Sitting at a bar in Southern Illinois a friend and I started discussing a video game that had recently been released, and the public reception to it. I’m super cool by the way. I don’t show my dork in public at all. Tangent: when will someone copyright an official sarcasm font? The game is the final in an epic trilogy of sci-fi action and adventure. Combined, through the three games one would spend around sixty hours in this world, and that’s a conservative estimate. Whenever we go and see a movie, or read a book we become invested. The characters, the world, they mean something to us. The entire enterprise of fiction sits on that foundation, and if a creator hasn’t made you care in even a small way about the fake people and places, then they have failed. This is why fiction is tricky, because when people care there is also the potential for disappointment. How many times have you walked from a theater thinking that you would have ended the film differently?

Investment in fiction is usually proportional to how much time we spend with it. There are many other factors, but typically we don’t stick with a book series or television program that we aren’t invested in. When a television program ends in an unsatisfactory manner it can affect the conception of the entire show. Lost is a perfect example of this. Lost spent years building its mysteries and advancing the arcs of its characters, and the longer it went on the more people cared, the more they wanted a fitting payoff. When core mysteries weren’t dealt with, or were briefly mentioned it created an incredibly divisive reaction. The video game I mentioned earlier is even trickier. You don’t just watch a video game. You interact with the characters and world in a much more intense fashion. Imagine how much you would care what happens to the hero you have been controlling for over sixty hours of your life? The game I speak of has multiple endings to try and appeal to as many people as it can, but the outcry has still been deafening. None of the available endings conform to a stereotypical happy conclusion.

It’s not just endings that inspire extreme reactions. George R.R. Martin has been publishing his epic fantasy series of novels entitled A Song of Ice and Fire since 1996. The sixth book came out this past year and was instantly a best seller. Martin has been criticized for working on other projects, or spending time in idle, while his fans wait anxiously for each volume. These fans believe that because they purchase the books and fund his lifestyle, that they are owed the books in a timely manner. More famously perhaps, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories and eventually grew tired of his popular creation. He killed Holmes off in a story called The Final Solution, where Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty wrestled each other off the Reichenbach Falls. The public outrage was so vast that the author felt himself compelled to write another story, revealing that Holmes survived the fall. Martin on the other hand has come out and told his fans that his writing process is what it is, and they will receive the books when he feels they are finished. These two different reactions show just how complicated this situation can be.

So at what point does the creator have an obligation to his audience? Money is powerful, and people have the right to only spend it on things they are going to be happy with, but it’s this sort of consumerism that leads to cookie cutter summer blockbusters and shelves full of supernatural teen romance stories in the vein of Twilight. Art, without business involved has no obligations. Every creator has a vision in mind. That vision may be to make something that everyone will love, but it could also be that a creator wants to challenge his audience. The consumer has to bear the burden of knowing what he or she is paying for if they are going to feel cheated if their expectations aren’t met. My opinion is that like all things in life, there is a middle road to be walked. If millions of people are providing a living to a creator by purchasing his product, that creator has some obligation to try and please those people. That could mean giving them an ending that he thinks will satisfy them, or finishing his story in a timely manner. On the other hand, consumers need to dial back their entitlement and be willing to be surprised by a work of art. The creator is often trying to tell a story that means something, and they deserve to be trusted to tell that story. If you disagree with how a film ends or a particular twist in a novel, try to see things from a different perspective and remember that no experience is a waste of money if it makes you think.