Secret Asshole
Expert in things that never, ever happened
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- Joined
- Jan 18, 2017
If you aren’t used to my threads or posts, this is going to be long as fuck. So if you don’t want to read some asshole’s novel on how story-telling has shit itself in the past few years, I don’t blame you. I’m also spoiling Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Attack on Titan. Kinda.
So, there’s been this recent trend in a LOT of media I’ve noticed. Its sort of creeped in very slowly, but very surely into a lot of things. I believe it got super-popular with Game of Thrones once it got to mega-hit status. Something that started out so beautiful, turning into a festering pile of shit. I know it got meme’d and got into the psyche of pop-culture with The Last Jedi, but it started long before that. Especially in what I would call the genre media: Fantasy, Science Fiction and Anime (if you’re not a Weeb, I’ll explain. If you don’t care, you can skip the anime bits, but its important to my point as infecting the ‘genre fiction' as a whole).
What subverting expectations is, basically in a sense, playing a trick on your audience. The Prestige brilliantly explains subverting expectations and how to do it well in basically two and a half minutes:
This is how subverting expectations works, in. Essentially, its a narrative magic trick. However, you’re ALWAYS hinting to your audience that something is off, something isn’t right, and what they are expecting to happen in your story, might not happen as they imagine. But the point is: You let them in on your trick. I mean, not so much as The Prestige does, as it directly tell it to your face its going to trick you. But narratively, everything is there. The point is, as Michael Caine says, ‘Making something disappear, it isn’t enough. You have to bring it back.’ And that’s exactly what you have to do when you subvert any narrative. You MUST bring it thematically, tonally, narratively, back to a place where it makes sense within your story-telling trick. If you don’t bring it back….
…you end up with an anti-climax. A word mostly forgotten nowadays, because when a writer today says ‘subvert expectations’, they mean ‘Anti-Climax’. What writers and creators are doing is pretty much ego tripping, pulling the carpet from out under their audiences thinking that they’re brilliant and leaving their audience going:
They read all the online theories and are SO DESPERATE for tricking them with ‘mystery boxes’ that lead to fucking NOTHING. Any asshole can do this. Its piss easy. Doing it well, like most things, is extremely difficult, takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and requires you to INTIMATELY know your narrative, more than your audience does. The more long-form your narrative, the harder this is to do. Because subverting expectations properly requires you to have a concrete plan. You must know EARLY in the work. You can’t be like ‘Oh that’s cool’ and do it half-way in, or even a third. You will fuck your audience over if you do this, because you can’t expect to diverge dramatically from where you were going and keep that original audience on a different narrative thread. If you’re going to make the hero the villain or vice-versa, there MUST be threads there that can be traced back, so when your audience goes back for seconds, its there for them to see and extremely gratifying.
Which is why a lot of one-off movies do this so well and a lot of series that try this die, flat on their face. Often these long-form series have huge fanbases that dissect works which often have huge gaps of time before they come out. The problem is there has become this weird obsession with keeping ahead of your audience to where they’ve figured out where you want to go, so you begin to pull your narrative in directions which it doesn’t fit so that it completely breaks apart. And then people think they’re geniuses for doing this.
Star Wars set up J.J. Abrams infamous mystery boxes, only for basically every single plot strand to be completely nullified by Rain Johnson who somehow thought this was good storytelling by delivering a movie that goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Ok? Are you a brain-dead faggot? What were you hoping to accomplish? Your audience is paying you billions, you’re not an indie creator anymore fuckwit. I guess by ignoring every single mystery set-up by your predecessor or making their outcomes massively mediocre, disrespect characters so they no longer are in any way recognizable and have no characterization or real narrative you’ll be thought of as a genius. No wait, you killed the IP. Oh well.
Game of Thrones got obsessed with its fandom and CONSTANTLY looked for ways to make sure it stayed ahead of them. Except the fanbase was so massive, everything you would ever do was described out in detail. So…they did retarded shit no one thought out because no one was retarded enough to see it. Ok. That’s one dynamic way to crater an IP, give them points for creativity. No one figured out they were quite that dumbfuck mental to do what they did.
Attack on Titan went from an interesting, post-apocalyptic, medieval horror setting to a boring, ‘Game of Thrones in World War I /II except with Titans as Dragons’, replete with ‘shocking’ character deaths, pseudo-magic and (possible) time travel, nonsensical character actions with little to no explanation and no real decent narrative that strings together its plot or really ever recovers from losing its interesting setting in its first third. For me, ‘Attack on Titan’ lost me a long time ago once an interesting world was thrown away with a stupid fucking basement reveal and idiotic timeskip, which basically destroyed narrative cohesion and characterization. Which means AoT has (or had) NO IDEA where its going (or was) and the author is going to fill in the gaps later to make excuses for what’s going on (you will never prove to me the dude had a plan when he times-kipped. He basically shifted the entire narrative of his work from horror to ‘Game of Thrones’. He had no fucking clue where it was going once he did the narrative, thematic and tonal shift). While AoT isn’t finished, the creator apparently loved Game of Thrones Season 8, which means he gets an erection from franchise-destroying elements. I’d recommend getting involved only to laugh at the resulting fanbase implosion. If you're looking for something that will satisfy you, stick to other weeb shit.
Lastly, I’ve noticed a lot of these symptoms comes from normie infection. That is, a lot of the three franchises I’ve mentioned above have become replete with people who aren’t sci-fi fans, aren’t fantasy fans and aren’t anime fans. Which leads to a massive explosion in fan theories and basically outlining your work before you’ve even finished it. And this leads to authors obsessing about subverting expectations, for which they’ve not narratively prepared for at all. Which then means a lot of fan-fiction becomes BETTER and MORE gratifying than the actual work. Because it makes more narrative sense. Which will inevitably mean no audience will ever trust your lying, faggot, pseudo-intellectual ass ever again. At least I hope. The normies can go get fucked as far as I'm concerned.
Which is why genres seemed burdened with this problem than traditional dramas or other sorts of story-telling. You still want to tell a unique story, but you have/get/need this mass market appeal, so your fans are basically outpacing you, so to outpace them, you essentially have to betray their trust and fuck them over to feel like you had a unique story. Or something. The problem is, that you end up with two acts in the prestige. You never give back what you took away from your audience. You don't have to leave them with a happy ending, or all the heroes winning or even the villains or ANYBODY getting what they want. Your obligation as a creator is to not waste their fucking time. When you don't replace what you took from your audience, you leave them ungratified, felt you wasted their time and alienated them to feel like some genius, when all you did was fuck up your story by writing an anti-climax. Which is pretty much what ‘subverting expectations’ in genre fiction now means and is code for.
Here, I’ll explain and give some examples as to what an anti-climax looks like:
So, there’s been this recent trend in a LOT of media I’ve noticed. Its sort of creeped in very slowly, but very surely into a lot of things. I believe it got super-popular with Game of Thrones once it got to mega-hit status. Something that started out so beautiful, turning into a festering pile of shit. I know it got meme’d and got into the psyche of pop-culture with The Last Jedi, but it started long before that. Especially in what I would call the genre media: Fantasy, Science Fiction and Anime (if you’re not a Weeb, I’ll explain. If you don’t care, you can skip the anime bits, but its important to my point as infecting the ‘genre fiction' as a whole).
What subverting expectations is, basically in a sense, playing a trick on your audience. The Prestige brilliantly explains subverting expectations and how to do it well in basically two and a half minutes:
This is how subverting expectations works, in. Essentially, its a narrative magic trick. However, you’re ALWAYS hinting to your audience that something is off, something isn’t right, and what they are expecting to happen in your story, might not happen as they imagine. But the point is: You let them in on your trick. I mean, not so much as The Prestige does, as it directly tell it to your face its going to trick you. But narratively, everything is there. The point is, as Michael Caine says, ‘Making something disappear, it isn’t enough. You have to bring it back.’ And that’s exactly what you have to do when you subvert any narrative. You MUST bring it thematically, tonally, narratively, back to a place where it makes sense within your story-telling trick. If you don’t bring it back….
…you end up with an anti-climax. A word mostly forgotten nowadays, because when a writer today says ‘subvert expectations’, they mean ‘Anti-Climax’. What writers and creators are doing is pretty much ego tripping, pulling the carpet from out under their audiences thinking that they’re brilliant and leaving their audience going:
They read all the online theories and are SO DESPERATE for tricking them with ‘mystery boxes’ that lead to fucking NOTHING. Any asshole can do this. Its piss easy. Doing it well, like most things, is extremely difficult, takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and requires you to INTIMATELY know your narrative, more than your audience does. The more long-form your narrative, the harder this is to do. Because subverting expectations properly requires you to have a concrete plan. You must know EARLY in the work. You can’t be like ‘Oh that’s cool’ and do it half-way in, or even a third. You will fuck your audience over if you do this, because you can’t expect to diverge dramatically from where you were going and keep that original audience on a different narrative thread. If you’re going to make the hero the villain or vice-versa, there MUST be threads there that can be traced back, so when your audience goes back for seconds, its there for them to see and extremely gratifying.
Which is why a lot of one-off movies do this so well and a lot of series that try this die, flat on their face. Often these long-form series have huge fanbases that dissect works which often have huge gaps of time before they come out. The problem is there has become this weird obsession with keeping ahead of your audience to where they’ve figured out where you want to go, so you begin to pull your narrative in directions which it doesn’t fit so that it completely breaks apart. And then people think they’re geniuses for doing this.
Star Wars set up J.J. Abrams infamous mystery boxes, only for basically every single plot strand to be completely nullified by Rain Johnson who somehow thought this was good storytelling by delivering a movie that goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Ok? Are you a brain-dead faggot? What were you hoping to accomplish? Your audience is paying you billions, you’re not an indie creator anymore fuckwit. I guess by ignoring every single mystery set-up by your predecessor or making their outcomes massively mediocre, disrespect characters so they no longer are in any way recognizable and have no characterization or real narrative you’ll be thought of as a genius. No wait, you killed the IP. Oh well.
Game of Thrones got obsessed with its fandom and CONSTANTLY looked for ways to make sure it stayed ahead of them. Except the fanbase was so massive, everything you would ever do was described out in detail. So…they did retarded shit no one thought out because no one was retarded enough to see it. Ok. That’s one dynamic way to crater an IP, give them points for creativity. No one figured out they were quite that dumbfuck mental to do what they did.
Attack on Titan went from an interesting, post-apocalyptic, medieval horror setting to a boring, ‘Game of Thrones in World War I /II except with Titans as Dragons’, replete with ‘shocking’ character deaths, pseudo-magic and (possible) time travel, nonsensical character actions with little to no explanation and no real decent narrative that strings together its plot or really ever recovers from losing its interesting setting in its first third. For me, ‘Attack on Titan’ lost me a long time ago once an interesting world was thrown away with a stupid fucking basement reveal and idiotic timeskip, which basically destroyed narrative cohesion and characterization. Which means AoT has (or had) NO IDEA where its going (or was) and the author is going to fill in the gaps later to make excuses for what’s going on (you will never prove to me the dude had a plan when he times-kipped. He basically shifted the entire narrative of his work from horror to ‘Game of Thrones’. He had no fucking clue where it was going once he did the narrative, thematic and tonal shift). While AoT isn’t finished, the creator apparently loved Game of Thrones Season 8, which means he gets an erection from franchise-destroying elements. I’d recommend getting involved only to laugh at the resulting fanbase implosion. If you're looking for something that will satisfy you, stick to other weeb shit.
Lastly, I’ve noticed a lot of these symptoms comes from normie infection. That is, a lot of the three franchises I’ve mentioned above have become replete with people who aren’t sci-fi fans, aren’t fantasy fans and aren’t anime fans. Which leads to a massive explosion in fan theories and basically outlining your work before you’ve even finished it. And this leads to authors obsessing about subverting expectations, for which they’ve not narratively prepared for at all. Which then means a lot of fan-fiction becomes BETTER and MORE gratifying than the actual work. Because it makes more narrative sense. Which will inevitably mean no audience will ever trust your lying, faggot, pseudo-intellectual ass ever again. At least I hope. The normies can go get fucked as far as I'm concerned.
Which is why genres seemed burdened with this problem than traditional dramas or other sorts of story-telling. You still want to tell a unique story, but you have/get/need this mass market appeal, so your fans are basically outpacing you, so to outpace them, you essentially have to betray their trust and fuck them over to feel like you had a unique story. Or something. The problem is, that you end up with two acts in the prestige. You never give back what you took away from your audience. You don't have to leave them with a happy ending, or all the heroes winning or even the villains or ANYBODY getting what they want. Your obligation as a creator is to not waste their fucking time. When you don't replace what you took from your audience, you leave them ungratified, felt you wasted their time and alienated them to feel like some genius, when all you did was fuck up your story by writing an anti-climax. Which is pretty much what ‘subverting expectations’ in genre fiction now means and is code for.
Here, I’ll explain and give some examples as to what an anti-climax looks like:
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