Quackcast 755 - My ending is not your ending

What happens if an author makes a massively popular story but takes ages and ages to finish that last part of it, and people are waiting breathlessly for years and years for them to end it? Would you support the idea of others taking it off their hands and finishing it FOR them? After all if the IP is popular enough and they've already sold it for tv shows and movies, the public feels they have a sort of ownership over it (Game of Thrones/A song of Fire and Ice)… This was the idea behind Tantz's newspost last week and we wanted to talk it out more.

We on the Quackcast all say “NO”, mainly because that's not the right thing to do but also because as a reader it always feels “off” when its not the voice of the actual author.

The example I go back to isn't George RR Martin, but Robert E Howard- A big strapping lad from a small town in Texas and a very talented writer for the pulps in the 1930s. He created many amazing characters but most famous among them was Conan the Cimmerian, thief, warrior, and king. The final Conan story by Howard was “Red Nails” and many people regard it was one of his best. Those people are wrong and they are idiots. Red Nails is a reworking of The Slithering Shadow (which I wrongly called “the hidden City” on the Quackcast), the main thing you can tell about Red Nails is that it wasn't written by Howard, it's just not at all in his style, apart from the things it takes from the story it's based on.

The Slithering Shadow is a perfect example of a Conan story: it's short, very tightly written, and it expresses all the themes a good Conan story always does- the power of the individual and their will to overcome any challenge, even unknowable supernatural horror, and the contrast between the wild barbarian man who knows himself and the decadent, soft city dwellers who cling to a decaying society built on inequity and evil. The Red Nails on the other hand copies those aspects without understanding them, Conan is a mere side character doing his own thing while pirate Queen Valeria is the main character from who's perspective we see. It's novel and great to have a female character perspective from Howard but he just didn't ever do that. The details and action in this long and sprawling uneven story are paper thin and rushed over without thought which again is something Howard never did. It also includes a great big graphic portion about a woman being captured, whipped and spanked in a very lurid exploitative way, which Howard just didn't do, especially not in his Conan stories. It's an obvious fake that freaks hold up as the best Howard Conan story but I say it's crap and something taken out of the hands of the author and finished by someone else.

When Robert E Howard died by suicide in the 1930s the legacy of his writing continued on. Author Lin Carter rather scurrilously repurposed a lot of Howard's other fiction and rewrote them as Conan pastiches, at first claiming they were original Conan stories by Howard, and Red Nails is possibly a good example of that sort of thing. Later on other authors like L. Sprague de Camp and Robert Jordan took on the mantel and continued with the character and he later made his way into comics and movies, the same as James bond, Batman, Superman and a hundred thousand other pop culture and comic characters that are part of the broader cultural landscape now, for better or worse.

As a fan, you DO start to feel you have a sort of ownership over characters and sometimes even feel you have a better understanding of them than the original author… So would you ever consider taking over the work of someone else, not in a fan fiction way, but becoming the author of official works? Or could you see that happening with your own work? In many respects I would hate it, but in others I'd be intrigued and interested.

This week Gunwallace gives us a lovely musical theme to Wings Of Daera - Welcome to the Star-chamber, prepare to be judged by the super sci-fi, scary arbiters with their laser eye attachments. But you escape into the underground passages and then out into the vast windswept, toxic wasteland beyond, driving fast in your turbo boosted future car to stay ahead of the cannibal mutants that hunt out there after nightfall…

Topics and shownotes

Links

Inspired by the newspost by Tantz - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/aug/22/the-ending-is-always-yours/

Featured comic: Blighted The Odyssey - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/aug/25/featured-comic-blighted-the-odyssey/

Featured music: Wings Of Daera - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Wings_Of_Daera/ - by Ardihel, rated M.

Special thanks to: Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/ Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/ Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/

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