What A Twist

Shymalan.

When information the audience incorrectly confirmed turns out to be false. The story usually leads them down a trail of lies to trick them into assuming one point is true. This is the set-up to a later revelation when the Truth Comes Out. The influence What A Twist has over the plot's progression is oftentimes difficult to ignore. For maximum effect, the UnTrash tends to play with the Good Guys in mind. Once the writers decide to flip what the viewers expected or figured they knew, there's no going back. Chickening out and crawling to the side of cop-out UnTrashes like All Just A Lie can give a sense of the story's direction no longer mattering if facts can be added and discarded on a whim.

There are multiple areas in the story's canon What A Twist can spin. Character identity is one of the most common as it can heavily affect how the audience and other characters perceive a person. If one of the Good Guys is revealed to be a Spy working under the Villain, the Leader is prompted to sending them off the team through a battle. This is the route most writers go when they want to twist a person's role: uncover a fake protagonist's real nature as an antagonist. While still enough to cause shock in the right context, this move has been done so many times that it in itself has become overdone. For a greater collective gasp from the audience, the writers will need to aim higher. What if the situation went the other way where a Bad Guy used to count themselves among the Good Guys? The Villain is likely to blame after converting them to their side, though it could be that the Lost Ally became bored with their occupation or felt betrayed by the Hero and wanted nothing to do with them.

What A Twist can generate new intrigue for a series and what it has to offer. The UnTrash forces the audience to stay on their toes, getting them to realize it still has more content up its sleeve. That's why some creators are less careful with how and when they play What A Twist. There are times when a twist can be pulled for no reason at all other than as a vain attempt to get everyone to keep their eyes on the franchise. If it's abruptly found out that the Main is the descendant of a foreign king in medieval times, the audience can be put off by how none of it makes sense. At no prior point was the matter of royalty mentioned in the series, and now that it has been, the franchise rapidly loses focus on its core themes. There's also the point of how the Main of all people turn out to be royalty, which the audience knows is only possible because of how they're the Protagonist. Suspension Of Disbelief is made to suffer by how extremely unlikely it is that events would play out in this exact way.