Tartilus wrote...
It's a common theme I've been seeing lately, sort of a... I'm actually not familiar with the proper terminology. It's a position adopted by individuals after thinking over a matter (in this instance, the nature of art) but which nevertheless is actually less congruous with the reality of the situation than the unthinking interpretation.
As I posted elsewhere, and as a writer myself, the immutability of stories and their 'sacredness' as works of art is nonsense, and I'm unfamiliar with any writer who feels otherwise. It's an artifact of a lack of understanding regarding how art is made - an expectation that rather than being the product of hard work and endless reiteration (which it is), it's some mystical Other, drawn from the aether and immune to any sort of objective reasoning. It's almost pseudo-religious, and it's nonsense. Art in a vacuum is indeed subjective, but novels are almost never art in a vacuum, and trilogies most assuredly are not. While I agree with individuals stating that we cannot demand alterations, the position that there is something philosophically wrong with an author altering a story after its initial release is metaphysical, not rational, and certainly should not be proffered as fact. Unless it was the author's intention to fail to bring closure to a significant number of people, their work is just as open to criticism and revision as any other non-art product. The fact that such alterations are uncommon in novels (they do happen, more often than you might think, though on smaller scales,) is more a matter of logistics than principle.
Videogames are the first truly fluid medium - indeed, it's a given that additional story will be released, and ostensibly it will (if only in incidental fashions) have the effect of altering the original story. The suggestion that we should not be able to voice our opinions as to how those resources should be directed is nothing short of bizarre, and stems from this pseudo-idealization of art. Writers (and painters, sculpters, etc.) are not savants, gifted with some amazing gift; we're mostly regular people doing a job that takes hard work, practice, and time. Accordingly, our products are as fallible as we are, and when they fail to elicit the desired reaction, they can be fixed. They don't have to be fixed, which is a point I'm finding it more and more important to stress, but they can be.
Inspirational. I wish we could all articulate our thoughts to words as this gentleman does.
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