Dude, that's the point that I am making. The show is not like your typical fantasy fare and I gave an example that highlights that. Everything else seems to argue semantics.
Subverting Expectations: The Megathread - Or How Baby Dick Creators ‘Sort of Forgot’ What an Anti-Climax Is
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There's nothing wrong with subverting expectations. There's lots of examples where people pulled that off.
As usual, I think Rich Evans hit the nail on the head when he said the point was to give the audience something better than what they expected.
As usual, I think Rich Evans hit the nail on the head when he said the point was to give the audience something better than what they expected.
"Subverting expectations" is just a new fancy word for a "plot twist" invented by people who don't know how to make effective ones. They want to pretend they have done something revolutionary in the history of media and not realizing this is something that has existed since the age of written word.
It's not clever, it's rebranding.
It's not clever, it's rebranding.
TBF that was less "subverting Expectations" and more "executive meddling".
Well, this is coming from the same people that pretend that Captain Marvel was the first female main actress in a movie ever. Or like Black Panther was the first ever movie featuring a black actor. In their strange perception, every movie in the past was an all white-male cast and if there was a black or female character, it was just a dudebro in a wig or blackface.
A large chunk of the current political farce called "SJW" hinges not only on being on the right side of history, but also on being the vanguard of this very movement, to celebrate any random bimbo (that most likely got their acting career by sucking off a producer) and pretending that she's the first female action hero ever. And they do this every goddamned year.
And when you bring up something to disprove their nonsense, they either mock you for (rightfully) bringing up iconic characters such as Ellen Ripley or Blade. Or they just plug their ears.
So of course, these people need to pretend that no movie or show "subverted expectation" ever before.
It's the same mindset of these morons that were chanting "Halo invented FPS" unironically.
But Abrams' mystery boxes weren't going to go anywhere because they never do. When you see his name on something, that's the time to abandon ship. Not the second or third movie in, not 15 episodes in. Unless you just want to go on a journey with no answers, don't press the play button when you see this guy coming. That's not to say Rain Johnson wouldn't have ruined the second film regardless, because he would have. The difference between Abrams following through with all three movies and Johnson taking over with #2 is that Abrams would have waited until the last 20 minutes or so of #3 to resolve the plot points with a nothingburger after a lot of wild chases and explosions. As far as I can tell, Johnson blew his wad in #2 along with all the SJW garbage and now everybody's pissed.
The biggest example of this to me is still AoT since it managed to an entire genre shift. It went from basically a story about a zombie apocalypse set in medieval times to a WWII-style GoT fanfic. It's utterly baffling, and the only explanation I have for it is that Isayama wanted to write an entirely new a story, but couldn't since AoT wasn't finished so he just decided to cram the two together, and the resulting trainwreck is what we got.
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As a counterexample, essentially the entirety of Dragon Ball is an asspull after volume 1 and everything known in the west as Dragonball Z (vol 17 on) is a double-triple asspull, yet it remains one of the most well loved series worldwide.
The deciding factor is that it always leaned into the absurdity instead of taking itself seriously; series like Game of Thrones or Star Wars have in more recent years treated themselves like they aren't an overblown high-tits soap opera and campy space adventure, so when they go for the anti-climax or simply invent new story directions, it feels wrong.
At the same time,
The deciding factor is that it always leaned into the absurdity instead of taking itself seriously; series like Game of Thrones or Star Wars have in more recent years treated themselves like they aren't an overblown high-tits soap opera and campy space adventure, so when they go for the anti-climax or simply invent new story directions, it feels wrong.
At the same time,
Rei is shit
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Subverting expectations is the easiest shit in the world to do, all one needs is to take convention and run in the other direction. And Rian has done just that with no more justification or reason than "its not what the audience anticipated".
That approach is not only lazy, but artistically bankrupt. Playing with conventions, inverting them or just outright twisting them in to parody can be really fun and interesting... but it needs to make sense. You don't have to come up with some super deep rock solid justification for doing so, just make sure that there is some semblance of thought put into it which goes beyond "u didnt expect dis lmao".
Here is a good example of an ending that "subverts expectations". Not that it will make any sense if you havent seen the film;
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That approach is not only lazy, but artistically bankrupt. Playing with conventions, inverting them or just outright twisting them in to parody can be really fun and interesting... but it needs to make sense. You don't have to come up with some super deep rock solid justification for doing so, just make sure that there is some semblance of thought put into it which goes beyond "u didnt expect dis lmao".
Here is a good example of an ending that "subverts expectations". Not that it will make any sense if you havent seen the film;
Days of Being Wild (1990, Wong Kar-Wai) - Ending scene with Tony Leung
The final scene of Wong Kar Wai's Days of Being Wild (1990) with Tony Leung. Title: Days of Being Wild (1990) Original title: Ah fei zing zyun, Āfēi Zhèngzhu...
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This character is literally introduced right here in this last scene of the film, shown preparing for a night out. He has no relation at all to any of the other characters or events in the film. This could be taken as a sequence from another film that was spliced into this one (which it may actually be lmao).
Yet this makes a certain amount of narrative sense. The main character of this film is a super special totally unique individual who had a bad childhood and, as an adult, likes to party and womanize. He frequently makes himself out to be different and stuck in an unusual circumstance. This ending shows that no, he isn't the least bit special. There are other guys just like him, living their life the exact same way as him, dressing up nice and going out every night just like him. This guy being introduced at the very end without a name or any other details is part of the point; you dont need to know who he is, just that the overall arc of his life is the same. Its a tragedy being played out all over the world every single day to a legion of unnamed individuals.
Yet this makes a certain amount of narrative sense. The main character of this film is a super special totally unique individual who had a bad childhood and, as an adult, likes to party and womanize. He frequently makes himself out to be different and stuck in an unusual circumstance. This ending shows that no, he isn't the least bit special. There are other guys just like him, living their life the exact same way as him, dressing up nice and going out every night just like him. This guy being introduced at the very end without a name or any other details is part of the point; you dont need to know who he is, just that the overall arc of his life is the same. Its a tragedy being played out all over the world every single day to a legion of unnamed individuals.
Seems like people forgot about M Night Shamalamadingdong
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Does Get Out count by the trailer alone? Everyone thought it would be an average mind control plot but nobody knew it turned out to be a people seeking immortality in the actual movie.
Red Letter Media explains this problem in a very simple and educative way
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He'd be the classic example of it. Mostly failing, some pulling it off. But I fucking hate narrative reversals in the last thirty seconds where you've got 0 time to process it so I'd add an extra 500 words if I'd ranted about that. The only good thing about his failures is that they waste about, more or less, 2 hours of your time and around 5 bucks on home video.
The other examples I used have wasted decades of people's lives and hundreds upon hundreds of dollars. I went for the bigger fish, so to speak.
Yes, its been around forever, which I used the example of The Prestige, a movie nearly 15 years old. And yeah, its been around for longer than that. If I wanted to list examples of where this was competently, this would have been 5,000 pages long. Another part of my point is that this narrative failure has been, lately, limited to genre fiction whereas in dramatic fiction, this problem is largely absent. My point wasn't that this was new, my point was that people are doing this and thinking they're genuises without giving the audiences anything back for their loyalty or satisfaction, resulting in an anti-climax. My point was in genre fiction they seem to think this is a new idea, forget what an anti-climax is, and think that's genuis.
Also unexpected twists are not subverting expectations, they're twists. Every story is expecting to see them. The difference between twists and surprises and subverting expectations is that you're taking something narratively and doing something that doesn't make complete sense, betraying the origonal intention of your story. It perverts the characterization, the plot, whatever.
'Luke, I am your father' is a twist when Luke reacts fucking horrified. That is in narrative context. The story just threw in a surprise. A surprise isn't subversion. To subvert something you have to alter it.
'Luke, I am your father' is a subversion when Luke's like 'THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING, LETS MURDER TOGETHER'. It becomes a successful subversion if Luke is only doing this to betray his father later, hence tricking the audience, but staying true, character-wise and narrative-wise, to the story. Its an anti-climax if he just, you know, wants to murder everyone, kills all his friends and joins the dark side with the Emperor. The end, with no over-arching questions solved. That's the difference.
There's nothing wrong with it. Its fine to do, you just have to do it well, have it make sense within the complete, overall narrative that came before it, and be true to the characters. That's a lot harder to do. Like I said with 'The Prestige' example, with subverting a narrative, you're basically taking away one of the large parts your audience loves your work. You have to give them something back to do it. Most of the times these days, creative works forget 'The Prestige' part of the trick and don't give the audience anything for what they removed, leaving them unsatisfied and the work pretty much in narrative and story-telling ashes, along with the respective franchise.
And yes, that is usually the point of subverting expectations. Because if you give them something worse, they'll usually hate you and leave. And you crater your story.
Allegedly, he had a plan. But I think the point is moot anyway. If J.J did what you'd said, he'd be replaced here. But we'll never know what Episode 2 would have been with him under it. And of course Rain would have ruined the second film, he just basically ignored the entire first film where its almost impossible to tell if they're from the same series or not.
I'll never fucking forgive that cunt for that. He started watching Game of Thrones and then was like, "ME WANT" and just did that. I don't think its an exaggeration that the manga lost basically half its audience after he made the switch and the basement was revealed. I seriously think the only thing that actually saved the manga was the Anime, and the Anime is basically relying on the first part that everyone loved, I have a feeling its going to crash. And crash fucking hard. The only people I see really left are shippers (oh my fucking christ, the shippers in that community), people who think he's a secret genius and fanboys who don't even think, just consume.
The funny thing is, fanboys are like "OH GOD, WAIT TILL THE ANIME SEES THE BASEMENT REVEAL LOL" and I'm like, "You mean when he upsets everyone for making his universe a worse game of thrones and loses half his audience because he basically threw out what they loved? And then he does a time-skip because he shifted the entire genre and had no fucking idea what he was doing and has been winging it ever since, and character motivations haven't made sense for years with 0 revelation because Isayama doesn't actually know what he's doing?" I'm really going to love when the brigade rides out to defend that fucking shit show.
I mean, for non-anime people, I really feel like I have to explain how really jarring this was. Attack on Titan was this post-apocalypse setting where the remnants of humanity were set up in these huge walls, surrounded by gigantic titans, monsters that would just eat people. Then you gradually learn there are sentient titans, humans that can control these monsters. So there's this big mystery, the primary genre is the horror of people fighting these things. The answers are held in the protagonist's basement. For which there's this huge charge, a major sacrifice, huge character deaths to get to.
Then it turns out that no, humanity is thriving and just fine, and the island is just a World War 2 concentration camp (figuratively) because the world hates the
Holy fuck, I knew that Attack on Titan went off the rails, but I never knew the particulars. What makes this so insane in my eyes is that the original concept is really cool and makes for an amazing post-apocalyptic horror story about humans trying to fight these monstrous beings. And Isayama threw it away so he can make something like Game of Thrones. The sickest thing here though is that he could have found a way to combine these two concepts without completely shitting all over everything; Game of Thrones has something similar in the form of the White Walkers beyond the Wall, which pose a serious threat to Westeros but Westeros is too busy tearing itself apart to notice. How about instead of throwing away the original concept, why not introduce the world's politics among the world's survivors and how that threatens the survival of the remaining humans? Make it a sort of reversal of priorities; where in Game of Thrones the only people who care about the White Walkers are a few people at the Wall, maybe in AoT the survivors are too busy fighting titans to pay attention to the increasingly sinister political machinations of those in power.
There are so many ways Isayama could have incorporated his inspiration from Game of Thrones while maintaining the integrity of his story's premise. I'm just stunned he fucked it up this badly.
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I think what makes a good twist work is, despite it being a twist, it typically isn't something that comes out of left field. This is what a lot of bad twists/the subverted expectations excuses fail to do. Someone mentioned M. Night whateverthefuckhislastnameis and while there are plenty of bad examples of his to choose from, I'll pick one of the few good ones he managed/became famous for. Bruce Willis being dead. It worked because it was planned from the beginning so the plot was written with it in mind, which allowed them to drop subtle hints about it and not have it come out of nowhere. Sitcoms tend to do this too on a smaller scale in an individual episode, where a dead character or hallucinated character is only interacting with one specific person and the rest of the cast ignores them, then at the end it is revealed they aren't alive.
A twist like the "I am your father" works even if it wasn't planned from the start because, while unexpected, it isn't something that couldn't work in universe. They even do a small retcon with the "Vader killed your father" lines to explain how it fits. It also works because it takes place in the middle of a planned trilogy. You can have a big twist like that came out near the end of the movie because now you have a whole other movie to explore the effect that twist has on the world, and it very clearly had a huge influence on the way Return of the Jedi ended. Shifting gears to GoT, it was the same deal with Ned's death. He was set up to be one of the big main characters, who in most examples of popular media survive potential executions. He didn't. But, it made sense in universe, and it set off a bunch of plot threads after the fact.
People like Rian Johnson don't understand why the above twists work. There's no payoff, and because the twists aren't planned for anything but surprise value, they don't want to do any foreshadowing to set them up and risk them being discovered. And, since the only purpose is to subvert expectations, after said twist happens they never really explore the fallout and consequences because they are too concerned with coming up with a new twist. Anyone who is thinking about writing a twist or doing something to subvert expectations needs to think about the "so what" effect afterwards. What does your twist do for the rest of the story? How do you plan to follow up on it? If you're just making a twist for the sake of having a twist, it will be surprising, sure, but it won't be good. And, depending on how badly it was bungled, it might even hurt the story because now you're impacting all the other stuff that had been planned. With long lasting series, it can undo years of planned character growth or development. Even on a smaller scale, it can make viewers feel like a section was just filler or a time waster and should have been cut to focus on more important scenes. That was a big thing with Rian Johnson IMO, especially with all the self-contained Finn scenes that went nowhere and ultimately did nothing to add to the rest of the movie.
A twist like the "I am your father" works even if it wasn't planned from the start because, while unexpected, it isn't something that couldn't work in universe. They even do a small retcon with the "Vader killed your father" lines to explain how it fits. It also works because it takes place in the middle of a planned trilogy. You can have a big twist like that came out near the end of the movie because now you have a whole other movie to explore the effect that twist has on the world, and it very clearly had a huge influence on the way Return of the Jedi ended. Shifting gears to GoT, it was the same deal with Ned's death. He was set up to be one of the big main characters, who in most examples of popular media survive potential executions. He didn't. But, it made sense in universe, and it set off a bunch of plot threads after the fact.
People like Rian Johnson don't understand why the above twists work. There's no payoff, and because the twists aren't planned for anything but surprise value, they don't want to do any foreshadowing to set them up and risk them being discovered. And, since the only purpose is to subvert expectations, after said twist happens they never really explore the fallout and consequences because they are too concerned with coming up with a new twist. Anyone who is thinking about writing a twist or doing something to subvert expectations needs to think about the "so what" effect afterwards. What does your twist do for the rest of the story? How do you plan to follow up on it? If you're just making a twist for the sake of having a twist, it will be surprising, sure, but it won't be good. And, depending on how badly it was bungled, it might even hurt the story because now you're impacting all the other stuff that had been planned. With long lasting series, it can undo years of planned character growth or development. Even on a smaller scale, it can make viewers feel like a section was just filler or a time waster and should have been cut to focus on more important scenes. That was a big thing with Rian Johnson IMO, especially with all the self-contained Finn scenes that went nowhere and ultimately did nothing to add to the rest of the movie.
This. There are so many better ways he could've done this, but he somehow managed to go with the absolute worst one.
Something I feel like that should also be mentioned is that Isayama seems fucking adamant to make both sides bad, and for us to not know who to root for. This wouldn't be such a problem if the Kingdom of Marley (which is seriously the fucking name of the big bad kingdom ruling the entire world) hadn't been genociding people for well over 100 years, and wasn't clearly modeled after Nazi Germany. Seriously.
1930's attire? Check. German names? Check. Ghettos segregating people based on race? Check. Secret Police? Check. Genociding people? Check. Hell, just like @Secret Asshole said, the island is basically one big fucking concentration camp. And Isayama wants us to feel bad for these people. And he somehow finds a way to fuck it up even more.
Eren basically commits a terrorist attack by running off to the KoM, blowing up a building via turning into a titan and then rampaging down town. He massacres a fuck ton of civilians, and for what? Well, the in-series explanation was to make war between Paradis Island, and the Kingdom of
But seriously, I highly suspect that Isayama also did it so we would feel bad for the two dozen new characters he introduced, and that we would begin to like them more than the old cast. Which no. Sorry to tell you this Isayama, but I don't feel bad for them. I don't feel bad for the Nazis. I'm just pissed that Eren sunk to their level. That's it.
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Oh God, I forgot about how he wants us to feel bad for Marley, that dumb fucking Jap. You have to understand, nobody likes any character from
Another big problem is that Isayama doesn't really understand history. He's clearly going for a WWII analogue, but the Allies firbombed the living fuck out of Dresden and allowed the Russians to get to Berlin first. The thing is: Both of these things were horrific, but they were miles better than letting Germany win. Yes they were mistakes. But letting Germany win would have been an unmitigated disaster. The fucking diotic time-skip happens. We don't know, and still don't, why he randomly decides to do it. Obviously the best time for Eren to do a 'firebombing' of Marley is as soon as he finds out because he's been portrayed as full of rage. He doesn't give himself time to fully process this information and goes full Dresden. He's seen his friends, loved ones, devoured alive. Also this shit has been happening for centuries too. And he finds out its not because of anything significant, but because he has
I still don't care Eren killed civilians. This Kingdom has been killing people for over a century in the most horrific way alive, keeping them in the dark and torturing them. Every Marley character deserves death, I really don't care. Isayama is having a huge problem rectifying this fact is that nobody sees it the way he wants to, for these reasons: All those monstrous Titans? They're people Nazi Germany turned into huge, man-eating creatures and dropped them off on the island. So yes. They experiment on civilians, turn them into man-eating creatures, because the only way to turn back into human is to eat a human titan, so they instinctively eat all humans they see. They've kept people in a concentration camp for centuries, inducing untold amounts of human misery from being there as well as the horror of their own scientifically altered people eating the people in the concentration camp. They've killed hundreds upon thousands of men, women, children and the elderly. And feel no guilt from doing so. At the start of AoT, there's around 500k people living on the island, and the plot is basically the Nazi Germany Analogue coming in with Titans to eliminate them. Not quickly. Bust open the walls so the Titans eat them all slowly alive, and have the rest starve to death. The only crime these people committed are sharing a bloodline with bad people that no longer exist.
He wants you to feel for these people because Eren went HAM on them one time. He wants you to feel sorry for people actively genociding another because they're extreme racists. Are you fucking high? Are you huffing binding glue? Do you have something wrong in your brain box? NOBODY feels sorry for these faggots, only the most densest of people. But of course, Isayama will crater his story with no survivors, because its what he wants. He doesn't want a 'black and white story', like with Game of Thrones. Faggot, you're the one who picked Nazis as the other side. You don't GET to have a story with sides of grey, because when you choose Nazis, your story is basically cut and fucking dry. BECAUSE NOBODY SIDES WITH NAZIS EXCEPT MAYBE YOU DUMB JAPS. And the spaghetti Niggers. But they did nothing during WWII except get their shit pushed in so everyone sort of forgets about them.
Its just really bad right now. I don't even know what the fuck he's going for, but its going to be bad. The only good thing about Attack on Titan exploding in Isayama's face is getting normies the fuck out of anime.
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