This is my post for day 10 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

“The ending was terrible.” You’ve probably heard this opinion many times. People will often claim that the ending ruined something, like the Game of Thrones TV series or the Mass Effect video game.

Whether it’s a book, movie, or DnD campaign, story-telling is hard, and wrapping everything up nicely is one of the hardest parts.

Over the years I have struggled to enjoy many popular movies, especially big climatic action movies, which seem to be addicted to escalation and whose endings defy any sense whatsoever. The bad guys can’t aim, the hero gets physically stronger just by resolve, and the power of love always saves the day.

This happened to me over and over, and got to a point where I started feeling like maybe I should just stop consuming popular media. Eventually I realized that I didn’t have to take the story all-or-nothing. I could just… “pretend” it didn’t end that way.

I think I first had this thought when I saw a typical Hollywood movie about AGI, and it somehow managed to get most of the details right, according to me. The AGI lived in a data center and not in a robot. The AGI stayed low-profile while it developed the technologies to control infrastructure. It built solar farms and nanotech. Most of the humans were unaware of it for most of the time. But then at the end of the movie, something weird happened, and then love saved the day. It was like someone designed a movie optimized for breaking me on this particular point.

So then I thought, fine. If you’re going to ruin your movie, I’m just going to, I dunno, revoke your right to tell me how the story ends, or something. Instead of deciding whether “I like the movie” was true or false, I just decided to carry around the part that I liked and throw away the ending.

The reason this feels weird to me is because you’re not allowed to pretend that things aren’t true. You’re not allowed to decide “I love America” by deliberately ignoring the parts about slavery and indigenous mistreatment and the Vietnam war. You’re not allowed to ignore the icky parts of true things, because then you’ll make wrong predictions and take worse actions, and then you won’t achieve your values.

But a movie isn’t an event that literally happened. I’m not advocating that you go around claiming and believing that The Matrix literally had no sequels. You should still maintain your beliefs about actual facts, like what types of media humanity tends to produce, or whether your friends liked the ending.

But if you find a painting in a thrift store that you absolutely love, except for this one weird dog that creeps you out, you can just paint over it. It’s allowed. It’s not a lie to change the painting, because the existence of the painting is not a proposition about reality.

The purpose of a story isn’t to make an assertion about what happened. The purpose of a story is — well, there are a lot of purposes. It can encode societal wisdom in a memorable way, or serve as hopeful inspiration of what the world could be like, or be a cautionary tale, or help you understand the inner experience of other people, or just be a rollicking good time. But none of the purposes obligate you to swallow the story as a whole or spit it out. Some group of people made up the story. You’re allowed to re-make up the story.

Though I explicitly noticed this option for the AGI movie, I’d been doing this already without realizing it. I absolutely love the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey, despite the ending making the least sense ever. The opening shot is ecstatic. HAL 9000 was a unique and formative representation of AI. The special effects were stunning. Whenever I thought of the movie it was a fond thought.

And really, this goes for anything you don’t like about a piece of media. It doesn’t have to be the ending. You can love a setting and throw away the characters. You can decide that the villain should have won, because it makes for a more poignant story. You can decide that the villain is actually the hero, because the author is wrong about morality. A lot of people operate this way, c.f. the entire fanfiction community.

This is something I also did unconsciously with the Indiana Jones franchise. When I rewatch the movies, I notice that there is some concerning treatment of side characters, and reckless handling of priceless artifacts, and that somehow every supernatural entity is real. But when I reflect on the movies, I feel fondness about the idea that an intellectual can also be adventurous and brave, that humanity’s collective cultural heritage is held as sacred and to be protected, and that Harrison Ford is incredibly dashing in a fedora.

I’m not sure why I manage to do this sometimes but not other times. I care so strongly about my practice of understanding how to make sense of reality, that I think I can get out of practice of enjoying stories.

Stories are creations made from innumerable ingredients. Use the ingredients that you like and bake your own cake.