What's with Phil's insistence that every story should have a definitive ending? He's, again, talking about the Sopranos ending, and how it's just poor writing, if the writers were competent they would've shown you Tony being killed. Almost everyone seems to think Tony dies at the end. Except him, since it doesn't show Tony being killed. He's such a child when it comes to anything regarding writing, but I can't expect anything more from someone whose favorite game is Bugsnax.
DSP needs to be spoon-fed everything and doesn't like it when the plot actually makes him think on his own. Probably also why he likes wrestling so much.
I'll be somewhat fair to Phil here: a lot of people can't understand implication or subtext to the point that if a character doesn't die on screen, they didn't actually die. I.E Juno in The Descent Part 2.
But you fuckers just uncorked my writing spergery so buckle the fuck up.
Phil doesn't engage with any media that is particularly challenging, and becomes openly hostile to any media that might challenge him. I'm not going to bullshit about how I think TLoU2 was great, or awful because I never played it, and never finished the first one. One of his sticking points about that game, that he would bring up as a negative was the game making you play as the "villains" and trying to make you empathize with them. I never heard him say it was handled poorly, or that it didn't make sense, just that he didn't like that they did it at all. When it comes to his fiction, if it isn't as basic and as simple as "These are good guys, these are bad" he doesn't want any part of it. If you think for a second that he'd ever give even a second thought to any ending that has any sort of subtly or doesn't feel the need to shove in your face: HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED, EVERYTHING IS NOW FINE, you're out of your goddamn mind.
Leaving endings before showing the ultimate fate of a character is a tactic going back since the dawn of story telling. Sometimes it's done because there's nothing else that really matters to the story, though it's usually done to allow for the writers to wrap up the themes and motifs, even if the ultimate fate of the character is clear and the story carries some finality to it.
The unfortunate part is you get people like Phil who either don't understand anything more subtle than a brick to the head, and need everything....I was going to say spoonfed but that creates the potential of chewing and swallowing it themselves. You get people like Phil where it's not enough to give them the meal, they need it chewed for them, and their throat massaged so they can swallow it. And it had fucking better come with dessert.
