Expectations: The When, Why and How to Subvert Them Without Killing Your Work
In popular media, the latter quarter of last decade was about subverting peoples’ expectations.
In 2017, Star Wars: The Last Jedi was unveiled to the world. Without spoiling anything (yet: spoilers come in a moment — consider this your disclaimer), it changed certain aspects of the saga, took different tropes that had long been a staple and altered the formula in an effort to make it all better. And a sizeable part of the fanbase took these changes less than well.
Two years later, the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones happened. Again, without spoiling anything, the producers decided to change things up a bit — the intent being to play with the expectations of their audience and craft plot twists that they might enjoy. The twists and subversions occurred with this enjoyment in mind — and if the reviews are any measure, that enjoyment certainly didn’t materialise.
Months later, still reeling from the hammering they took from fans recoiling from TLJ, the producers of Star Wars did the stupidest thing they could have done. Instead of seeing the mess through to the end like they should’ve done, they scrambled to fix it by going right back to basics and outright retconning what was established in TLJ, combined with roping in old faces in what basically amounted to sticking duct tape on a collapsing building. The Rise of Skywalker worked about as well as you’d expect — that’s to say, it didn’t.
Now what do Star Wars and Game of Thrones both have in common — apart from their efforts to subvert expectations? They did it badly. TLJ had Kylo Ren kill off Snoke, a compelling, interesting villain character, in an extraordinarily pathetic manner after building him up so much in The Force Awakens. Then they tried to patch the whole thing up by bringing Palpatine back from the dead out of thin air and declaring, “Oh, he’s Rey’s grandfather now” (again, totally out of the blue).
GoT committed a similarly grievous sin in the destruction of the Night King by, uh, Arya. You know, instead of Jon who was being built up as the Prince That Was Promised since the first season? And then, despite seasons upon seasons of character development, Daenerys goes mad and destroys King’s Landing because haha Mad King go brrr.
At this point you can probably imagine why so many multitudes of fans and professional critics alike were less than impressed with the two series. No? Oh, alright then, I’ll tell you. The reason is simple: beloved characters and plot points were tossed aside like hot garbage, sacrificed to the gods of subverting expectations. It’s underhanded trickery of the worst kind — next to Loki, Phenax and Set planning to unleash the Great Candy Heist against a hapless toddler.
But does the trope of subverting expectations truly merit the flak it’s gotten in the past few years from poor writing?
Well, no, not really. There are ways to do it well. Allow me to elaborate, first by making good on a promise I made a while ago (June, more specifically) to re-introduce you to a character I created for both fiction and for Dungeons & Dragons.
Mireen Mantriss is an evil wizard. Neutral evil, to be precise. She pursues black magic to bolster her personal power, intent on acquiring godlike power with which to dominate the multiverse. When she’s not blasting apart hapless monsters and cultists alike with elemental power and sending undead hordes to tear them to pieces, she schemes at the back of the party, plotting to crush her fellow players if they threaten her master plan.
If you’re thinking to yourself that this sounds just like every evil wizard in the history of all fiction EVER, you’re not far off. On the face of it, Mireen is a fairly stock necromancer. That’s the expectation, anyway.
Subversion: I explore the question of why she pursues power in lucid detail. Mireen chases after divinity through undeath because she feels guilty over allowing her father to be brutally murdered by invaders. Being the pampered favourite daughter of a noble household, she neglected her studies of magic for luxury, and paid the price for it in blood. And to ensure that such a tragedy never befalls her ever again, she will become powerful enough to instantly obliterate anything that dares threaten her and the people she cares about. Everyone who stands between her and that goal will help her or burn, and she doesn’t particularly care who or what is destroyed to get there. Mireen Mantriss isn’t an inherently bad person — she just made a horrible mistake and seeks to correct it through any means necessary. In doing so though, her methods are deemed sufficiently ruthless to put her into the ‘evil’ category.
But I have an entire VF post devoted to discussing evil, and yonks to waffle about my writing, so I’ll cap off this piece by showcasing another good example of subverting expectations well. That example is Thanos, of Marvel Cinematic Universe lineage.
Up until Infinity War, where he finally took the helm as Big Bad, Thanos was an imposing presence. From the first time he appeared — in the post-credit scene for 2012’s Avengers Assemble — audiences knew they were in for a ride. Comic book aficionados knew the Mad Titan as one of the most powerful villains in all Marvel universes, so the threat to the MCU was set in stone. And then, as the Infinity Saga — named for the magic stones that would see his goal of annihilating half of life come to fruition — neared its terminus in Infinity War, we saw the terror in full.
From the very start of the 21st greatest crossover event in movie history, where he mercilessly whales on the Hulk (the same Hulk who almost singlehandedly trashed several armies, many war machines and one puny god), that the heavily armoured space raisin was nothing to sneeze at was all but confirmed. But surely, even after all the terrible things that all the heroes have faced, they could beat the Mad Titan and his armies by uniting together in one grand clash to the death? Good will prevail, right?
Wrong. Thor should’ve gone for the head.
Thanos’ victory in Infinity War works for a number of reasons. First is that it took the audience by complete surprise: there’s always a chance that the baddies win in any MCU film, but the heroes universally find a way to beat them when the night is at its darkest. In Infinity War, they almost DID beat Thanos, but then he did the now-legendary Snap anyway.
This leads onto the second reason why this subversion of expectations works — the Snap doesn’t come out of nowhere. From the beginning of Infinity War, we know what Thanos is capable of doing, and what devastation he and his hordes can unleash across the galaxy. The threat is present even before the movie, and it’s played up to the max in the movie itself.
Finally, Thanos is one of the few MCU villains whose motivations you can understand on a fundamental level and possibly even sympathise with. He truly, sincerely believes that killing off half of all life is the only way to preserve it. He even goes about the killings with impartiality — his crusade isn’t driven by anger, insanity or megalomania, but by a real sense of altruism, if a misguided one. He feels real, instead of a silly caricature, and he even makes terrible sacrifices (we can safely presume Gamora won’t be getting him a Father’s Day card) to get what he wants. So in a sense, the audience almost wants him to win — and when he does win, it sets up the surviving heroes for a hell of a fight to eventually vanquish him and restore the universe. When this fight came around — in Endgame — the Russo brothers again did not disappoint.
Hopefully this article should give you some idea of how subverting the expectations of your audience isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do, so long as you do it well. On such a bombshell, I thank you for reading this piece, and I will be seeing you again next week.
~ Harry