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Good discussion and question!

I just had to add in my personal pet peeve. Most of the time in a story, I want a resolution where good wins. And I think a strength of fantasy is that it tends to make good and evil clearer than most genres. When it’s clear in the story, then later the story’s principles and themes get applied in my life in more subtle and harder decisions.

When there is no clear protagonist for the reader to cheer for –just a bunch of morally ambiguous characters, then the ending is going to disappoint me. I probably shouldn’t analyze Game of Thrones when I haven’t watched it, but my interpretation is that you had a bunch of morally ambiguous characters fighting over the throne with the only possibly heroic one of the bunch (Ned Stark) killed off in the first season. Thus, because there is no clear good hero, there is no satisfaction when the throne is won because the reader didn’t know who to cheer for to win the throne. Thus, the audience complains about the person who does win the throne, and the author struggles to finish the series because the resolution isn’t “surprising yet inevitable”.

So along with this fad of morally ambiguous characters, I also see a connected fad for vague resolutions. I’m okay with morally ambiguous characters in a book, but I want the resolution to show good wins (or if bad wins, then it is a tragedy).