What’s Wrong with Franchises?

Recently, friend of the blog Alexander Hellene stated his disgust with IP franchises. Aside from personal preference, he believes that stories should have a beginning, middle, and end, without extraneous material like side stories and such.

I can see why he would feel that way: a lot of the go-to examples for expansive IPs feel bland. It’s like a committee of people comes up with a story, and you can tell that creative choices were made not because the team felt it was best for the story, but because “it will pull in [X] demographic” or “we can slap it on merchandise and make [X] amount” — things like that. On top of that, they keep it going as long as possible and add a bunch of ancillary material that you have to purchase to get the whole thing. Nothing can just end.

Thinking about it, I think one problem with franchises is that it ruins the magic from the get-go. When something is a franchise, it’s hard to get sucked into the world and see it as an account of events. Instead, you know this or that character is going to survive, that one thing or another will happen, and things will largely keep going the way they are so as to not kill the cash cow; you can see the accountants behind the curtain. If the franchise becomes popular enough to build a fanbase, creative choices become ever more constrained as you have to satisfy your paying customers. Indeed, I believe this is part of the reason why so many Western-produced franchises have gone woke; the creative teams feel too restricted by the demands of the fanbases, so they lash out in rage.

How to avoid this tension? Have a defined end point.

If you know that the story will have a definitive end, you know nothing else is coming down the line, so everything is fair game and anyone can die. Surprise is preserved, and when the story ends, it feels final, like everything is over — because it is. Sure, the reader knows that the world goes on past the end of the story, but they can only guess and speculate, because the writer won’t write anymore. Since there would be no side stories or continuing adventures, fanbase demands for particular characters to come back won’t frustrate anyone, and there would be no need to lash out at them.

And the best part? The writer gets to do something different.

Now, the reality is that people love their series, and series make money if you can do them right, because people like comfort food. They like to come back to something familiar that makes them feel good. Thus one possible solution is to do what medieval fantasy series Fire Emblem and sci-fi giant robot series Gundam do: tell stories set in different continuities that share a basic concept. Each entry in either series tells a different story, but you can tell it’s a Fire Emblem game or a Gundam anime based on the content and on common tropes between the entries, despite not sharing characters or settings with previous entries. It gives the best of both worlds: stories that end, and a franchise that continues to generate revenue.

While franchises have their flaws, I think they can be handled correctly if done with care.