Order of the stick it to your audience

"You know what I'm talking about. You said I was insecure.
[...]
What you're really saying is I come off like I'm some kind of joke machine. That I have to be restrained with a yockstrap."

Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H S09Ep13 - No Laughing Matter


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Spoiler alert: major last-act dramatic reveal for OOTS.
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The webcomic The Order of the Stick just did something very, very stupid. After over eleven hundred pages, it's decided to invalidate its entire cosmology. Granted, it's a stick figure comic about D&D characters who continually break the fourth wall to comment on game mechanics, but until now they at least had the decency to feel guilty about it. Then starting in comic 1139 a god divulges to two of his clerics the infinitely recurring and arbitrary nature of existence and the whole thing meta-jumps the meta-shark.

Just two weeks ago I scoffed at the game Wasteland 2 for its half-assed attempt to mask a lack of substance with cheap derivative references and meta humor. The difference between telling a joke and becoming a joke is largely that between self-possession and insecurity. Wasteland 2 crossed it, blatantly, by leaning too hard on its pop culture and self-derision crutches. In the same vein, it's one thing for OOTS' characters to constantly point out the absurdity of the world around them, and quite another for them to become accomplices to the perpetrators of such absurdity. Writing characters clever enough to spot the joke they inhabit retains the interplay between audience and actors, the tension and inquisitiveness of storytelling (even interactive.) Writing characters who are simply in on the joke forces a divide between them and the audience. It's a way of explaining said joke, and that tends to kill it.

When Tolkien set about writing the Silmarillion, he supposedly voiced some reticence in unveiling so much of Middle-Earth's cosmology, for fear it would kill the sense of mystery and grandeur behind his tales. He quite skillfully bridged this pitfall by holding the true powers of middle-earth off-stage. He gave us some accounts of the actions of the Valar, Morgoth or Eru Iluvatar, but we're never left simply leafing through Iluvatar's diary and hearing him scoff at how shoddy Arda turned out. This would force the audience's viewpoint into a sort of adolescent feigned nonchalance as to the trials and tribulations of hobbits; it would dilute the bulk of the story -

- and that's exactly what OOTS just did. The tendency for speculative fiction to retreat into some postmodernist reshaping of reality belies an intrinsic insecurity, an inability to form a coherent worldview. And it is (make no mistake) a tendency, a trend, a trope, a cliche. Ironic detachment has suffused our modern storytelling for so long and so thoroughly as to grow into, ironically enough, a forced perspective from which we cannot detach. Another, similar gaming themed webcomic, Guilded Age, recently ended after pro- regressing quite predictably from tales of adventuring and escapism to "clap your hands if you believe" omnipotence. Gunnerkrigg Court has taken the same turn. Supernormal Step recently ended with its latter half (from what I've skimmed) seemingly devoted to facile self-help mysticism. It's hardly limited to internet doodles, either. The TV show Lost quite infamously got lost on its island adventure, falling into fatalistic religious claptrap which invalidated pretty much everything its hobbits did on-screen. Star Trek before that was constantly plagued by interactions with omnipotent divinities. We've learned to expect every story to end in this sort of dissimulation of artistic coherence. To quote from David Foster Wallace's old spiel on the dangers of television culture:

"make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. [...] All U.S. irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I say' [...] Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny."

What is your story about?
If it's about hobbits, then it's about actions which hobbits can undertake, about a world which hobbits can affect and problems which might worry hobbits. It's not about omnipotence, about infinite time, infinite power or infinite regression. Infinity's a showstopper. It makes a terrible show. If the world you've created can be anything, then it's nothing.

Worse yet, the "make your own reality" schtick has been done. On rare occasions it's even been done well. We've read Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman. We've seen Serial Experiments Lain. But those are exceptions. After seventy years of such endings, we should probably admit they're more often a cop-out, a sign of the authors' insecurity or inability to adequately define their worlds, an attempt to laugh off the question instead of providing an answer or admitting a lack.