Tony Un: "Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: On ending with the ending"

Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: On ending with the ending

By Tony Un

                The sinkhole that consumed my life for the better part of middle school arrived on my doorstep in the form of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The included maps in the package adorned the walls of the basement in my house, where my brother and I spent hours and hours exploring each cave in an attempt to find every nook and cranny of the world. Despite our best efforts, we didn’t make it very far in that endeavor; the sheer number of places to visit and the vast open stretches to explore seemed to persist against our onslaught of location discoveries. 

                The closest thing to a conclusion the two of us would discover during our adventures was the slaying of the main antagonist, Alduin, after chasing him to the ends of the Earth and discovering new tools to corner the beast and take him down. Alduin doesn’t put up much of a fight, in comparison to the rest of the trials we had faced to get this far, and to our surprise, and the anger of many on the internet, the final boss fight didn’t seem very final. Once Alduin is killed, the hero(ine) returns to Skyrim and continues questing, and not much has changed besides the occasional remark from a passerby. While outrage was the common emotion amongst my fellow explorers, the ending seemed natural to me, and the events following seemed logical. Something went terribly wrong and was righted by the actions of the hero(ine). But who’s to say that life has improved because of it? Skyrim was no paradise before the arrival of Alduin. The world is rife with racism, sexism, and banditry: the game is set, after all, set in the middle ages. In order to make the world a better place, the adventure must not stop after the ending. Going from town to town and working to improve the life of small groups of people was much more fulfilling than tackling Alduin and returning to glory and a game over screen. The final fight and its immediate aftermath epitomize what endings should be, and I enjoyed it for two main reasons: The reality of the situation, and its adherence to the world it was based around.

                If the goal of fiction is in ability to return to the present with a better understanding of how to tackle the issues at hand, why pretend that killing Alduin will suddenly allow for crops to grow better, for undead to turn back and head home, and for hunters to always find enough meat? Bring that lesson into our world, why pretend that tackling the biggest issue at hand will fix every problem underneath it? On top of this, the normal fairy tale ending presumes the existence of every being in the given world revolves around the main character. Surely there are people in the northern mountains who were never aware dragons had returned at all, let alone that an adventurer was attempting to put a stop to the problem. 

The ending of Oblivion, which many people would see as a more classic ending to a story, becomes cloudy when told from different perspectives. Skyrim is not the first installment in the series, and many of the important groups, and beliefs they bring with them, are present in the previous games. When reading about the Oblivion Crisis, an event where demons invaded the Earth, the story of who saved the planet changes depending on whose account is being read. The high elves will claim they stopped the massacre when they took down demon lord Mehrunes Dagon. The Argonians will recount their sacrifice invading through the black portal to fight in the world of the demons. All of this works against the assumption that the player had prevented the crisis in the last game; none of the invasions discussed or military advances planned are ever mentioned to the player. The game is again speaking as to how the world exists besides the events which the player character caused and speaks to how different perspectives are not always wrong.

                Skyrim’s own ending and its take on the ending of a past game in the series was satisfying in that the ending was not exactly an ending. Just like the real world, life carries on for every habitant of every village scattered throughout the maps adorning my walls. A satisfying ending does not have to be the ending at all.