#I refuse to tag fandoms because I know I'll get arguing over the final pairings

[phoenixcatch7]

*Rants about those awful Ten Years Later epilogues with the protagonist getting the girl and having 2.5 kids and a picket fence*

It's just so frustrating to read or watch some amazing, lengthy coming of age style story, where there's superpowers and found family and oaths of friendship and people surviving and growing up and winning great battles and one last, great huzzah, and (most of) the loose ends are tied, and the exhausted but relieved hero returns home with a final message to the world, and then you turn the page and. 'oh it's been many years since the events of their youth, now they're adults who do their taxes and got married to that one pretty girl who had a crush on them when they were kids, and now they've got brats of their own! How fitting!'

Like? Hello? What kind of heteronormative bs? I don't want to see this bland, empty future! You promised high stakes mysteries and grand revelations and profound soliloquies, and you delivered, so what's this?! This one dimensional ideal? This flat, pointless vision dragging out the end of the story? Is this where you stuffed your own selfish whims?

You write for teenagers and kids, you wrote grand fantasy and dramatic escapism, and at the very end you suck all the emotion out and deliver some unimaginative adult cis het allo normative bs where they've all got the jobs they were expected to have and a big house and there's now OCs running around the place that we're suddenly supposed to coo over la dee da yada yada, aw isn't that nice. No! Why would the target audience care about taxes and who gets paired off and what shade of eyes the kids re running around with??

There's no plot, there's no stakes, there's nothing but suddenly a blank space stretching between the last scene and this distant, mindless future where the main cast get ground down back into the masses and joins in the adult lifestyle and start doing all the things the previous adults in the series did and the kids had to rail against to stay alive. This isn't closure.

Boring. Useless. Immensely confining. It just feels like author-service, like the author slips a glimpse of what they think should be happening, what they think of all the cast after all is said and done, and it's demeaning. Are our beloved cast allowed no more growth? No more standing out from the crowd? They've done their part, now get back in the box?

Is the audience not allowed to wonder? Are we not allowed this final moment to settle? Are we not allowed to imagine our protagonist returning home, adjusting to peace, learning how to love in the aftermath? No weird careers, no hopeful ships, no running off to champion new causes or continue to fight for what they believe in? No budding friendships with once enemies, no new techniques they developed? Nothing?!

There's no better way to make it feel like the series meant nothing. Like it doesn't matter. Like it had no effect on anyone, like it was a blip in the earth's rotation everyone should just forget.

It just. It makes it feel like the story was a puppet theatre, everyone on strings to dance for the audience, and now the shows over and the wooden joints are revealed, get back to the box you came from, fresh paint on what you chipped, there see good as new. Don't do that again.

It's such a narrow minded happy ending. It comes out of nowhere, it means nothing, no the protagonist can't be part of the 'troubled' lot, the lgbt lot, the neurodivergent lot.

Back in the box, the story is over.