Blue: Oh, I'm sorry, were you expecting somebody else? Well, what better way to introduce a trope talk on plot twists than with my very own plot twist! Red: Hey, get out of here, I need the chair. Blue: But I was doing a bit... Red: Shoo, Shoo. * coughs * Plot twists are kind of a hot topic these days, or at least they were several weeks back when Game of Thrones ended its ten-year run, everyone lost their minds, and I decided to start writing this talk. For those of you viewing this in the future, when both Game of Thrones and the polar ice-caps are a distant, irrelevant memory, Game of Thrones ran for eight seasons but ran out of book material after five, leaving the show runners to stumble through seasons six through eight with only George R.R. Martin's notes to guide them. For the most part, they seemed to have done an alright job for season six and seven, but general consensus is they made a bit of a mess in the final stretch. Now, where exactly Game of Thrones went wrong is a subject for other, more invested Youtubers, (preferably ones who've actually watched the show instead of absorbing the plot through gif-sets and furious Twitter threads.) But I'm more interested in the discussion the disappointing finale sparked in both writer and fan communities pertaining to predictability and plot twists. See, most of the characters in Game of Thrones had complex character arcs that had been following fairly understandable trajectories, and a good chunk of the fanbase pretty much assumed that after seven seasons, they could kinda see where things were going for the finale. Cersei Lannister had gone full Mad Queen, so the assumption was that her brother and noted Mad King-Slayer Jaime was going to fulfill his character arc, outgrowing their abusive relationship to do the right thing and take her out, in the process fulfilling a prophecy that Cersei would be killed by her younger brother and replaced by a more beautiful queen. Jon Snow had been revealed to be the true heir to the Iron Throne, but this wasn't common knowledge in-universe, and everyone kinda assumed his character arc would end with him killing the big scary Night King, possibly dying in the process. And Daenerys was on a pretty solid trajectory for taking the throne, possibly while pregnant with Jon's son: the true, true heir, additionally fulfilling some other prophecy stuff about the circumstances under which Daenerys would have another kid. It's... complicated. And like I said, I didn't actually watch the show. But, my God... Game of Thrones fans would not stop talking about it. I've absorbed more of Game of Thrones through pop culture osmosis than I remember from some shows I actually watched. The point is, there were a lot of plot threads to wrap up, but most of them tied together into neat little endings that at this point, ten years in, everyone could kind of see coming. And then, people got a little concerned when Arya Stark killed the Night King. Like, good for her? Girl power, I guess? But this was the first hint that maybe the show runners were deliberately trying to subvert the audience's expectations in the final stretch. Oh, you just assumed Jon would kill the Night King, because they've been sharing an arc and he's basically the main character at this point? Ha! Gotcha. But then, in the last few episodes, the show runners did two things that managed to piss everybody off. First, they made Jaime go back to Cersei, abandoning his love interest, Brienne, after what amounted to a one-night stand, proclaiming his love for Cersei and his general disdain for the innocent people he's made a habit of sacrificing everything to protect. And then, he and Cersei get killed by falling rocks. And second, they made Daenerys go crazy and murder a city full of innocent people after she made it her life's mission to save the innocent, empower the enslaved to rise up against their masters, and break the wheel of tyranny and destruction. This really made people think the show runners were just trying to subvert the audience's expectations for shock value rather than bring the stories to a satisfying end. "You expected Jaime's character arc to have some sort of dramatic conclusion, but instead we rolled back six seasons of character development and dropped a building on his head!" "You expected Cersei to get what was coming to her in some dramatic, prophetic confrontation, but instead we made her comparatively sympathetic as former, good-hearted Daenerys burned her city to the ground, AND we dropped a building on her head!" "You expected Daenerys to overcome her relentlessly terrible life and use the power and autonomy she gained to help those similarly imprisoned and used, but instead we made her go crazy and murder everybody so Jon Snow could murder her!" "Oh! And if you thought Jon would get to be king after finding out he's the rightful heir and everything, NOPE! He's going back to exile in the North for murdering Daenerys." "Oh, man, we still need a king... Uhh, what about that psychic wheelchair kid we forgot existed for most of the season?" "Yeah, he'll make a fine king." "Oh! And make sure we call him Bran the Broken, because I bet the disabled members of the audience weren't expecting to feel terrible today." I like to refer to this writing technique as "shock bait." I mean, if they wanted the heart-wrenching “mad queen is unexpectedly killed by her grieving lover” scene, they already had the perfect setup with Cersei and Jaime. But the point wasn't the scene, it was the shock. "Yeah, I bet you were expecting this show to actually be good. Well, joke's on you!" So, this got people talking about plot twists and subverting expectations. Because for a long time, we kind of assumed they were the same thing. "Oh, it's a twist cause it surprised us." "Oh, it surprised us so what a twist." But when faced with a cavalcade of subverting expectations that somehow contained basically no effective plot twists, we all had to re-evaluate what exactly they meant, and why we wanted to subvert expectations at all. So, what makes a plot twist a twist, and what separates it from subverting expectations? Well, fundamentally the difference is in focus. A plot twist is a story element that redirects the plot from its former trajectory. Subverting expectations is an audience impact that results from events in the story. One is cause; the other is effect. So, while they're related, they're not equivalent. Now, the other reason plot twists and such were in the public consciousness so much in the first half of 2019, was the release of Avengers: Endgame and the total spoiler embargo for the first week it was out in theatres. This got a lot of people talking about how dumb the concept was, and a number of people put forward the opinion that if knowing the twists in advance ruins the viewing experience of a movie, the problem is probably with the movie and how it apparently has no rewatch value. I'm not saying you should spoil movies, just that this is what people were talking about because it was literally impossible to get any information about this movie. Now, the concept of a spoiler is firmly on the audience impact side of things. Spoilers don't affect the plot, a.k.a., the cause, but they affect the audience response, a.k.a. the effect. When a plot twist is spoiled, it just tells the the audience that the twist is coming, effectively turning a first viewing into a second. Spoiling a twist takes away the first impact and replaces it with a kind of suspense, not really ruining the experience, just changing it. Alfred Hitchcock's thoughts on suspense are pretty much legendary at this point. He suggests that if you show an audience a room full of people and suddenly blow it up, the audience feels a few seconds of shock. But if you show the audience your room full of people and tell them a bomb under the table will go off in ten minutes, the audience has ten minutes of suspense. By giving the audience information, the audience knows enough to be afraid. In effect, a spoiler, or a second viewing, gives the audience information that turns the lead-up to a plot twist into Hitchcockian suspense. By now, pretty much everyone on the planet knows that at the end of Game of Thrones, season one, Ned Stark is killed. At the time, this was a twist. Now, everybody watching season one goes through it dreading what they know is inevitable. The problem I keep running into with discussions of spoilers and subverting audience expectations and stuff is that you can only ever surprise your audience once. And that's cool-- getting that initial "What?" is great, but if your end goal is just to shock them, your story kind of ends up one-use-only. If you tell your audience there's a bomb under the table and then one of the characters gets stabbed by a clown, you don't win because your audience is going "What?" This is why the real, substantial plot twists have more to them than just surprising the audience on a first viewing. So, having gotten all that out of the way, let's actually talk about plot twists. Broadly, there are two major kinds of plot twists, and there's totally overlap between them, it's not a straight categorization. There are basically retroactive twists, and trajectory twists. Retroactive twists reveal something to the audience that retroactively changes the way the story up to this point can be interpreted. On their own, they normally happen near the end of the story and mostly affect the rewatch value. Though retroactive twists can happen at any point in the story, they'll just affect the rewatch value up to this point. A retroactive twist is usually a revelation of some kind, a new bit of information revealed to the audience and/or the characters. Some of the most iconic plot twists are in this category. The Sixth Sense, Planet of the Apes, and Citizen Kane are the big ones. "He was dead all along" and "It was Earth all along" were so popular that they're kind of generic twists by now. Although, "it was his sled all along" is a little too niche to enjoy the same popularity. A trajectory twist, on the other hand, is an unexpected event in-story that radically changes where the plot is going from there. They usually happen before the final act of the story so the plot actually has time to change. If a retroactive twist happens early enough in the story, it usually also has the same effect. The finale of Game of Thrones Season One gives us a trajectory twist in the form of Ned Stark's death, unceremoniously removing the presumed main character and scattering his family in disarray, leaving us uncertain of where things are going from there. In Terminator 2, relatively early in the movie, The Arnold-ator whips a shot gun out of a box of roses and tells John to get down instead of shooting him which is when we learn that the scary Arnold-Terminator is actually the good guy and the innocuous policeman-Terminator is actually a really scary bad guy. This tells us straight out that T2 isn't gonna be like the first Terminator. This time, the bodyguard figure isn't a squishy human soldier, but is instead the indestructible metal badass that was trying so hard to kill them. And this one's not going to be horror: it's gonna be all action, baby! By the way, looping back to the spoiler discussion a little, I was unsurprisingly spoiled about this particular twist before seeing the movie, since it came out in 1991, but the interesting thing is that while knowing it in advance removes some of the oomph from the scenes when Arnold whips out the shotgun, it basically reframes all the scenes leading up to it to be seen from the Terminator's perspective instead of John's. Watching it thinking the Terminator's trying to kill John puts us in his head as he tries to get away. But knowing the Terminator's trying to protect him puts us in the Terminator's head as he tries to catch up to him before the T-1000 does. It's exactly as tense, because even though we know the Arnold-nator isn't the threat, we're aware of stakes that John doesn't know about yet. Anyway, a lot of plot twists are both retroactive and trajectory twists. There's a big twist in Spiderman: Homecoming, where as Peter's getting ready for prom, he learns that the Vulture is actually his girlfriend Liz's dad. This is a retroactive twist, as it reframes every scene where the Vulture discusses his family, and the bits where we see Liz and her mom, but it's also a trajectory twist, as it leads to the Vulture finding out Peter's secret and kicks Peter back into action as Spiderman. Steven Universe has a similar character reveal twist where midway through the fifth season Steven learns that his mother, the heroic rebel Rose Quartz, was actually the tyrannical Pink Diamond she was supposedly rebelling against. This reframes five whole seasons of stories about Rose Quartz, Pink Diamond, and the rebellion as a whole, and also reframes our image of Pearl, who knew the whole time but was physically compelled to keep it a secret. But it also radically shifts the focus of the plot, as now Steven is determined to stop the conflict with the other diamonds, fix the damage from the Gem War, and do what his mother couldn't in either of her identities. I wanna real quick put a spotlight on Into the Spiderverse, because it had a bunch of plot twists, that were all very different and all handled very well. In the "trajectory twists" category, the big one is the death of Peter Parker, which happens super early in the movie. They give us this perfect Spiderman, in his absolute prime, and right after he promises Miles to help and mentor him and his new abilities, he DIES. Miles spends the rest of the movie struggling to find another mentor who can help him get a handle on his powers and trying not to crumble under a mountain of expectations, things he wouldn't have had a problem with if Peter had survived to train him. Most of the other twists are character reveals, which you could consider to be a subcategory of the overlap between retroactive and trajectory twists, because they give you new information about a character that makes you see them retroactively in a new light, but also usually changes how they behave going forward. And it's really fun, because the movie explicitly anticipates that its audience knows who Spiderman is, how he works, and what his bad guys are. We know about Green Goblin, Doc Ock, Kingpin, Tombstone, Scorpion, whatever. And we see Ultimate Green Goblin very early on. Plus during Peter Parker's intro monologue, we get a flashback glimpse of Doc Ock throwing a car at him. So because the movie expects the audience to know who Spiderman's villains are we're anticipating for Doc Ock, a portly scientist dude with a bunch of robot arms and some scary shiny goggles because that is what Doc Ock always looks like. And instead, it turns out that this quirky hipster scientist lady we already saw in a school presentation is the Earth-1610 Doc Ock. And as a bonus, she's packing more supervillian panache than the rest of the crew put together. Bonus points, the reveal is immediately preceded by Peter B. Parker thinking that he needs to re-examine his personal biases when he learns that the head scientist is actually a lady instead of a portly dude hunched over a computer with some scary shiny goggles. Cheeky. We also get the much less fun Prowler reveal later on, which wasn't a surprise to anyone who was familiar to the Ultimate Spider-man comics, but I didn't know it going into the movie, and even if it doesn't surprise you, it still impacts because Miles is so affected by it. Miles has been looking for a mentor figure all movie. Even before he gets his powers, his intro shows us that he and his dad are already drifting apart due to the high expectations he puts on Miles. Then, after Perfect Peter dies, he tries our Peter, but Peter B isn't exactly mentor material. None of the other spider-people are interested in actually helping him because they're on a bit of a schedule and don't have time, and after a string of crushing disappointments Miles goes to find the one person who always supported his actual interests: His uncle Aaron, artsy, independent, rebellious, suave and fun. And then it turns out uncle Aaron is the supervillain Prowler who's been hunting him since Perfect Peter died. Obviously Aaron didn't know he's been trying to kill his nephew but all Miles cared about is that the only person he felt he could trust has actually been trying to murder him the whole time. Even though we know what's coming, I'd say especially if we know what's coming, the writer preserves the tension and the impact is extremely effective. These are all twists that are fun on the first viewing and better on the second viewing. If you know the scientist lady is Doc Ock, you notice her octagonal glasses or the spare tentacle parts on her desk. If you know Aaron is the Prowler you understand Miles's dad's disappointment in him and why he doesn't want Miles hanging around him too much. If you know Peter's gonna die, watching him swing around quipping without a care in the world hurts a lot more. But these are GOOD twists. Effective, well-written ... Good. Let's talk about what makes a bad twist. Broadly, a plot twist is bad, or at least ineffectual, if it ticks one of these boxes: The twist contradicts canon or makes no sense, the twist isn't as clever as it thinks it is, the twist is less interesting than the un-twisty natural progression of the plot, or the twist has no meaningful impact. Let's break these down one by one. "The twist contradicts canon or makes no sense" This is the easy one. If the twist actively clashes with the rest of the story, the twist is bad, and even if it doesn't clash, if you think too hard about it and it stops making sense, that's not good either. The remake of Planet of the Apes where Mark Wahlberg makes it back to his own time, but now the Lincoln Memorial has a monkey face? That's just... confusing, and makes no sense. What exactly is it trying to say here? Bad twist. "The twist isn't as clever as it thinks it is" If a twist is predictable, simple, or just kind of ... whatever, then the amount of weight the author puts on it can be distractingly self-indulgent. If the twist isn't actually that twisty or profound it can be kind of uncomfortable to watch the author go all [snobby British accent] "Oh isn't it sooo smart, I bet you didn't see this coming" I had this problem with a lot of the later episodes of Sherlock, but let's hit some low-hanging fruit here and make fun of Signs, where the big twist is that the monsters are deadly allergic to water. That's ... not a very complicated twist, and also it'd be like if a bunch of humans went to a world where it's mostly covered in and actively rains lava and were shocked to discover that we caught fire. They're not even wearing suits! Bad twist. "The twist is less interesting than the un-twisty natural progression of the plot" This one might actually be a little controversial, but if the plot twist results in something more boring than the non-twist version, that's not good! Any story where the twist is "that radical, fantastical adventure was actually all a dream or drug-induced hallucination" falls into this category. So does the ending of Game of Thrones, where the big twist was "everyone's character arcs ended badly". Bad twist. "The twist has no meaningful impact" This is really the biggest one, if the twist has almost no consequences what was the point? The most important characteristic of a plot twist is right there in the name: It has to twist the plot. If it just jiggles it a little then like... whatever. I have a favourite good bad example that manages to tick every box, so let's circle back to my old favourite punching bag: Age of Ultron. Specifically, the bit where Quicksilver dies. See, Age of Ultron spends basically the whole movie trying to convince us that Hawkeye's gonna die. He gets injured early on, sarcastically announces he's gonna live forever, and we learn he's got a secret family with a loving pregnant wife and two adorable kids, and he stares at a picture of them before heading into the final battle. Then, when he runs into danger to rescue a kid and gets attacked by a gunship, Quicksilver zips him behind a car, gets riddled with bullets, says, "you didn't see that coming", and dies. Couple problems, and by a couple I mean ... WOW. So, category one, "the twist makes no sense". The movie shows us that Quicksilver is fast as hell. I have NO trouble believing he could get Hawkeye to safety. But I do have trouble believing he couldn't ALSO get himself to safety. Like, did he ... carry Hawkeye most of the way to the car and then push him while he was still in the open? The seems kind of unsafe at those speeds. It makes more sense that he carried him behind the car but then why was Quicksilver still out in the open to get shot? The movie doesn't convince me that Quicksilver had to die, and in fact gives me reason to believe he's absolutely fast enough to NOT die in this specific situation. We've seen what bullets look like to him! And it's pretty embarrassing for him to go out like a punk when barely a year earlier Days of Future Past showcased exactly what a speedster like Quicksilver was capable of. Not a great look. Category two, "the twist isn't as clever as it thinks it is". When your plot twist looks directly into the camera and cheekily says "you didn't see that coming", please just... stop. And maybe fire your writers. More importantly, I did see it coming and so did a lot of people. See, when you give us a lot of really obvious death flags on an important character, but then introduce a bunch of disposable new characters, it's not hard to assume that you're faking us out. Vision and Wanda are famous for their relationship in the comics so they were both out of the death running, which just leaves us with Quicksilver, whose arcs are mostly centred on things like Magneto and the X-Men AKA stuff Marvel doesn't have the rights to. Yeah, it wasn't hard to see that one coming. Category three, "the twist is less interesting than not having the twist". I want you to picture, for a moment, a world where Quicksilver existed for the events of Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame. He'd already started outgrowing his angry, jaded personality and had begun recognising the Avengers as heroes, seeing them do their absolute damnedest to save Sokovia from a problem he indirectly helped cause. He started off hating Tony but changed his mind to side with him instead, recognising that all Tony wanted was to fix the problems he caused. So, if Quicksilver survives Age of Ultron he becomes an Avenger, most likely just as fiercely loyal to them as he was to Ultron, just in time for them to tear themselves apart in Civil War. Say he sides with Tony, seeing the accords as just another step in Tony's journey away from being a weapons dealer he hated. It puts him in opposition against his sister, the first time they've really fought, and it would be cool to see them fight! Even if it... probably wouldn't last long. Say he survives the Snap in Infinity War, the first time he's separated from his sister. The way they played out Endgame, during those five years there were almost no active supers on the planet. Thor was getting drunk and Hulk was getting therapy, but I don't see Quicksilver taking armageddon lying down. He could be doing his damnedest to keep the peace Flash-style, maybe even clashing with Hawkeye's one-man vigilante crusade, a narrative foil situation, each of them responding to the loss of their family in very different ways. Maybe he's doing for Earth what Captain Marvel is doing for the rest of the galaxy, desperately running around keeping things working while the rest of the team searches for a real solution because he's the only one with the powers to do it. Then Wanda comes back after the snap and suddenly there's a five year age difference between these twins. Wanda's still mourning Vision, Pietro's just happy she's alive, and my god the emotional baggage they could unpack there. There is SO much potential here, but Age of Ultron wanted a death and Pietro was available so... sucks to be him. Bad twist. Category four, "the twist has no meaningful impact". You guys notice nobody liked Quicksilver? Literally nobody but Wanda, and his death just made her kill Ultron-bots slightly faster than she already was. Quicksilver dies, Hawkeye lives, the cast expands by two instead of three, nobody mourns, nobody gets a funeral, nobody cares. Hawkeye grimaces sadly for a couple minutes and then everyone puts on their Dark Serious Pants for Civil War, and I'm pretty sure they don't even mention him in Civil War. So, broadly, there are a number of ways to screw up a plot twist, writers often equate writing a twist with shock bait but they really aren't the same thing and in the struggle to surprise the audience the writer can sometimes just disappoint them instead, which... can be surprising, but still not good. Trying to micromanage the audience's reaction to something is never a good idea, all you can control is the story, not the way they react to it. There's a reason tropes exist, just because a story element is a known quantity doesn't mean it's not compelling, and just because your audience can see something coming doesn't mean the story isn't still good. Maybe we should all stop freaking out about spoilers so much. Good stories have rewatch value, good stories are good even if someone summarises the whole story first. * coughs * Plus, I mean, I always get really happy when my audience can guess where my story's going because it means I'm doing my job right and getting my plot across without confusing anyone. Isn't that the whole point? So, yeah!
Oh good they're not jerking off Quick Silver in this.
I always thought that was weirdly graphic sexual content for a kids movie.
Good points. Now I just have no idea how the fuck we can fix it
The big problem here is how it would affect wandavision
I do not see Wandavision ever existing with quicksilver still alive unless he somehow dies in endgame
And if he doesn’t die in endgame
Than wandavision is going to be really contrived if he doesn’t end that story in just one episode
Unless Wanda’s grief for vision truly is that strong, but even then all it took was a pep talk from Monica Rambo for her to begin to snap out of it, so it’s highly unlikely that Pietro wouldn’t just end wandavision within an episode
She's right. Age of Ultron was a shitty movie.
In all seriousness though, good points.