This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Shire Nomad: This one seriously needs some better examples; the old ones were Whedon-centric, not to mention relatively minor cases. I tweaked it a little, but I'll need some help.
How is any of this The Reveal?
- In An Abundance of Katherines, Colin has dated nineteen different girls named Katherine, all of whom have dumped him, and communicates these relationships to the reader through flashbacks. Katherine Carter, aka Katherine XIX, was with him for almost a year and totally broke his heart. When he was eight, a little girl named Katherine asked him to be her boyfriend; he said yes, fell in love, and got dumped two and a half minutes later. Then Colin is asked out by the most popular girl in school, who is named Marie, not Katherine, and is finally going to break his streak... but then he sees Katherine I, Katherine the Great, and ends up ditching the date. "And so it was Colin and Katherine Carter snuck out of the house to have a cup of coffee at Cafe Sel Marie."
- Then the book does it again — Colin is determined to figure out why Katherines keep dumping him, and he works out a theorem of relationship graphs, and it works for eighteen of the Katherines. But the graph says that he dumped Katherine III. So finally he calls her back and tries to figure out what happened... guess who did the dumping after all.
It's a fairly hefty paragraph of the type that normally gets cut or at least trimmed... and I can't even see any examples of the trope in it. I haven't actually read the work in question so I'm not going to cut it, but could someone who has please explain it better and in a more concise fashion?
Beforet: Fixed the Shadow Of The Colossus example, it was listed as a(for lack of a better term) sub-example for Legacy Of Kain.
Jack Slack: This whole trope seems slightly off to me: It's mostly used as an example of "The Twist", rather than, "The reveal" which is, at least to me, when a storyteller only shows a plot-point after the fact, rather than in chronological sequence, in order to maximise the pathos of the development. An example here would be showing Sonny's body in The Godfather rather than showing him being shot at the time. It's done 'as a reveal'.
In short, I wonder if this trope shouldn't be renamed.
