Hi Mythcreants!
Following a recent post by Oren, I started to wonder why elements that generate reader confusion/frustration are so often used for reveals (characters not questioning seemingly obvious problems or holes in the world, characters conveniently not thinking about “the thing”, etc).
Whenever I read a story with a giant worldbuilding or plot hole that the PoV characters don’t question, I get pulled out of the story because it appears the author hasn’t noticed such a glaring issue. When that hole is then used as part of a reveal later in the story, I just feel betrayed – it’s like the author thinks I’ll be impressed by their deception.
Considering how often I’ve encountered this issue in stories recently, I feel like twists/reveals are a current “must-have”, but are disingenuous reveals really worth it?
Thank you!
Kel
Hey Kel, great to hear from you again!
The short answer is no: a disingenuous reveal isn’t worth whatever benefit it provides. The good news is that if an author wants twists and reveals in their story, and not every author does, there are plenty of non-disingenuous ways to get them! But if that’s the case, then why are contrived and disingenuous reveals so common?
The most prominent reason is that building a good twist or reveal is hard, and authors often make mistakes. That’s what’s happening when you notice what appears to be a hole in the setting or plot, but the author later uses it for a reveal. The author simply didn’t realize that the gap was so noticeable.
For example, in the Star Wars prequels, a big question is why Anakin never went back to Tatooine to get his mom out of slavery. This seems to be a pretty serious plot hole, and then we see that Lucas is using it as an excuse for Anakin’s mom to die, which pushes him closer to the dark side. Lucas wasn’t creating a plot hole on purpose (probably); he simply didn’t realize how obvious it was that Anakin would have used his position as a Jedi to help his mom.
When it comes to meta mysteries, the “don’t think about” school of reveals, this is mostly down to authors not understanding the problem. The costs of a meta mystery are often subtle, so it’s easy for authors to conclude that they’re not a big deal, and they’re usually much easier than the correct way to build a reveal. We can only hope that as storytelling education slowly improves, this mindset will fade.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck finding better reveals!
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Yeah, that Star Wars plot hole has bugged me, too. Even if Anakin didn’t have the means, Padmé would have had them and she knew Shmi as well.
Twists and reveals are a part of plotting. You need to change things up here and there as you tell a story. Usually, there’s a couple of twists in each story. The point about reveals or twists is that they have to fit with the story, they have to be part of it. You can and should foreshadow them, but you shouldn’t make characters go out of their way to keep the reader from seeing a twist.
A good twist is one which you read and look back at the story and see all those little hints in dialogue and throwaway lines of description which have pointed towards it. It’s been built up during the whole story so far. Same goes for a reveal (which is a type of twist). Build up to it, drop little hints, but don’t let it become a plot hole or a glaring problem of the world building, that’s never going to end well.
An even bigger plot hole, for me, is the fact that none of the Jedi did anything about slavery.
“I’m not here to free slaves.”
Really, Qui-Gon, so what are the guardians of peace and justice throughout the galaxy actually for then?
Lucas unintentionally (I hope) made the Jedi the biggest bunch of jerks going.
Good point.
I mean it’s one thing to say that the Jedi can’t have their eyes everywhere at the same time and some things can fall through the cracks, but as soon as they see something bad is happening, they should act.
Indeed. It’s not really a disingenuous reveal but the portrayal of the Jedi was certainly disingenuous.
Making them so unsympathetic was never a good way to go, not when we’re supposed to be rooting for them.
Since “The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” the good guys have to be incompetent or bigots to let the hero shine. If Jedis were prone to make the galaxy a better place, there wouldn’t be problems and the Resistance wouldn’t be necessary.
Everything in the prequels is set up to Anakin becoming Vader, no matter how nonsensical it could be.
That is precisely the problem, though. Yes, we know what happens to Anakin at the end of the story, but that doesn’t mean the way there can’t be interesting and sensical.
First of all, it was Lucas’ idea to make Anakin and his mother slaves. They could just have been farm workers on a backwater planet. Luke is very much trapped on Tattoine at the beginning of “A New Hope”, too, without being enslaved. Just living at the edge of the galaxy can make you stay put.
In addition, Anakin is already worried about Padmé being pregnant and about being secretly married to her at the beginning of “Revenge of the Sith”. There is no need for the past trauma of his mother having been killed by the Tusken Raiders. Having nightmares of Padmé and their children dying is a very good reason for him seeking council. He can’t talk to the Jedi, because he’s not supposed to be in a relationship, not even to Obi-Wan (although I have the suspicion Obi-Wan might have kept silent about it for his friend and padawan), so he talks to Palpatine who, as we know, is a master manipulator. From there, the way to the dark side isn’t hard to make.
In addition, “Attack of the Clones” might have been better with one less plot line and the whole ‘mother murdered by Tusken Raiders’ could have been removed easily. Why, Luke could be given to Shmi first after Padmé died and she could have asked her second son and daughter-in-law to raise him.
Supposing that happens in an already published book, what’s the best approach to fix that in the next one? Obviously, it would be too late to fix that in the previous one . I would assume that book has had some success at that point.
That’s a difficult question. You could ignore it in the next book, just not talk about it. In general, some things should be considered before you sit down and write about them, especially because you can’t take anything back once it’s published.
Unless, of course, you’re Disney, have bought a new franchise, and just ignore everything they did before, like Disney did with the whole Expanded Universe of Star Wars.
It was to establish that he does dream of things to come, so his dreams about padme weren’t stress induced nightmares.
Jedi were supposed to be a bit unsympathetic- supposed defenders of peace and justice turned to be a petty servants on the leash of the goverment, protecting wealthy and useful to temporary interests but contractually blind to the systemic problems. I bet you can name a dozen organisatons that faced the same problems. Not to mention that their policy of uprooting people and supressing their emotions that meant to produce emotionless robots backfired right in their face because one of them had nobody to talk to.
And Anakin… honestly he is 18 at the beginning of AOTC, freshly out of the strict training, living in dormitory with no money on his own. He already had problems with being accepted into order and I can’t blame him for not looking for his mum- it was forbidden and Shmi almost begged Jedi to give him a shot for a better life. When he got a bit of freedom he run back to her.
I just saw Marvels “the Eternals”, which wasn’t a great movie by any means, but it did avoid this particular kind of plothole.
Main character Sersi is asked early on why she and the other Eternals, sent to Earth by the powerful Arishem to protect humanity against a certain kind of monster, didn’t do jack about any other serious problem that humanity has faced during the millenia that the Eternals have spent on Earth, after they managed to exterminate the monsters (turns out later they weren’t quite exterminated, but they thought so for thousands of years). Sersi replies that they weren’t supposed to interfere beyond removing this initial threat against the survival of the entire species, because humanity has to learn and grow from their own mistakes blabla.
This is a common justification in specfic for why super-powerful individuals don’t interfere more, but it seems so stupid when you think about stuff like slavery, the holocaust, or in the MCU, Thanos (which was explicitly brought up).
BUT. It later turns out that (spoiler alert I guess, for anyone who wants to watch this movie spoiler-free)
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… Arishem actually uses Earth like a giant incubator to hatch another one of his species. The whole incubation process takes millions of years, and the “fetus” inside the planet needs to feed on brain energy or something (the details were vague here) from sapient creatures to grow strong enough to eventually crack the planet open and emerge. For this purpose, it was important that the human population grew as large as possible. Terrible wars, diseases etc temporarily brings the population down, but the idea is that in the long run, it promotes innovation and more population growth, while an idyllic and harmonious Earth would likely have ended up with a smaller population. THAT’S why Arishem wanted wars, plagues, famines etc to rage on without the Eternals interfering.
Also, we learn that the Eternals are artificial lifeforms that he created for his own purposes. So, that also makes sense of the fact that although we see Eternals questioning whether they shouldn’t help humans more etc, it’s hard for them to think independently about the matter, since they were created to do Arishem’s work (although at the end, when they learn the whole story, most try to save the Earth).
What doesn’t make sense is why an All Powerful being would let one of their creations to escape their control, and then create a second “lifeform” to fight the first and let them rebel again.
For someone that builds universes a couple aeons more or less to begin from scratch and learn from their errors is a minor setback. Instead let all the plan to be thrown away by mere androids (not even fully living beings capable of evolving but machines that they programmed). I hope they build galaxies better than beings or soon the suns will fail and gravity will have the hiccups.
Haha, that’s true.
I don’t think it was unintentional. The story is about the fall of the Republic, and if you paid any attention to the movies, it isn’t the Sith who destroyed the Republic, it was the corruption of the senate and the indifference of the Jedi that killed it. There are a lot of parallels to how the Roman Republic died and was reformed into an empire under Augustus Caesar. The Roman reformation was informal however, they still called themselves a Republic and Augustus wasn’t called an “Emperor”, his title was merely “First Citizen”, or “Princeps” in Latin.
What history teaches us is that it is the complacency of an empire that brings it down, not an external pressure. Rome completely dominated the Mediterranean world, but then it grew complacent, it’s enemies defeated the ambitions of its prominent citizens turned inwards into internal power struggles that over time divided and crippled the empire. Complacency set in as they believed that no might on this earth could ever challenge them, until Rome itself was sacked by a poorly organized bunch of rabble.
The eastern half of the empire survived a thousand years longer, but in the end, when the Ottomans were at the gates, the city of Constantinople was still crippled by petty infighting. The gradual decline of an empire is a fascinating subject, I really encourage everyone to read up upon Roman history; Rome fell three times! First is the fall of the Republic and the formation of the Principate era Rome, then the fall of the western Roman Empire and then finally the fall of Constantinople.
Good storytellers know their history and you’ll find that pretty much every single great piece of history gets most of their inspiration from real history and real mythology. Real history is a lot more amazing than any fictional fantasy can ever hope to be after all.
For the record, Constantinople wasn’t suffering much in the way of infighting during the final Ottoman siege of 1453. Constantine XI had domestic issues mostly squared away by then, he was simply outmatched by Ottoman military might.
However, it is correct that Rome often suffered from internal division even when being attacked by an outside power. The centuries leading up to the final collapse were full of such instances, and perhaps most dramatically, when the Fourth Crusade showed up and sacked Constantinople in 1204.
In retrospect, the idea that “complacency” is what destroys empires is also inaccurate. Empires fall for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they’re defeated by external enemies, sometimes they collapse to internal problems. Sometimes all it takes is one badly timed death and succession crisis. Looking at you, Alexander. The fall of empires can take centuries or it can happen practically overnight.
All of that is far too complex to sum up as “complacency.”
I think there also an element of author over-ambition to the meta-mystery point. There are a few really great meta-mystery stories out there (The Fifth Season and Going Postal are a couple of my favourites) that work thanks to the crazy effort and skill put in by the authors. There are also movies like Ocean’s 11 where the meta-mystery works well because of the medium. It’s not bad that authors aspire to pull these types of plots off, but they make it look easy (especially Ocean’s) when the meta mystery is actually so difficult to execute it’s inadvisable in most scenarios.
Six of Crows in particular is a novel that I think fails due to overambition in its ability to execute a hard storytelling technique rather than assuming that a meta mystery would be easy to pull off. I thought the backstory reveals were executed really well but the actual heist plot wasn’t as Ocean’s as it wanted to be.
I’m curious if you have a minute: what meta mysteries are you referring to in Fifth Season, Going Postal, and Ocean’s 11?
I have some knowledge of Fifth Season and Going Postal, and I might know what they’re talking about:
(SPOILERS FOR BOTH WORKS)
With Going Postal, they’re likely referring to the hidden plan turning point at the climax, with the message through the clacks.
(there was originally a bit here about the use of second person in The Fifth Season and its sequels, but after looking that up, it wasn’t quite what I thought it was)
With The Fifth Season, they might be referring to how three certain characters in the book are actually the same character at different points in their life (I’m most likely wrong, though; I don’t know that much about The Broken Earth series).
That’s just what I think might be the case, though, they could be thinking about something completely different. (I’ve never seen any version of Ocean’s 11, so I can’t comment on that.) Anyway, I hope I helped.
It looks like Innes has just mixed up meta mystery with meta reveal. Easy enough to do – so many terms! I too thoroughly enjoyed the hidden plan turning points of Going Postal and Ocean’s 11. I think that makes them ingenuous* reveals?
[*not a word I have used in a sentence before]