In the grand toolbox of narrative conventions,
very few things are better for a writer than a ticking clock. And I don't just mean how deadline
stress is a hell of a motivator to kick the creativity-brain into overdrive - narratively
speaking, it is very useful for a story to give its characters an in-universe deadline that they
have to accomplish some task in time for, or risk absolute failure on a grand scale. For whatever
reason, there's an event permanently locked into the schedule that is pivotal to their success
or failure, and if they don't hit the target, they're pretty much screwed. Structurally,
this answers several foundational questions, like "why do our heroes need to worry about this
NOW" and "why can't they slow down and do this smart instead of flinging themselves headfirst
into perils they aren't prepared for?" A ticking clock with a hard deadline puts the pressure
on, automatically raises the stakes of failure and gives the writer a very clear idea of when
and how this story is going to end and what it's going to look like when it does - which you
wouldn't think would be a noteworthy benefit, but oh man. OH man. Knowing how a story is going
to end is an underrated but crucial writing tool that tells the writer what they're building
everything towards, what they're foreshadowing, what they need to plant for their eventual
payoff - and while it's not the only thing that a story needs to hold together, we've
had a lot of examples in the last decade of stories that had no idea how they were going to
end, and a lot of them ended so badly that they retroactively made people hate everything they'd
built up beforehand, functionally rendering the entire multi-year effort pointless through no
fault of the many participants who poured their hearts and souls into making it come alive.
Knowing at least the basic shape of a story's finale is a subtle but vital element to effective
longform storytelling, and one very simple way to lock that in from the outset is to give the
characters a hard deadline. And deadlines don't get much harder than a good old cosmic alignment.
The concept of a cosmic alignment is grounded in the very nonfictional fact of reality that stars,
planets and the moon move in very regular and predictable cycles, and that means there are
predictable and calculable times when they overlap, or rather align. If you're interested
in the way real world cosmic alignments work and feel, I made two videos about recent solar
eclipses that unpack that in significantly more detail. In the real world, the most striking
kind of cosmic alignment is definitely the solar eclipse, closely followed by the lunar eclipse,
which have the advantage of being the only kinds of cosmic alignments you can see clearly without
needing a telescope. I've got a little astronomy app on my phone called Star Walk that pings
me whenever, like, Venus is close to Pollux, or Jupiter and the Moon are gonna look close
together or whatever, so trust me when I say that little cosmic alignments are happening
basically all the time, but they're usually not all that interesting to look at. Eclipses are
the real breadwinners in the Cool Sky Spectacles department, and writers know it, because when
it comes to fictional cosmic alignments, solar eclipses are far and away the most popular flavor.
The concept of a fictional cosmic alignment is simple. Two or more heavenly bodies have
predictable cycles of movement, and somebody has calculated out when they're going to sync up.
When that happens, it's going to cause something, almost always something magical - despite
the scientific origins of the concept, cosmic alignments are very rarely used as plot
points in sci fi and generally just feature in fantasy, where it's pretty easy to claim that a
couple orbits crossing over is tied in with an ancient prophecy and it's going to have massive
consequences for whatever's under it, which is a little harder to justify in the harder side of
sci-fi, where the effect of a cosmic alignment generally starts and ends with "looking cool".
In any case, the cosmic alignment will either cause something or enable an opportunity for the
characters to do something, and thus it serves as a hard deadline on the plans for our protagonists,
our antagonists, or both. In some more nebulous cases, a cosmic alignment might be tied with the
long-term execution of some sort of prophecy, i.e. "when the stars align this ancient force
will awaken from its ten-thousand-year slumber", and since this is a frequent staple of
Lovecraftian cosmic horror the implication is generally "and this will f*ck everybody over
in an unstoppably horrific way and as We Are But Ants there is Naught That Can Be Done But Wait
With Souls Adread", but in most cases it's a much more, like, short-term, actionable thing.
The exact details of the cosmic alignment vary depending on the setting. On earth or in
earth-like settings, it's most common for the cosmic alignment to be an eclipse. Solar
eclipses are popular triggers for evil magic that powers up the big bad and are only rarely
seen in positive contexts, while lunar eclipses are kinda wildcards - despite the ominousness of
a bright red moon, they're not automatically seen as bad news. Earthlike settings can also have
planetary alignments factoring into things. If the setting isn't earthlike, the possibilities
for cosmic alignments become significantly more broad. Non-earth settings still frequently
get solar eclipses just because solar eclipses are extremely rad and not a spectacle many
writers would willingly deprive themselves of, but you can also get stories where the setting has
multiple moons or suns, and a convergence of those bodies can be very significant. There are also
stories where the cosmic deadline isn't stellar or planetary at all - most things that move in space
have predictable orbits, including things like comets, and the close approach of a comet can be
used to signal all kinds of weird stuff. Specific meteor showers also usually peak at consistent
and predictable intervals, although that isn't as well known, I've noticed? So a story can use
a meteor shower as a cosmic deadline if it wants, but it's kinda rare. The possibilities are pretty
much endless, especially if you aren't overly concerned with adhering to the laws of physics.
All you need for a cosmic alignment is for two or more space objects to snap into a specific
arrangement, preferably one that doesn't happen too frequently, and bam. Cosmic alignment o'clock.
The primary component of the cosmic alignment plot device is its inevitability. It's literally
written in the stars, and while the cool thing about fiction is literally nothing
is categorically impossible, it takes an extremely high-power character to alter the course
of the heavens themselves. Generally, stopping or altering a cosmic alignment is inconceivably far
above our protagonists' paygrades. So whatever the cosmic alignment does is going to happen
when it wants to happen, and the only thing the characters can do is prepare for it, find a
way to loop it into their plans, or broadly deal with the consequences as best they can. As a side
note, you do sometimes get powerful characters, usually villains, causing artificial cosmic
alignments, typically fake eclipses in service of some kind of Eternal Night scheme, but weirdly
enough that's a completely separate kind of trope to the Cosmic Alignment and is basically just a
special effect applied to the big bad's inevitable big plan. A real cosmic alignment happens
with or without the input of the characters, and while it may present a unique opportunity
for some sort of extremely powerful magic, it cannot be commanded or controlled by any of
the characters aiming to harness its potential. Now this is a pretty flexible structure - one
could even argue it's surprisingly vague. And that's for the simple reason that what exactly
the cosmic alignment does is completely up to the writer. It is a blank madlibs line with the
instructions "pencil in the climactic threat of your story here". A cosmic alignment in the real
world or in fictionland is an inherently dramatic spectacle that feels unbelievably powerful, and
a writer making any sort of fantasy setting can basically justify it causing whatever they want
it to. The cosmic alignment might break the seal on an ancient evil, or activate the big bad's
massively complicated spell, or open a gateway to another realm, or facilitate the ascension of
a monster, or really anything the writer wants it to do. It's a rare, cool-looking event that
reminds us of the vastness of the universe in all its wonder - it can do whatever it wants. Just
about the only hardline subdivision we can draw is whether the cosmic alignment does something
the antagonist wants or something they don't. For instance, check it off your bingo
cards, Avatar's "Day of Black Sun" is a cosmic alignment - specifically a solar eclipse,
unsurprisingly - that is very bad for Team Bad Guy because it switches off everybody's firebending
for a few minutes, making it the prime opportunity to launch an invasion while they can't explode
things with their minds. Unfortunately for Team Good Guy, while the rank and file fire nation
soldiers don't seem to have been informed that their powers are gonna stop working when the sun
goes bye-bye, Firelord Ozai and company are very aware of this and have prepared for the scenario
by squirreling him away to a backup secret lair, causing the invasion to fail and basically wiping
out our heroes' entire army of allies. This is actually an incredibly illustrative example of how
metanarratively useful it is to the writer to have a cosmic deadline, because after the black sun
invasion fails our heroes spend several episodes adopting Zuko, sidequesting and goofing off,
leading to Zuko having a minor breakdown when he realizes they aren't taking the Sozin's Comet
deadline seriously, so he has to drop a new cosmic deadline on them right before the finale so they
actually get their act together and fight the firelord before he torches the Earth Kingdom.
The comet handily illustrates the other sort of cosmic alignment, namely one that the antagonists
want to happen, because while the Day of Black Sun nerfed all the firebenders, Sozin's Comet is
gonna buff them for extra damage, making it a very un-ideal time for our heroes to try and fight
them. Or rather, un-ideal from the perspective of the heroes, but perfect from the writing angle
that it'll make the final conflict significantly more perilous and exciting than if they just
beat the firelord when he couldn't fight back. Which actually leads into a much more broad-scale
writing principle that the unsubtlety of the cosmic alignment trope kinda exposes, much
like how the corona of the sun only becomes visible when the moon obscures the disc. I've
previously discussed the Unspoken Plan Guarantee, which is the principle that a plan the audience
has seen explained on-screen is guaranteed to fail, while a plan that the audience hasn't
already been told stands a much greater chance of success. It's technically a trope, but
it's more of a consequence of some much more deep-seated rules of storytelling, namely that it
is boring to see the same thing play out twice; when the Unspoken Plan Guarantee is violated, the
end result is the audience sees something they've already had explained, which is redundant and kind
of weak in the execution. Similar to that concept, the hidden writing principle that the cosmic
alignment reveals is something I like to call The Endgame Inevitability. The Endgame Inevitability
decrees that the villain's complex multi-step plan cannot be thwarted until the very last minute,
when it is in its final stages of completion and all preparations have already succeeded. If
the villain's plan requires that they collect a whole set of macguffins, they will successfully
do that, and the heroes' attempts to guard or hide them from the villain are guaranteed
to fail. If the villain is concealing their full power behind transformations and
power limiters, they will not be defeated until they have revealed their final form and
probably a secret bonus form after that for good measure. If the villain's plan hinges on the day
of the Cosmic Alignment for its final culmination, they will succeed in every preparatory step
and reach the Cosmic Alignment poised for total victory. The heroes will naturally want to stop
the villain before they reach the final stages of their victory, and presumably try very hard to
do so, but no matter what, whether they aim to destroy the infrastructure supporting the plan,
squirrel away one or more mandatory macguffins, or just take out the villain before they reach
their final form, they are going to fail. The villain will reach their endgame just like they
planned, and in the case of a plan that hinges on a Cosmic Alignment, the Endgame Inevitability
guarantees that the villain's plan cannot be stopped before the alignment, and must instead
be stopped during or immediately afterwards. And the reason for this is actually very simple.
It's more interesting that way. The reason the heroes can't just hide or destroy one of the
villain's Mandatory Macguffins is because they become a much more dangerous and interesting
threat when they have all of them. The heroes stopping an evil plan before it really gets going
is an anticlimax compared to the promised final confrontation where the heroes must instead
desperately struggle against the ultimate foe at the apex of their power. If the villain can
conceivably get more threatening, they inevitably will do so. The heroes cannot win before the
final battle, because the final battle is what the entire story has been building towards,
and therefore it must be as epic as possible. But at the same time, this is kind of only
automatically interesting on paper. If a writer isn't careful, The Endgame Inevitability
can make everything the heroes do before that finale feel completely pointless, like the whole
story up to that point was a waste of time. They try to stop the bad guy, but the writers will
not let them. They try to slow down or cut off the villain's plans, but the writer will make
sure the villain is always one step ahead. It's not fair. In the most literal sense, this scenario
is contrived to be unfair to the heroes, because watching them struggle is what makes the story
interesting. It is a damn good thing fictional characters are tools to tell a good story and
not real people with real thoughts and feelings, because otherwise the act of writing would be just
about the most unethical thing a person could do. The thing is, the Endgame Inevitability isn't
guaranteed to make the hero's struggles feel fruitless, because protagonist progress isn't a
binary - just because the heroes can't stop the ultimate villain early doesn't mean they can't
accomplish other important things. One of the best stories that utilizes a Cosmic Alignment
and the Endgame Inevitability in relation to it is Fullmetal Alchemist, also check it off your
bingo cards, a story where the villain's ultimate plan hinges on a series of complex preparations
building up to "The Promised Day", which turns out to be the day of a total solar eclipse. The plan
is very intricate and has several potential points of failure that our heroes try and ultimately fail
to exploit, because there's no way they're getting to the finale without having to deal with the big
bad plan - but everything the heroes do serves a narrative purpose. Sometimes their actions build
towards their own counter-plan to mitigate or undo the effects of The Promised Day; sometimes they
just gather or win over allies, or take out a bad guy that means one less bossfight day-of, or go
to extremely complicated lengths to avoid being forced to participate in the final evil plan so
their morals stay intact. I'm trying not to be too specific here because Fullmetal Alchemist is
the kind of masterpiece of writing that I think everyone should get a chance to experience clean
- previous trope talks spoiling big chunks of it notwithstanding - but really, if there's one story
that I think balances the climactic final showdown promised by the Endgame Inevitability with
the protagonists actually feeling like they're accomplishing meaningful goals along the way, it's
this one. And one big reason for that is the main characters have extremely important personal
goals they're pursuing for the entire story, and stopping the big bad's evil plan is
completely ancillary to that, and is basically just an unexpected inconvenience. From minute
one and the established premise of the show, the primary thing protagonists Ed and Al care
about is getting back the extremely important body parts they lost in an ill-fated attempt to
alchemy their mom back to life. Al specifically has the worst of it, having lost his entire body
and currently surviving as a soul bound to an empty suit of armor that can kick serious
ass in a fight but also can't eat, sleep, or feel the warmth of human contact. The personal
goal of "findings some way to get their bodies back" provides the story with secondary stakes at
every turn; even if the characters win a victory over Team Bad Guy, it can still feel like they
suffered a devastating loss if their current angle of approach to solving the body problem is
looking like a dead end. And on the flip side, even if they fail to definitively thwart the
big bad's evil plan in some new and clever way, which is pretty much guaranteed due to the Endgame
Inevitability, if they make any progress on their personal goals in the process it can still make
the whole thing feel like a meaningful win. Cosmic alignments, as a trope, have
a bit of an aura of vastness to them, which is appropriate enough for anything to do
with space. When the great gears of the universe inexorably turn to the stroke of midnight, it's
easy for the characters at the center of the story to feel small and powerless. Generally, the
turning of the cosmos is a neutral inevitability. It's just A Thing That Will Happen, with or
without the input of the characters. Plans and schemes that center on cosmic alignments are
usually relatively small-scale machinations, when it comes down to it - petty plans for
personal empowerment that take advantage of the opening provided by the stars aligning. While the
villains usually get more out of cosmic alignments than the good guys do just by the general rules
of underdog heroism, it's not like the bad guys have any more control over them. Thanks to the
endgame inevitability, the bad guys can often feel like unstoppable forces of narrative nature.
Because their near-victory is the most interesting outcome, they really are unstoppable - right
up until they aren't. When the cosmic alignment comes due and the villain's big plan reaches its
ultimate, final culmination - that's usually when the uncaring gears of the universe prove once and
for all how small and alone they really are. A big bad is never more in danger of being horrendously
outclassed than when all their schemes have come to fruition and they have no more powerups left in
the tank. Because even if they harness the cosmic alignment, even if they use it to further their
goals to final completion, they cannot control it, and if the good guys successfully hold them off or
beat them back until the cosmic alignment is over, then they pretty much instantly lose everything
right at the moment that should have been their most profound victory. In tying their plans to
something so massively powerful as the turning of the heavens themselves, all they do is reveal
how small and weak they really are. It is oddly common for the perpetrators of Cosmic Alignment
schemes to find themselves suddenly facing down entities of godlike power, embodiments of the
heavens or the truth or the balance of nature who absolutely smoke them right when their hubris
was at its most extreme. It's a fun reminder that, while the Endgame Inevitability forces the villain
to succeed right up until the finale, the writer is a fickle ally and no friend to the big bad. The
aid of the writer is conditional on what makes a better story, a system of wheels within wheels
far beyond the comprehension of the characters caught in their gears. A villain is only built up
to their highest heights because it makes it that much more fun to watch them fall.
So… yeah?
