When I was a kid, I loved Star Wars. I religiously watched and rewatched the original trilogy. I collected action figures and toy ships. I even played Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire for Nintendo 64, which is neither underrated nor overrated, but rated exactly right. But eventually, around the time the prequel trilogy began its wobbly run, I grew out of it. That’s natural. All things must end.
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This piece is a companion piece to Chris’ “Franchises Are Fine, Calm Down.”
Many share some variation of this story, both older than me and, in some cases, much younger. Some remain wedded to their nostalgia, as though they clutched a safety blanket so tightly that it fused with their skin. Others, like me, moved on. I bring up Star Wars in particular because it created the blueprint for modern franchises, revolutionizing movie merchandising back in the ‘70s and plotting a course toward all manner of spinoffs and stories. Then came the Disney era, in which Star Wars was milked for every conceivable penny to progressively diminishing returns. There have been bright spots, like Andor, but they’re surrounded on all sides by comparatively pointless prequels and other drek. Darth Vader got transformed into a FortniteAI chatbot. There is no greater insult.
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—except at light speed.
Execs across numerous industries have decreed that everything must have franchise potential or it’s 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’re 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 in the name of focusing on its “strongest franchises.” 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.
(Speaking of, the FalloutTV 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!)
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 or it drones on and on and on until it’s a Marvel-like red thread conspiracy board tangle of interlocking setups and letdowns.
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’re 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.
Good stories end—often quickly, and without explaining or resolving everything. That’s why they stick with us. That’s 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’ve experienced. That’s what originally drove people to write fan fiction and form communities—not an ever-expanding tapestry of glorified explanations for how a character ended up a certain way or a giant hand appearing in the sky.
Blanks aren’t meant to be filled in. The best notes aren’t 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’re equally aware that they just witnessed something special, something one of a kind. Endings are painful, but that’s why we remember them.
It’s Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
