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OPENENDED

                                             January   19, 2013
                                             September 29, 2013

The Open-Ended Manifesto:
                                                THE_ENDING_MANIFESTO
The inherent up-in-the-air, shoe-never-drops
nature of series fiction that never reaches
some trite "conclusion" has a clear virtue:

It provokes the fan into a use of imagination,
it prompts the "doujin" reponse to craft your        Is there a fan of
own conclusion when you're impatient with the        "Skip Beat" who has
official creators.                                   not already envisioned
                                                     an ending for it?

    There's an odd pattern in many                       IMAGINARY_FINISH
    of these stories where everything
    rests on a particular mystery that
    is never actually explained.

    In "Mysterious Girlfriend X", based
    on the evidence (and a knowledge of
    manga/anime tropes), we expect that       Presumably: her saliva
    the female lead is actually an            is infested with
    alien, or an android, or something        nano-machines, hence
    like that...                              it's odd contagious
                                              quality.

    In "The Melancoly of Haruhi               A detail reminiscent
    Suzimiya", we're told something           of a Cory Doctorow
    about what's going on...                  story: Japanese
                                              manga/anime folks
       MELANCOLY                              often seem far better
                                              read in American SF
    But it's pretty clear that there's        than their
    another layer to it that's not            counterparts in the
    fully explicated:                         States would be.

       KYONISM

       They're not in any hurry to
       actually tell us what's going
       on (because we're not really
       in any hurry for them to tell us):

           They leave the mystery in
           place, and just hint at it's
           outlines: this can make it
           feel like a deeper story,                      MEDIAVORES
           they presume that you can
           deal with some uncertainty,
           that you might prefer to use     We're assumed to be sophisticated
           your own imagination to fill     consumers-- they know it's not
           in the gaps that they're         difficult for us to make up our
           leaving.                         own explanations.  Possibly they've
                                            got one eye on the internet: they
                                            want us to join in on discussions
                                            of where the story is going, and
                                            hence help amplify the buzz.








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