Again, the author badly wants to surprise the reader and guards information so tightly that the audience isn’t even aware that information is being withheld. It can also leave them feeling manipulated because they were denied the tools to see where the story might go. This can cause the audience to give up on theorizing because they know they don’t have the information to make a reasonable guess. The writer badly wants to surprise the reader with a twist, so writes in a secretive fashion: unreliable narrators, missing scenes, time skips, and generally making it clear to the audience that information is being withheld. Sometimes it leaves the reader thinking, “Wow, they actually went there.” The genre subversion throws out the usual rules of the genre to make some kind of statement about it. After reading or watching a few stories in a genre, the audience has a pretty good idea of where these things go. Westworld Season 1 is a great recent example. When they find the solution, the audience wants to rewatch/reread to look for all the clues they missed.
As the story goes on, possible solutions get pruned one at a time. The audience treats the story as a puzzle and comes up with many solutions.
Subvert expectations meaning full#
This leads to a deep level of engagement, with water cooler talk and vibrant online forums full of fan theories.
The audience know they are missing information and are looking for clues.
There are a lot of ways to handle this, and they often stem from the motives of the author. You want the audience to think the story is going one way, then jerk the wheel to the left and drive the plot somewhere else. As the author, your job is to control the flow of information, misdirect, build multiple sets of possibilities, and set expectations. When you want to surprise readers, or have plot twists, it affects how you write. I’m going to use a few major events from the show as examples, so if you haven’t finished the series, click away now because there will be spoilers. After the finale of Game of Thrones, I’ve seen the phrase “subverting expectations” being used as a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for “bad writing.” So let’s talk about plot twists.
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