Got Your Expectations

''Oh, yeah? Well, I got your nose!''

When a scene plays with what the audience expects to get them by surprise. Audience members will sometimes use Meta Knowledge gained from previous franchises to predict what comes next in the one they're currently experiencing. To prevent them from being right, creators with higher Meta Knowledge will purposefully deviate from what they believe the audience thinks is happening. Got Your Expectations is a helpful tool for dealing with predictable situations like UnTrashes that seemingly only have one ending or plots that have been played nearly unanimously. As useful as it may be, relying on it too heavily will cause the UnTrash itself to become foreseeable and lose its potency. This is especially painful if Got Your Expectations is used as a joke in such UnTrashes as Instant Contradiction or Fake-Out Joke.

UnRec
Tricking the audience is a great way to get them to think differently. Regardless of if you set them up to fake them out or purely act unpredictably, it's a good idea to go against what's to be expected. Not only will this open new possibilities for you as a creator, but it keeps your audience engaged since they can't tell what's going to happen next. As Got Your Expectations is such a broad UnTrash, repeatedly playing it is harmless as long as you don't fake the audience out using the same limited methods. For instance, you can build your Main Cast with a Main who's on top of their game, a Buddy who isn't that good of a friend, a Comic Relief who uses their humor to ease their personal pains, and an Edge who's only that way because they double as the Brains. At this point, your audience will take it that your franchise isn't going to be a run-of-the-mill example of its category. Continuing to write the rest of your characters this way is okay, but if you aim to make every last character an Atypical or Wrong mirror, there are two unhappy effects that arise. First, you run the risk of burning yourself out in trying to get everybody to reach peak creativity. Secondly, you make the unexpected expected. Still, the audience will know that whatever role they're introduced to will likely not be like anything they experienced in the past. Therefore, your franchise's quality won't be hurt all because one UnTrash was used in character generation.