Subverting Expectations: The Megathread - Or How Baby Dick Creators ‘Sort of Forgot’ What an Anti-Climax Is

I have been watching a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock movies latley, and it got me thinking.
He managed to subvert the expectation with style when it came to what people expected to see from his movies.
When Pyscho came out, people thought it was going to another one of his thrillers like North by nothwest, dial m for murder etc, but nobody, nobody was prepard for this:
In one single scene, he subverted everything. the whole "man on the run from the law", "the femme Fatale" etc, nothing of that matter. the main charchter is dead and BAM, we follow Norman Bates.
He never went "hahahaha! look how smart I am" like people would do today.
 
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Foltest said:
I have been watching a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock movies latley, and it got me thinking.
He managed to subvert the expectation with style when it came to what people expected to see from his movies.
When Pyscho came out, people thought it was going to another one of his thrillers like North by nothwest, dial m for murder etc, but nobody, nobody was prepard for this:
In one single scene, he subverted everything. the whole "man on the run from the law", "the femme Fatale" etc, nothing of that matter. the main charchter is dead and BAM, we follow Norman Bates.
He never went "hahahaha! look how smart I am" like people would do today.
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I might’ve posted this already, but it’s because “subverting expectations” is just the first step. In order for it to WORK, you need to give the viewers something better than what they initially expected.

Current-year hacks stop at Step 1 without realizing that the only expectation they’re subverting is the viewer’s expectation of a good story.
 
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Short film where I am playing poker. Thick atmosphere, the kind in any gambling movie with the “big gamble” and it’s framed exactly like that sort of scene here.
It turns out my hand has four aces, and I fold. Later we see me moving out of my foreclosed house.

versus

Same set up but the money I lose is marked and tracked and this was all a sting. And finding out I folded unluckily outs me as the mole.

That’s the idea.
 
Gar For Archer said:
I might’ve posted this already, but it’s because “subverting expectations” is just the first step. In order for it to WORK, you need to give the viewers something better than what they initially expected.
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The trick is to give you what you didn't even know you wanted.
 
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fishercat said:
I gave up on it when my favorite character died halfway through for a bullshit reason.
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I Gave up on it when the "Trip to the cabin" got interrupted and instead of trying to go there as soon as possible The Plot Meandered into some Rebellion bullshit for no reason, anyone who defended the show after that deserve the ending they got.

It was Clear the Writer had no idea what was actually in Erin's Dad's basement from that moment and only answer to "What is in this Mystery box" is "An ass pull"
 
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Honka Honka Burning Love said:
I Gave up on it when the "Trip to the cabin" got interrupted and instead of trying to go there as soon as possible The Plot Meandered into some Rebellion bullshit for no reason, anyone who defended the show after that deserve the ending they got.

It was Clear the Writer had no idea what was actually in Erin's Dad's basement from that moment and only answer to "What is in this Mystery box" is "An ass pull"
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Tbh members of the royal family that get the founding titan's memories not wanting to talk about it or leave the island makes so much more sense now. Imagine trying to explain to someone in-universe all the bullshit that led up to that point. I would become a depressed recluse too.
 
fishercat said:
Tbh members of the royal family that get the founding titan's memories not wanting to talk about it or leave the island makes so much more sense now. Imagine trying to explain to someone in-universe all the bullshit that led up to that point. I would become a depressed recluse too.
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"Listen there were some fucking pigs and a retard slave"
 
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fishercat said:
"A slave girl has been making titans out of sand in a sort of weird dream dimension and I wish I was making this up."
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"Okay listen, ya'll don't want to know..its stupid and autistic..lets just forget the Cabin exists..use Erin's power to Murder the titans on the Island and let him eat the Beast Titan's power so nobody can destroy new walls..and forget the rest of the world exists"
 
AnOminous said:
This reboot treadmill is making me hate everything and just instantly assuming that anything remotely related to a previously existing IP is going to be absolute garbage and that everyone involved with it should be forced to dig their own mass graves and shot into them before they can perpetrate whatever the next atrocity is.
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I think the worst thing to come out is not the reboots themselves. The reboots are like the knife that presses into your heart and kills you slowly. What is worse is the fact that there is nothing to replace what was once great. Ever since TLoU, GoT and AoT failed, no media has replicated the same success of those franchises because of the fear that they will repeat the same mistakes. What the people will do instead is recreate or half-ass once great concepts done someplace else and think of that as original, then the cycle repeats because they probably forgot how to write an ending or failed to grasp what made the greats fall.

Why do you think we barely have a few originals in the first place? The anime industry, games industry, movies industry? Barely any of these industries have anything that resembles an original act and all feel like the authors were trying to get inspiration from the greats, when in reality all they are doing is copy and pasting what shit sticks and go with it.

wtfNeedSignUp said:
SSSS.Dynazenon might have one of the lamest subverting expectations moment I've seen. I'll spoiler it since it is still ongoing:
The main heroine has a massive complex over her sister seemingly jumping from a tower to her death, though the police ruled it as an accident. There are a lot of hints it wasn't accidental, that the sister had problems with her family, her club played cruel pranks on her to get youtube upvotes (with one of those clubmates being their teacher), that her boyfriend wasn't there for her. We follow this plotline like 60% of the show runtime, and it's a fucking mecha show. In the latest episode the heroine is trapped inside a mecha kaiju that traps its victims in their past (arbitrary as fuck) and she gets to meet her sister in the day she died (this mecha can extrapolate the past apperantly) and she learns that.... it really was an accident and the sister wasn't depressed or murdered.

This really comes as the creators just fucking wasting the viewers time, that discovery didn't really give anything to the story, the themes, or advance the character besides removing her only characterization. At best you can say there is a theme of not sticking to the past, but even that's very partial to the cast and is generic as fuck. To pour salt on the wound, the mecha fight afterwards had the robot take few minutes to built himself into its ugly super form, only to take out a knife that makes a circle of death that instantly killed the mecha.

Fuck this show and fuck Trigger.
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Why the fuck are you watching Triggershit? Did you not learn from Franxx and the amount of retarded people that spent their wasted life on that?
 
Foltest said:
I have been watching a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock movies latley, and it got me thinking.
He managed to subvert the expectation with style when it came to what people expected to see from his movies.
When Pyscho came out, people thought it was going to another one of his thrillers like North by nothwest, dial m for murder etc, but nobody, nobody was prepard for this:
In one single scene, he subverted everything. the whole "man on the run from the law", "the femme Fatale" etc, nothing of that matter. the main charchter is dead and BAM, we follow Norman Bates.
He never went "hahahaha! look how smart I am" like people would do today.
Click to expand...
Coming back here for a sec; the reason he killed Janet Leigh off early is not so much to subvert expectations, but for a bit more practical. In Hitchcock's time, the movie culture was more lacksidasical. People would just come in later or in the second act. They didn't much care to sit through the whole thing.

Janet Leigh was a big name at the time, so the audience figured she'd be in the movie for the whole time. So when they came in late, they had no fucking idea that she was already killed off. And killing off such a major star so soon was unheard of. This basically got people to come in and see the whole movie from the start to the end.

So while it was a subversion, it was also a meta move in order to get people to sit through an entire story instead of just coming and going. And it worked too, since people bought tickets again to see the start of the film. Hitchcock was also a giant asshole and troll too, but that's another story for another time.
 
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I don’t like it when rebooted stories change some elements but not others so the new story is actually not a fresh take on the original because the dramatic structure was changed only just enough to be a less rewarding version of its old self.
Know what I mean?
 
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Honka Honka Burning Love said:
I Gave up on it when the "Trip to the cabin" got interrupted and instead of trying to go there as soon as possible The Plot Meandered into some Rebellion bullshit for no reason, anyone who defended the show after that deserve the ending they got.

It was Clear the Writer had no idea what was actually in Erin's Dad's basement from that moment and only answer to "What is in this Mystery box" is "An ass pull"
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To be fair that sorta made sense why they did that, like I can excuse it but anyone who defends the shit that happens in the timeskip is a fucking idiot

I already went over how the racism for that is terrible, but since the ending, Eren's whole character is retarded. I won't write an essay but basically Isayama tried to be subversive by making the main character evil, but then it was revealed "uwu he actually wanted to help us all along" at the very end in the dumbest plan ever.

Basically all atrocities happen because Eren did not put an effort into changing his own destiny and relied on the deciding factor being his adopted sister wanting to bone him after he cockblocked her many times prior. It gets dumber with his real motivations being "I want my friends to live long lives" despite most of the characters being willing to die to win so he clearly does not give a shit what they think and ended up making the world despise his homeland enough to nuke it decades later. Basically the entire thing was trying to make a character who commits genocide seem humble and good intentioned despite being a massive retard in the very end.

WULULULULU said:
I think the worst thing to come out is not the reboots themselves. The reboots are like the knife that presses into your heart and kills you slowly. What is worse is the fact that there is nothing to replace what was once great. Ever since TLoU, GoT and AoT failed, no media has replicated the same success of those franchises because of the fear that they will repeat the same mistakes. What the people will do instead is recreate or half-ass once great concepts done someplace else and think of that as original, then the cycle repeats because they probably forgot how to write an ending or failed to grasp what made the greats fall.
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The issue with that statement is that all of those things failed for different reasons. TLoU became a failure because it never really should be a franchise and a major component of the original crew left by the time the sequel was developed. AOT had a case of the writer either sniffing his own farts to be some genius or deliberately crafted the dumbest ending of all time. As for GOT the issue with that is D&D can't make their own stories and need to rely on stuff made by more competent writers to get by and then wanted to jump ship to get the Star Wars money.

These franchises all have one thing in common though with all these factors and it's the egos of the writers which let their success get to them, and honestly it's good that nothing tried to replicate their success because something that successful will inevitably result in the writer becoming an egotistical maniac that is full of themselves. The issue with the subversion in the modern context is that many hacks just get high off of their own popularity and let outside stuff influence them instead of telling the story they wanted to tell.

That is why many great notable works of fiction work because the people behind it don't let fans or popularity dictate where they go.

tl;dr Modern "subversions" are the results of hack writers who are consumed with their own popularity and let the fandom partially influence their decisions whether it's to pander or piss them off
 
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I've always found it really confusing how M Night was relentlessly shit on for pioneering "X was the real monster all along" and then every Jordan Peel movie has "racism was the real monster all along" and everyone furiously sucks his dick so hard the black is coming off.
 
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Ruin said:
I've always found it really confusing how M Night was relentlessly shit on for pioneering "X was the real monster all along" and then every Jordan Peel movie has "racism was the real monster all along" and everyone furiously sucks his dick so hard the black is coming off.
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It's because M. Night's twists gradually became more stupid for stuff like ayy lmao's being weak to water, misadvertising a movie as a horror film, and killer trees along with portraying himself as a cool guy all the time.

Jordan Peele gets away with it since his movies appeal more towards those types of snobby critics who'd eat it all up and are accessible enough for average people to like it without going crazy like Shymalan. Basically he appealed to the right people and wasn't as over the top.
 
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Doctor of Autism said:
Jordan Peele gets away with it since his movies appeal more towards those types of snobby critics who'd eat it all up and are accessible enough for average people to like it without going crazy like Shymalan. Basically he appealed to the right people and wasn't as over the top.
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The concept of Get Out was pretty interesting to me. There's some pretty heavy foreshadowing regarding what's going on.

Us was a mistake.
 
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