>\n
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