The first (rather snarky) response to such a statement is that while many people might enjoy hearing a child tell a story, they wouldn't want to invest over 100 hours listening to one, nor turn it into a global franchise (...unless it's the
Twilight series. Bam! Take
that, author-I've-never-met-and-whose-success-I-shamelessly-envy). A child's story can be filled with colour and adventure, can go in all manner of directions, but it lacks the coherent order necessary for a resolved, satisfactory fiction. Form and theme are fundamental for a story to endure; the beginning, middle and end of a tale
must have some kind of structural integrity; and it is arguably the conclusion that is most crucial for providing this unity. The second (more helpful) response is to explore exactly what kind of narrative we are dealing with, and to examine why leaving the ending vague, contradictory, or dependent upon an unwarranted twist, undermines the whole negotiation of journey and destination at the core of the text, resulting in the audience feeling misled and the expedition meaningless. A lot of people have put
Mass Effect's central protagonist, Shepard, into the category of a 'tragic' hero perhaps tempted to approach this series as a tragic arc because it exudes such an ominous tone. Again, I'm offering nothing new to this discussion, I'm sure, but it should be acknowledged that Shepard is not in fact a character who
by thematicnecessity has to die. In my own play-through, I (like many others, I'm sure), was more than prepared for him/her to die, but that does not mean that this death was predestined; indeed, despite what people might suppose, classic literary tropes of death for the focal character are relatively rare. We see them frequently in Shakespearean tragedy, or Greek theatre but Shepard is not a tragic hero. He/she has no fundamental fatal flaw like hubris, or jealousy, or rage that condemns him/her to the inexorable inevitability of thematic consequence. Even the most Paragon-y Shepard is not allowed the luxury of being a
Hamlet-style procrastinator; and the most Renegade-y Shepard struggles to be fuelled by personal ambition like
Macbeth, or jealousy like
Othello. He/she is a cipher onto which we project our own interpretations in a feedback loop of player and text. And so we get Renegade Shepards (who will steal your lunch money and sleep with your mum), or my Paragonish Tess Shepard (who rescues pets from animal shelters and is polite to telemarketers ...And yes, I admit it, is named after
Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Shut up.) But in all of these cases Shepard is driven to fulfil a larger goal, not by a personal failing that will be his/her Achilles heel. Shepard is instead more of an epic figure a reading that Bioware itself wants to endorse with the obnoxious Stargazer ('Can-I-haz-another-story?') scene that concludes the game, placing the character and his/her universal struggle into the confines of mythology and folklore. And mythology has no such requirement of death. When Perseus returns home to get married after defeating the wicked Gorgon, he doesn't also have to then set himself on fire and fling himself into a ditch, just for the hell of it. Or to use the example of Homer's
Odyssey (the foundational text that has, in one permeation or another, inspired every quest narrative in the history of Western Literature), not only does Odysseus
not die in the end, but his return home to reclaim what is his is by necessity profoundly centred on reiterating everything that he has learned on his journey. On his quest Odysseus has developed patience and ingenuity in dealing with the Cyclops; outwitting Circe he has gained poise and cunning; with Nausicaa he has discovered humility, charm, and how to look all sexy while emerging from the surf, James-Bond-style; in the underworld he has found
fortitude,
hope, and just how self-involved dead people can be (sure, let's talk some more about
you then...) The conclusion of the
Odyssey is thus the culmination of everything that he has learned or experienced in his preceding adventures: he carries with him new truths on how to be a better hero, King, father and husband, but it is only by
proving the growth that he has attained on his journey
at home that his worth is measured and his quest, finally, fulfilled. His journey was great (actually it was horrible for him; great for us), but it is
only the destination that validates the ride. And the analogies that can therefore be drawn to
Mass Effect are already pretty obvious... Click "next" below to read part 3..