"NO WAY!"
It's not the big climactic battle, the heroic victory, the villain's plotting or demise that gets me. Oh no. It's the plot twist. It's the moment where the whole story gets turned on its head, where the unpredictable happens. I love it when you've been led to believe one thing the entire story, then all of a sudden get blindsided by the fact you had failed to consider.
Some of the best plot twists, I think, come after many, many minor twists. I love it when a storyteller knocks off several possible twists you might be thinking of as you read, watch or listen before knocking the wind out of you with the real plot twist. By that point you're so sucked in to a particular self-conceived expectation that the plot twist leaves your jaw dangling.
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| "No way!" from Disney's Wreck It Ralph |
- The King-Candy-is-Turbo reveal from Disney's Wreck It Ralph.
- The Hans reveal in Disney's Frozen.
- The Scabbers-is-Wormtail twist from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban.
Then there are the "And they lived happily ever----Wait a minute!" plot twists, like these:
- Here's a relatively cliched example to start; the overlooked surviving monster egg/baby.
- Loki's appearance at the end of Thor, after he supposedly died, when the Tesseract was revealed.
- "Fallon was gone." - from my own book The Elements and the Exodus.
Plot twists are what make stories interesting. They're what grab the attention of readers and bring out the demands for a sequel. What are some of your favorite plots twists? and why?
Plot twists make me so angry. Not angry as in I hate the story, but angry as in 'why didn't I see this coming?'. I literally yell 'NO' when they happen, and usually a character goes on my never trust a person like these people list.
ReplyDeleteI've met a lot of people who feel the same way. Myself included at times. :-) Sometimes the twist just destroys your expectations of a person, doesn't it?
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