It’s pretty common for a story to accidentally give away its mystery with heavy-handed foreshadowing or a limited pool of suspects, but some stories go a step further: they give their mysteries away on purpose. Instead of an exciting investigation, we get a fizzled-out dud. Mysteries generate their satisfaction by letting us solve them along with the protagonist, and if that doesn’t happen, all we have is a not-so-mysterious case of boredom. It might seem as though no storyteller would actually do that, but it’s common enough that I have plenty of examples to choose from.
1. Soon I Will Be Invincible
The big mystery of Austin Grossman’s superhero novel is what happened to Corefire. He’s the most powerful hero in the world,* and he’s missing. While the reasons we need to find him could be more compelling, that’s still a decent setup. It’s enough to get his old super team back together for a search, and they’ve got a prime suspect in mind: Corefire’s well-known nemesis, Dr. Impossible.
With this mystery hook in place, we can settle in for a story about superheroes investigating the fate of their lost comrade. Except… we already know Dr. Impossible didn’t do it. You see, Impossible has his own viewpoint chapters, and while he withholds a lot of information from us, one thing he’s clear about is that he doesn’t know what happened to Corefire either. Unless this story is so meta that Impossible can lie to the reader,* he’s a dead end.
In a more traditional narrative, it could be a really cool twist for the heroes to discover that Dr. Impossible was a red herring the whole time. But since we already know that, it’s not a twist. Instead, we spend most of the book watching our heroes follow a lead that we already know doesn’t go anywhere. It makes everything they do feel pointless, as if we could just skip forward until they figure out the truth.
Part of the problem is that Grossman doesn’t actually have a cool reveal at the end of this mystery. Instead, we eventually discover that Corefire was temporarily knocked out in a fight against a minor villain. He eventually recovered on his own (offscreen, of course) and then decided to fake his own death as part of a convoluted plan to catch Dr. Impossible and return him to prison. So despite the heroes spending most of the book investigating Corefire’s disappearance, there’s nothing for them to find.
The rest of the problem is that Grossman doesn’t actually seem interested in telling a story. Instead, we spend huge sections of the book delving into backstory for characters we barely know and have little reason to care about. Some critics call this “thought-provoking,” but for my money it’s just tiresome, and the book giving away its own mystery is a sign of problems to come.
2. Middlegame
Seanan McGuire’s trippy urban-fantasy novel features protagonists with the rhyming names of Roger and Dodger. They live across the country from each other, but as the story starts, they discover the ability to communicate with each other telepathically. That’s pretty cool, and it raises questions of why they have such an ability. It’s not hard to guess that they’re twins,* but where does the magic link come from and what are its implications?
Our heroes will spend most of the book figuring this out, but we apparently don’t have that kind of time. Instead, McGuire cuts over to alchemist and main antagonist James Reed, who helpfully explains what’s going on. It seems that James created Roger and Dodger as part of an attempt to manifest the Doctrine of Ethos, a magical MacGuffin that would give James ultimate power to fulfill his evil agenda. The Doctrine is too powerful to manifest all at once, so instead, James splits it into the two twins.
That’s very cool, and it puts the twins in a difficult position. To stop James, they have to realize their power, but this is exactly what James wants. What a conundrum! At least it would be, if the characters knew anything about it. Instead, they continue in ignorance for most of the book, while we readers know everything. In fact, McGuire spends a number of chapters explaining the extremely complex nature of Middlegame’s magic to us, all while the protagonists remain in the dark.
While this is happening, Roger and Dodger go through a series of tragedies and traumas, mostly caused by James’s agents meddling in their lives. These tribulations are well written and poignant, but it still feels like we’re waiting for the heroes to catch up with the plot so the story can start. Unfortunately, it takes so long for Roger and Dodger to look behind the curtain that by the time they do, the book is almost over.
Once the heroes figure out what’s going on, another problem raises its head: there’s such a huge gap between what we know and what they know that the only way to close it is for a side character to deliver some epic info dumps about the nature of magic and the villain’s plans. That kind of extreme exposition isn’t advisable anywhere, but it’s especially out of place in the final quarter of the book, when everything should be clicking together in preparation for the climax.
3. Stranger Things 2
The first season of Stranger Things ends by tying up most of its plot threads. The Demogorgon is destroyed, all our heroes are safe, and the evil government agents are all dead. However, there is one big mystery leading into season two: what happened to Eleven? The last we see of her in season one, she destroys the Demogorgon and disappears, presumably into the Upside Down. Then, as a coda, we see Hopper leaving a box of waffles out in the woods. That’s a little odd, since if Eleven is in the Upside Down, how can she get the waffles? Oh well, add that to the mystery for Mike and friends to solve next season, along with more pressing questions like how to get Eleven back.
Then season two arrives, and along with many other disappointments, we learn that while Eleven was indeed pulled into the Upside Down, it was only for a few minutes. She only had to walk about 20 feet to find a way back, at which point she let her friends think she was dead because the government might still be looking for her. That’s pretty contrived, as it would not have been hard to slip Mike a note without being seen.
More importantly, it immediately defuses one of the main reasons for watching season two in the first place. The threat of the Upside Down is still present, but Eleven’s disappearance made that threat personal. Attachment to the Stranger Things cast is very high, and the story matters more when it endangers characters we care about.
This fizzled-out mystery also signals season two’s most consistent problem: what to do with Eleven. She’s so powerful that she’d easily outshine the other characters if they were together. To avoid this problem, the writers shunt her off into unrelated side stories. First, she’s stuck in a cabin watching as Hopper transforms from an insightful investigator into a possessive jerkass. Then she peaces out to Chicago for an entire episode. Anything to keep her away from problems that could be easily solved by her psychic powers.
It didn’t have to be this way. If the writers had followed through on their mystery, we could have had a story where Eleven is still stuck in the Upside Down, only occasionally able to influence the real world so Millie Bobby Brown could still be in the show. Maybe she can even breach the dimensional barrier long enough to grab the waffles Hopper leaves out, but not long enough to bring herself back. That would have been a great mystery for the kids to investigate, and no one needed to visit Chicago.
4. A Memory Called Empire
In Arkady Martine’s Hugo-winning space-opera novel, protagonist Mahit is dispatched as Lsel Station’s new ambassador to the Teixcalaanli Empire. Oh boy, does she have a lot on her plate. Not only must she maintain Lsel’s independence in the face of Teixcalaan’s expansion, but she also has to solve her predecessor’s murder. Fantastic setup, but wait, there’s more! We also have hints of cosmic-horror-type aliens lurking beyond the borders of settled space. That’s very cool; I can’t wait for Mahit to learn more about that and…
She’s not going to learn more about the Cthulhu aliens, is she? I should have known. Instead, Mahit spends most of the book working on political intrigue and the aforementioned murder investigation. The Cthulhu aliens are still around, though, in the form of my greatest literary nemesis: interludes.* Occasionally, the main story will pause so Martine can add some exposition about how these Cthulhu aliens are still out there and will totally do something bad soon; just you wait.
Eventually, the Cthulhu aliens finally join Mahit’s story in the most awkward way possible: she gets a message from her boss that explains the aliens to her and then instructs her to use them as leverage to secure Lsel’s independence. This is actually two problems bumping into each other. The first is Martine spoiling the Cthulhu-alien mystery. The second is that Mahit doesn’t have any credible way to secure Lsel’s independence, so she has to get a deus-ex-alien message from home instead.
I run into this issue with clients all the time: they want something in their novel, but it doesn’t have anything to do with their story. There’s no connection between Mahit’s plot and the Cthulhu aliens, but Martine still wants the aliens around, presumably for book two. The only way the book can tell us about the aliens is with narrative-breaking interludes, and I can only assume their inclusion in the political climax was an attempt to give those interludes some payoff.
For the Cthulhu aliens to work, they would need to be part of Mahit’s story, and that’s a tall order. Mahit already has a lot going on, and she can’t really leave the Teixcalaanli capital due to her other plot commitments. The best revision I can suggest is for one of the imperial political players to already know about the Cthulhu aliens, and for that knowledge to be tied up in the murder of Mahit’s predecessor. That way, she’d at least have a reason to investigate both at the same time. Of course, it would be easier to cut the aliens entirely, but I know how attached authors can get to their cosmic-horror darlings.
5. Eternals
Marvel’s latest IP launch earns itself a special place on this list, as it spoils not one but two important mysteries. First, there’s the mystery of what Arishem and the Celestials are even doing on Earth in the first place. It’s pretty clear that they must be up to something; they wouldn’t send a team of superheroes just to fight a bunch of generic CGI monsters. Indeed, Arishem’s plan is to use the Earth as an incubator for a baby Celestial, with the tiny little side effect of destroying the Earth in the process.
Figuring that out seems like a pretty cool conflict, and it could have been if Arishem hadn’t immediately spilled the whole thing to protagonist Sersi. He literally pulls her aside for a moment and goes into full exposition mode, explaining the movie’s entire backstory and also how everyone on Earth is going to die. It’s not clear why he tells her this, since it doesn’t take an expert in human psychology to guess that Sersi wouldn’t be on board with the death of billions.
With this mystery spoiled, most of the movie has to fall back on gathering together its unusually large cast. To be fair, getting the team together can make for a good story, but it doesn’t really work in Eternals because there are just too many of them. This means there’s no time for any real conflict in each recruitment. The characters show up, the new team member doesn’t want to join, and then they very quickly change their mind. If the filmmakers weren’t interested in a mystery about Arishem’s goals, the characters should have just started out knowing them; that would at least have saved some time.
The second mystery is what happened to Ajak, the heroes’ former leader. At the beginning, we’re told she was killed by a monster, but that seems pretty suspicious. And indeed, it’s actually one of the heroes who killed her: a Superman-wannabe named Ikaris. How do we find this out? A flashback where we see Ikaris kill Ajak. Oh boy.
In fairness, this kind of plot doesn’t have to be a mystery at all. Instead, stories can use the dramatic irony to build tension: we know Ikaris is a murderer, but the other characters don’t, so they might give him the chance to strike again! Eternals doesn’t do that, though. Ikaris has no plans to kill anyone else, at least not by surprise.
Instead, the reveal-flashback seems to exist primarily to obscure how little evidence there actually is that Ikaris killed Ajak. When the other characters accuse him, all they know is that Ajak confided in Ikaris more than he initially let on. This dubious leap of logic would be more obvious if we hadn’t already seen the murder happen.
Eternals is a mess from many angles, but the self-spoilers manage to stand out because of how awkward they are and because there are two of them. I wouldn’t even know where to start fixing them, since the root cause is too much story crammed into a short run time.
Not every story needs a mystery, but it’s disappointing when there’s potential for one that goes to waste. If a writer isn’t interested in adding mystery to their plot, then the best option is to not write mysterious things. That way, no one’s disappointed when a giant cosmic entity pulls the hero aside for a bit of Marvel wiki-diving.
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Seems like “Soon I Will Be Invincible” is becoming a regular here…
I think the book would have won a lot from cutting Dr. Impossible’s viewpoint entirely. It would have won just as much from viciously cutting back the backstories to, perhaps, one tenth.
It’s true that the mystery in this book really falls flat. As the heroes are so sure that Dr. Impossible must be behind it (which is a valid theory for them, they don’t have the reader’s viewpoint), there’s no research in any other direction. It doesn’t help that the whole ‘mystery’ turns out to be a convoluted plan to catch a guy who hadn’t even broken out of jail (if I remember correctly) when the superhero mysteriously vanished. You basically wait for the big reveal the whole time and in the end it’s just a ‘what?!’ moment.
Since that book is a little darker, in terms of superheros (such as Damsel having bulimia), Corefire could’ve been very depressed from all the pressure and have needed to go away because he would have a mental breakdown otherwise. It would’ve been interesting to explore how putting a person on a pedestal can reduce them to an idol, even to their colleagues, and the dangers of forgetting that that person is human, too.
That would definitely have been a possibility.
Re-arranging a few things could also have worked. Impossible breaks out first and CoreFire disappears after a meeting, going to ground because what Impossible does needs watching and he can’t stop it yet.
Interesting…
In earlier articles you warned that hiding info too long, in order to have a cool reveal, can hurt a story
Here you warn against giving certain info too early, especially if the main characters don’t know what we know and spend much of the story trying to find out
These two points are not actually contradictory, but they do show that SO MUCH of writing is a balancing act between too little and too much
I think it’s two different situations.
Carnival Row – one of the stories hurt by a late reveal – keeps an important fact (the main character is a fairy, too, but had his wings removed when he was little) hidden too long. We can’t get invested in the whole story because it’s not clear what stakes the main character has this way. If we knew he is a fairy and keeping it silent, it would make way more sense.
Soon I Will Be Invincible, on the other hand, shows us from the beginning that the heroes are on the wrong track – Dr. Impossible himself tells us he had nothing to do with it and it’s valid (as I mentioned above, he was still in jail when CoreFire disappeared). Yet, the hero side of the story continues to focus on proving Dr. Impossible did it and finding out how he did it, even though the audience already knows they’re barking up the wrong tree. When the book can get away from all that backstory for a bit, that is…
If I remember correctly, Phylostrate had no idea he was a half-fairy. He only found out when we, the audience, did.
There were heavy-handed hints, like him and the heroine hovering while having sex and her wings glowing. The heroine afterwards said that only happens to fairies when they have sex with other fairies, not with humans, but I rolled my eyes at that and thought that they were setting up a “true love that surpasses species” kind of thing.
The whole clip the kids’ wings thing had been kept a tight secret in-universe, so even Phylostrate’s landlady/lover didn’t think twice of the scars she saw on his back.
Still, as this was the only explanation for him being so interested in the rights of fairies, it should have been uncovered before. Third episode of eight was pretty late. Before that, he came across as the ‘white saviour’ type – someone who saves another social group while being a member of the privileged one himself. That’s a tired trope and will have driven people away.
For the record, Rycroft (Phylostrate is his last name) absolutely knows that he’s half fairy. It’s a little confusing because the show is hiding that information from us, the audience, but Rycroft does know. He’s aware of another character “keeping his secret,” he’s lying when he says the scars on his back are battle wounds, and he has an argument with Vignette about hiding his identity.
What Rycroft doesn’t know is exactly who his parents were.
Actually, both pieces of advice derive from one guiding principle of Mythcreants: stick as close as possible to the main characters’ viewpoint. They warn against keeping hidden information that the POV characters know, and against revealing information that are a mystery to the POV characters. Those aren’t contradictory at all.
Well said : )
There actually are times when giving the audience information the protagonist doesn’t know can be helpful for building tension (the dramatic irony Oren mentioned), but it has to be weighed against the downsides, so it’s not as useful as visual stories make it look. For instance, inserting a villain viewpoint to talk about the villain’s evil plan is supposed to create tension, but more often than not it only makes the villain look like a joke. Other times, keeping the threat mysterious creates more tension than revealing what it is. But sometimes it’s still a good move.
In some of these cases like Eternals and the Arishem reveal, the audience is indeed on the same page as the protagonist, the problem is that all the information is handed to the protagonist on a silver platter, whereas making them work to puzzle through a mystery would have made for a better story. The problem there is a lack of conflict and agency.
Eternals most incredible feat is to being able to let people down at every level.
The moment Ikaris got into view i knew he was a bad guy, and the film tries too hard to let you know.
When he returns and he is “the other guy” to Jon Snow’s Dane Withman, other stories would have redeemed him, this didn’t because he was the bad guy, letting down people in for a romantic drama.
When they get All Powerfull Celestials losing control of a lifeform they created not once but twice, they let down Celestials fans. They also waste an interesting twist on the Deviants, when they realize they were created to destroy.
When they used Jonathan Hickman SHIELD’s run plot of a newborn Celestial but changed it enough to deprive it from any relevance (the new Celestial would born into the sun, by chance, and was up to SHIELD to solve the situation without plot superpowers) they made a combo by copying Galactus’ modus operandi of killing a whole planet to survive, hence making more difficult to use him in subsequent films. Which let down Fantastic Four fans.
They even let down people by advertising Keith Harrington as the Black Knight just for him to not appear in the movie (just 3 seconds and a mention to the Ebony Blade).
It’s the second most ashaming Marvel media only topped by Agents of SHIELD.
I don’t agree when it comes to Eternals. The throughline of that story isn’t a mystery or a investigation – it’s the dilemma of their faith in the Celestials vs their love of humanity vs their love of each other. Which I think is the right call, because that dilemma is easier to explore when there’s ten of them for the arguments and sides and motives to fall out among.
For a more specific example, in the case of Ikaris, I think Chloé Zhao was right to prioritise showing us his absolutist faith in Arishem and the big picture – but also that Ajak’s death wasn’t meaningless to him – over the mystery of whether he did it.
Obviously, a human audience is unlikely to find it a difficult decision whether Earth should be sacrificed to Tiamut, but the film succeeded in making me empathise with the Eternals who did.
Cf the mournful rather than victorious framing of Tiamut’s death.
(Incidentally, I also had the impression at the end that Tiamut acceeded to its death).