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alt title(s): Non Spoiler
"It was his sled. It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I saved you two long, boobless hours."
SNAPE KILLS TRINITY WITH ROSEBUD! Then it turns out they were both Tyler Durden.
Dr. Cox: There's a mess in the hallway.
Dr. Cox: That film is at least five years old.
Janitor: So what? I haven't seen it. Shush.
Dr. Cox: Bruce Willis is a ghost. He's been dead the entire time. (Gasps.) All the best.
This trope is for a Twist Ending that used to be guarded carefully as a Spoiler. However, thanks to Popcultural Osmosis, everyone within the target demographic knows the ending already, even those who haven't even seen the original film or TV show, and it's probably never going to surprise anyone again. In many cases, the twist becomes the central fact known even to those only noddingly familiar with the work, and other adaptations take it as read from the beginning.
Naturally, any movie or series that is based on a historical event gets this by default. For example: "The Spartans all die" in 300, or "The ship sinks" for Titanic. It's a Foregone Conclusion.
Named after the best-known example, from Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane.
Spoilers ahead, of course. Or not. After all, that is the point of this trope... but there's a good chance that some Troper added a twist which really doesn't belong here, or you may be in the dark about it anyway, so read at your own risk. If a work is not too well known, but is only really recognized for its spoiled ending, then it's All There Is To Know About The Crying Game.
Also, before adding a new example to this page, take a jaunt on over to the discussion page and see if it's been removed before. If it seems glaringly obvious to you and it's not here already, it's likely that someone else has already added it before and we reached consensus that it doesn't belong. Many borderline examples have been added in the past and eventually found wanting, so make sure you're not treading familiar ground. Just because it's known to all the fans of a particular work or series doesn't mean it belongs here; the standards are somewhat higher than that. New works and works with relatively narrow audiences, in particular, need to withstand fairly intense scrutiny to avoid getting nuked here (no matter how well-known it seems to you).
Examples:
Anime
- Bleach: Aizen is the Big Bad.
- Sailor Moon (first season): Usagi is the moon princess everyone's been looking for. This, along with other plot points, is ruined in the English dub, as well as a few other dubs by being revealed to the viewers in the first episode in a scene that didn't appear until much later originally.
- Also, Tuxedo Mask is Mamoru in disguise.
- Additionally, Chibi-Usa from the second season is their daughter from the future, which isn't outright said until around 3/4's of the way through R.
- Plus, all the Senshi's true identities are not typically spoiler marked, which are all spoilers (with the possible exception of Pluto), but it is most egregious in the case of Hotaru/Sailor Saturn, which is a fairly monumental reveal. The fact that alot of promotional mateiral shows them in Senshi form, and they then look identical, kind of ruins it even for the average joe.
- Sailor Pluto doesn't get the same treatment in this regard due to the fact that she's shown as a Senshi First, then appears as a civilian in the next arc. We're already familiar with her appearance by this time it's obvious who she is.
- Yu-Gi-Oh: The card game Duel Monsters is based on ancient Egyptian "shadow games". This isn't revealed until the beginning of Battle City in the original version, but the American adaptation gives you this fact in the second episode. (It's mysteriously still treated as a surprise when it happens then.)
- Speed Racer: Unknown to Speed, Racer X is Speed's older brother Rex who ran away from home. The constant mentioning of the fact that Racer X is Speed's older brother Rex by the narrator wouldn't be so bad, if he didn't seem to treat the fact that Racer X is actually Rex, the older brother of Speed as such a frickin' revelation every single time. The fact that "Racer X" (in fact the older brother of Speed, Rex) is also pronounced identically to "Racer Rex" just makes the revelation that Racer X is in fact a disguise worn by Speed's older brother Rex even worse. The 2008 Live Action Adaptation movie handles this- the surprise twist that Racer X, unknown to Speed, is in fact his missing older brother Rex Racer- in a much better manner, but saying more would be a Spoiler.
- Naruto: Sasuke pulls a Face Heel Turn.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion is a weird example. Everyone remembers what everything looked like, but no one could understand what was happening. Most people after seeing it for the first time would conclude that everyone dies.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Kamina dies not even ten episodes into the series and becomes the world's most Hot Blooded Obi Wan ever. Not even trailers for the movies based on it made much effort to hide it.
- If you want to spoil several parts of Axis Powers Hetalia for yourself, go review everything you learned in school about history, maybe expand on it a bit and add some interpretation, as even some of the more cracky plot twists or events may just be for a historical reason.
- Spike dies.
- Johann from Monster is a Villainous Crossdresser.
- Vash and Knives are brothers. And they are immortal too.
- Fullmetal Alchemist. Envy kills Hughes.
- Fresh Pretty Cure: Eas/Setsuna is the fourth Cure they were looking for.
Comic Books
- Spider-Man: Gwen Stacy is killed during a battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. It was, in fact, hyped with Tonight Someone Dies, but in the days when fans would be likely to assume a trick.
- Jean Grey dies. And is reborn. And dies again. And so on. Perhaps her code name (Phoenix, a mythological creature that is constantly in a cycle of death and rebirth) added to the spoiling?
Fan Fiction
Film
- Citizen Kane: Rosebud was his sled. Although he provided the trope name in the formerly above quote, Peter Griffin was not the first to spoil it — that ship sailed for good when Charles Schulz, with uncharacteristic thoughtlessness, gave it away in a 70s Peanuts strip
 .
- It was spoiled by Don Rosa in the final chapter of The Life & Times of Scrooge Mc Duck (or rather, the author's introduction to it), although I didn't realise it until later (I was too young to get the reference at the time).
- Many of us who grew up in the 1980s had this ruined for us by an episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, where the ghost was that of Charles Foster Kane and he was convinced to stop haunting at the end when he was given the sled back! Seriously.
- And those who spent the early nineties watching afternoon television got it spoilt by an episode of Columbo. 'Rosebud' is the control word for the dogs used to commit the murder.
- Olsen & Johnson spoiled this the same year Citizen Kane came out in 1941 in Hellzapoppin, when Chic Johnson bumps into the sled and says "Thought they burned that..." (seen at 8:33 here)
- Julie Brown ended her song "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" with her friend Debi gunned down during her shooting spree - as she lays dying she croaks "I did it...for Johnny!". Julie is puzzled; she doesn't know any Johnnys, and exclaims "Omigod, this is just like that movie Citizen Kane where you later find out Rosebud was a sled? But we'll never know who Johnny is, 'cause, like...she's dead!"
- More Information Than You Require did not spoil it. Because the book consists entirely of lies, we are told that "Rosebud" was William Randolph Heart's nickname for Theodore Roosevelt.
- Also spoiled in and Animaniacs intro
- The Empire Strikes Back: Luke is the son of Darth Vader. This is arguably more famous than Rosebud, because some of the younger generations haven't heard of Citizen Kane. Although really, "vader" is Dutch for "father", so it shouldn't have come as that much of a shock.
- The Crying Game: Dil isn't the usual sort of woman.
- Psycho: Norman Bates's murderous mother is actually Norman's other personality. The murder itself, killing off the hitherto most important character halfway through the movie, was originally meant to be a surprise, too.
- Soylent Green is made out of people.
- Although in the book it's soybeans and lentils. (Soylent Red adds coloring to make it look more like meat.)
- But soybeans are genetically modified and may in fact have human genes in them.
- Sadly enough, the big twist can be ruined by the goddamn trailer if you happened to put two and two together. (At 2:20 or so into the trailer, you can see Chucky Heston sneaking into a factory where there are inconspicuous white body bags on a conveyor belt. Wonder what those could be?)
- The Planet Of The Apes is really a post-apocalyptic Earth.
- The final reveal of this one is frequently blown in the advertisement or dvd-cover...
- I guess in this way humans really aren't smarter than apes.
- It was well-known enough for Mel Brooks to parody the ending in Spaceballs.
- And for The Simpsons to parody the ending as a musical Show within a show starring Troy Mc Clure as Colonel Taylor, complete with a Statue of Liberty prop rising in the background as he sang, "It was Earth all along."
- In Old Yeller, the kid has to Shoot The Dog. Literally.
- The Third Man: Orson Welles' character isn't dead.
- The Sixth Sense: Bruce Willis, however, was dead the whole time.
- Also, "I see dead people" was supposed to be a twist, explaining what the heck was going on for the first half of the movie, but it was featured in the trailers.
- The Wizard Of Oz is, in both the film and the book, just an American con man. Also, in the movie (and only the movie), it was All Just A Dream, "a wonderful dream."
- Casablanca: Rick lets Ilsa go to be with her husband, who needs her to inspire his fight against the Nazis, and then he and Louis go to Brazzaville, fight more Nazis, and have a beautiful friendship.
- This might have been less of a twist to contemporary audiences, as there would be no way to get a wife abandoning her husband past the censors of the time.
- The husband could've died. That would've freed up Rick and Ilsa to live happily ever after, and the husband was obviously in a lot of danger.
- The Disney Animated Canon has plenty, in part because it frequently draws from older sources. A few of the more famous include:
- Shrek: Fiona becomes an ogre at night. Made obvious by the two sequels.
- King Kong: He climbs to the top of the Empire State Building and gets machine-gunned by aeroplanes until he falls down. But it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.
- This comprehensive list of Twist Endings from The New York Times.
- Titanic: Besides the obvious, it's become well known that Rose had the jewel the whole time (to the point that the final scene was parodied in an insurance ad).
- Also mentioned in the music video for "Ooops, I Did It Again," by Britney Spears. Or so I heard...
- The sinking of the ship would also count here as well. Anyone who was surprised that the Titanic would kiss an iceberg and wake up at the bottom of the ocean the following morning both Did Not Do The Research and Fails History Forever.
- Even first-time viewers of Alien these days are not surprised by the chestbursting scene.
- Terminator 2: Arnold's the good guy in this one. Most people don't even know that was supposed to be a surprise, as the marketing totally ruined it.
- Terminator itself. For the first forty minutes, you're not supposed to trust Reese. Of course, by now you probably know that Reese is there to save Sarah.
- In Fight Club Tyler Durden is the Narrator's split personality. Thank you, Rosie O'Donnell.
- The Usual Suspects: Verbal Kint is really Keyser Soze.
- The Fly. In the original version the fact that the teleporter combined the Mad Scientist with a fly is supposed to be a huge surprise. Even though it's in the title.
- The Wicker Man. They burn the policeman. In a big wicker man.
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Spock dies (until the sequel).
- The makers try to mess with us here: The news that Spock's death was planned leaked fairly early on in development, so the first scene (the famous Kobiyashi Maru scene) was edited so that most of the characters (including Spock) 'died'. After the sim ends, Kirk even asks Spock: "Aren't you dead?" This was to preserve the twist; first-time moviegoers would assume the spoilers referred to this scene, and would then be surprised when Spock died For Real This Time. Today no one notices any of this.
- KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!
- This Troper was narmed by Spock's (actually good played) death, knowing, that the next movie rented is called "The search for Spock".
- The Brood. The Enfante Terrible killers are the physical manifestations of Nola's misdirected anger. This information is right there on the DVD case, and it comes as a bit of a surprise that it was even intended as a Twist Ending at all.
- An odd one here is Scanners. The fact that one dude's head explodes has become an cultural meme, but a lot of people don't know that it's from this film. Once the scene starts, however, everyone recognizes the guy (he looks a little like Dr. Phil), says "Oh, it's from this movie!", and knows how the scene will end.
- Videodrome gives you brain tumours.
- The Dark Knight: Rachel dies, provoking Harvey Dent to becomes Two-Face. A lot of people thought that this was being saved for part 3. Sadly, they killed off Two-Face and kept the Joker, but the Joker's actor died, while Two-Face's lived. Murphy's Law at work.
- Chinatown: The Bad Guy Wins. Also, that mysterious blonde girl is Faye Dunaway's sister. She's her daughter.
- Dead Poets Society : Neil is Driven To Suicide.
- Cloverfield: We never find out whence the monster came.
- The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari: Francis is insane and the whole thing is his babbling. The real cabinet is in his head, and vice versa.
- Nosferatu: Orlok is killed by sunlight.
- Although Dr Strangelove regains the ability to walk, the mission to prevent The End Of The World As We Know It is a failure, and the film ends with footage of nuclear explosions while "We'll Meet Again" plays.
- Saw: The Jigsaw Killer is some old guy played by Tobin Bell.
- Network has Howard Beale murdered live on TV.
- When A Stranger Calls: The calls are coming from inside the house.
- Sidney Poitier gets a coffee mug with To Sir, With Love written on it from one of his students.
- Mi-Do is Oh Dae-Su's daughter. Yeah, eeyew.
- And while we're on the subject, Noah Cross had a daughter with his daughter.
Folktales
Literature
- The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde: The two title characters are the same man. This was a Twist Ending in the original novel, but it's so well known today, all of the adaptations make it part of the plot from the beginning. Because of this, some people are unaware that it ever was a twist.
- The Scarlet Pimpernel is Sir Percy Blakeney. Once again, in the original book, the reader doesn't discover this fact until Percy's wife does, but this has become another case where the twist is so well-known that most TV and film adaptations reveal it at the very beginning.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: "Snape kills Dumbledore" quickly became an internet meme within days of the book's release.
- In its 18th season, The Simpsons pretty much validated this spoiler during an episode in which Homer read the latest Angelica Button book to daughter Lisa. Later he skipped ahead, then announced, "They killed [headmaster] Greystache!"
- Alice In Wonderland: It was All Just A Dream.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There: Again, it was All Just A Dream. But just to mess with our heads, we're left with the question "Was it Alice's dream, or the Red King's dream?"
- The Da Vinci Code: The heroine's family have been in the Priory of Sion for generations, and the Holy Grail (i.e. the tomb of Mary Magdalene) was hidden in the Louvre the whole time.
- Anna Karenina: Anna commits suicide by jumping under a train. When Vladimir Nabokov taught this novel, he was particularly fond of the trope; he intentionally gave away the ending to his students before they started reading the book, so they would not focus solely on the plot.
- In a class discussion of irony and foreshadowing in literature, This Troper said, "Anna Karenina met Alexy Vronsky at a train station, and she killed herself by jumping under a train!" The teacher facepalmed and responded, "Thank you for that. Nobody really wanted to find that out for themselves, after all."
- Treasure Island: The ship's cook, Long John Silver, turns out to be a pirate. Of course, these days the name Long John Silver is almost as strongly associated with piracy as Black Beard.
- Also, Ben Gunn had the treasure all along. And John escapes with a sack of coin.
- Star Wars: Vision of the Future: Luke and Mara get married. Even Mara's Wikipedia page gives this away.
- In Len Deighton's Bernard Samson sequence, the twist at the end of the first novel, Berlin Game, is essentially given away the back cover of every subsequent novel in the sequence "Bernard Samson is a bit distraught that his wife is a traitor'.
- Parodied and subverted in More Information Than You Require, when Hodgman discusses W.R. Hearst, and reveals that "Rosebud" was Hearst's nickname for Theodore Roosevelt.
- War Of The Worlds: The aliens are ultimately brought down by a (to humans) harmless bacterium.
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: The answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" is 42.
- Nineteen Eighty Four: He loved Big Brother.
- The Bible: Jesus dies for our sins and comes back to life.
- John has a prophecy about the world ending.
- Gone With The Wind: Rhett leaves Scarlett. That's the entire point of "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"
- Twilight: Edward's a vampire. I've been told that it's supposed to be a spoiler, but even the back jacket announces it.
- Also, Jacob is a werewolf.
- The granddaddy of these is Dracula. In the novel, now a century old, the revelation that Count D is a vampire was a major reveal.
- The Maltese Falcon is a fake. General Kemidov still has the real one. Also, Bridget shot Archer.
- The Dark Tower: Roland leaves Jake to die. He gets better. The top of the tower sends him back to the beginning of the first book.
- The Great Gatsby: Gatsby dies.
- Lord Of The Rings: Saruman is The Dragon. Boromir succumbs to the ring and dies. Gandalf turns out to be alive. Gollum seizes the ring at the cracks of doom, and while dancing with joy, accidentally falls into the lava taking the ring with him.
- HP Lovecraft gives us a few:
- The Call of Cthulhu: Cthulhu rises, and then goes to sleep again.
- The Dunwich Horror is the giant, invisible brother of Wilbur. Both of them are the sons of Yog-Sothoth.
- Pickman's Model is a giant ghoul.
- The Rats in the Walls are actually in his head, and his ancestors were cannibals.
- The Haunter of the Dark is an avatar of Nyarlathotep. It drives the protagonist mad and probably eats him.
- At the Mountains of Madness, there are dead aliens, and a few live ones.
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth is the fact that its townsfolk are descended from demonic fish-creatures. The protagonist is, too.
- The Canterbury Tales don't really end.
- Beowulf dies after he and Wiglaf kill a dragon.
- The Crying Of Lot 49: We never find out what was going on. And the book ends before the actual crying starts.
- The Giver: Being Released To Elsewhere means being put to death.
Live Action TV
Poetry
Theatre
- Stanley rapes Blanche, she goes crazy, and announces that she has always depended upon the kindness of strangers.
- The endings to many of Shakespeare's plays are well known. Most don't have an actual Twist Ending, but Macbeth comes pretty close.
- The ending of Titus Andronicus fits the "twist" ending well: Titus bakes the guys who raped his daughter into a pie, and feeds it to their mother and stepfather. This was the inspiration for the South Park episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die".
- King Lear had a twist ending, at least at the time it was released. Theatre-goers of that time would have been extremely familiar with the story of King Lear, which, until Shakespeare, always ended with Lear being restored to his throne and ruling well until dying of old age.
- Romeo drinks some poison and Juliet stabs herself because, in an odd twist of fate, they both think the other one is dead. And if you're still singing songs about a "Romeo and Juliet romance" then you fail literature FOREVER.
- Exception: The ending of the long-running play The Mousetrap is the most infamous open secret in theater history - the audience is sworn to secrecy at the conclusion of each performance, and the terms of the original contract prevent the story from being published or filmed until after the show has closed. Everyone who has seen the play has done a fairly good job over the years of keeping mum, and the text of the play has never been published in the UK. (There is, however, an urban legend regarding a cab driver who dropped a number of playgoers off at the theater in question, was stiffed on the tip, and shouted as he drove away, "Sergeant Trotter did it, you cheap gits!"). Indeed, when the play The Real Inspector Hound openly plagiarized The Mousetrap, its producers refused to sue on the basis that doing so would publicly reveal the ending.
- However, the partwork The Agatha Christie Collection did publish the text of The Mousetrap. Regarding the cab-driver anecdote, in some versions of the story he's said to have shouted "The butler did it!", which is said to be the origin of this phrase. (There is no butler in The Mousetrap.)
- Waiting For Godot: Godot never shows up.
- Happy Days. You think being buried up to your waist in sand is bad? How about being buried up to your neck?
- Waiting For Lefty: Lefty never shows up either, mostly because he's been shot. The cabbies strike.
- Oedipus Rex. Oedipus married his mother. Not much of a twist considering it was in the opening narration but it still occasionally surprises people.
- In Oedipus at Colonus, the titular character reveals that his children were the product of incest. For modern audiences this is how the myth is assumed to go, but it is presumed that an earlier version of the myth would have some or none of the children born of incest, instead the product of a polygamous marriage.
- Similarly, Euripedes' version of Medea. In all versions of the Medea myth, her children die but most versions have it happen by accident or bring the children back alive at the end of the story (usually because of mistaken identity). Ancient Greek audiences would have been shocked at Euripedes' ending, where Medea is the willful murderess of her own sons we know today.
- On top of that, Medea was also a shocker for Ancient Greek audiences because Euripedes was one of the first Greek playwrights to show death onstage! Previously, a death would only be reported by a messenger. Medea killing her children mid-monologue would have been unheard of.
- To a lesser extent, Aeschylus' Agamemnon - in the conventional myth, the titular character is murdered by Aegisthus, with Clytemnestra as his accomplice. Clytemnestra being the sole murderer would have been a surprise to a Greek audience (though it's obvious fairly early on).
- JM Synge's Riders to the Sea: Bartley drowns. Everyone knows this from Maurya's famous monologue:
They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me.... I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.
- Hedda Gabler shoots herself.
- Nora leaves her husband in The Doll's House.
- The Three Sisters never get to Moscow. Also, Baron Tuzenbach dies.
- The Ghost Sonata: Nothing gets better.
- Woyzeck stabs Marie to death, and then ambiguously drowns himself while trying to dispose of the knife.
- Long Day's Journey into Night: Edmund has tuberculosis, and wishes he were a seal or a fish.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy: Garland is actually Chaos, the Big Bad. This one was spoiled by Dissidia:Final Fantasy and is even a plot point.
- Final Fantasy II: The Emperor isn't quite as dead as you'd think...
- Final Fantasy IV: Cecil becomes a paladin, and Golbez is his brother who's being mind controlled by the real Big Bad, Zemus.
- Final Fantasy V: Exdeath is actually a giant tree. Not even Dissidia avoids making fun of this one.
- Final Fantasy VI: Kefka is the real Big Bad, and the Floating Continent is not the final dungeon.
- Final Fantasy VII: Aerith dies. Permanently, despite rumors to the contrary.
- Final Fantasy X: Yuna does NOT die; I'm not sure it's soon enough to reveal the rest.
- Tidus is a dream construct of the Fayth and Auron died ten years ago trying to defy Yu Yevon. Game's been out for eight years, bro.
- Would you kindly not spoil the twist to Bioshock?
- The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Sheik is Zelda in disguise. This is so out that Super Smash Bros series has the Zelda-Sheik transformation as a special move.
- Midway through the game you travel seven years into the future.
- Oh, and the tomboy-pirate from The Wind Waker, wearing the same bandages around her wrist as Sheik and having the same tan? Yeah, she's a Princess Zelda too. Even though the mentioned hints weren't really obvious to recognize on first glance, a visit on this page, Deviant Art or You Tube will certainly make you recognize them. After spoiling the whole twist to you. And if that's not enough, her Trophy in Super Smash Bros and the intro of Phantom Hourglass completly ruin it.
- Faces of Evil: Link defeats Ganon, but Zelda still won't kiss him.
- Wand of Gamelon Duke Onkled betrayed the King! And after he's scrubbed all the floors in Hyrule, then we can talk about mercy. Also, Link was somehow trapped inside Lady Alma's mirror.
- Solid Snake's commanding officer, Big Boss, is secretly the enemy commander in the first Metal Gear.
- Ah ha! But it turns out, that was all just a ploy to make America look good and to found the foundation of the Patriots!
- In Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake and Liquid Snake are actually clones of Big Boss.
- Raiden is the main character in Metal Gear Solid 2.
- You have to beat Psycho Mantis by switching the controller to port 2.
- Metroid: Samus Is A Girl.
- Not for the game being notable, but for the twist being so retarded, Bionic Commando and its "Your arm is your wife" has achieved major notoriety.
- Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: Soma Cruz is the reincarnation of Dracula. (The direct sequel, Dawn of Sorrow, states this pretty early on.) Also, the mysterious "J" is actually Julius Belmont, making him a descendant of the clan known for going against Dracula over the years. (Dawn of Sorrow states this as well.) Oddly, the Aria reveal that wasn't explicitly stated until Dawn was the first one players figured out, thanks to a particularly unsubtle hint from Yoko. Genya Arikado is Alucard.
- Portal: The cake is a lie. Or Is It?
- There are bigger threats than the Covenant in Halo, as the demos and publicity carefully did not tell you.
- Baldurs Gate: You're one of the children of the dead god of Murder, as are most of the antagonists. When the creators declare 'It Was His Sled' (by marketing the series as "The Bhaalspawn Saga") you know the twist is dead.
- Kingdom Hearts II: Roxas is Sora's nobody. C'mon, with that name and appearance, who else could he be?
- Regardless of whenever or not you've heard it before, it's most likely you'll just guess it quite early in the game's story. It's that obvious.
- Sonic Adventure 2: Shadow dies (until Sonic Heroes).
- Shadow The Hedgehog: Black Doom gave his blood as the base for Shadow's creation, making him his biological father (of sorts).
- In Pokemon Red and Blue, your rival is the Champion and you have to defeat him in order to beat the game. As if you didn't see it coming anyway.
- And the hidden Pokemon Mew is mentioned in the storyline.
- In Gold and Silver, you have to fight Red. Also, by the time Nintendo "revealed" Arceus' existence, everyone already knew about it.
- Mega Man series: It's always Dr. Wily.
- Mega Man 3: Breakman is Protoman. Even Mega Man Anniversary Collection doesn't pretend this is a surprise. He's your Navi for cryin' out loud!
- Call Of Duty 4: The USMC faction is killed by the nuke.
- In Final Fantasy VI, the world is destroyed halfway through the game.
- The World Ends With You: All the players are dead, and the game is their only way to come back to life.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door: Princess Peach becomes possessed by a 1000 year old demon queen and it's up to Mario to snap her outta it.
Western Animation
Real Life
- You die.
- And pay taxes.
- Usually not in that order, but not always.
- Elvis is dead. Maybe.
- Santa Claus is a lie your parents tell you so you will brush your teeth.
- Same with the Easter Bunny.
- And the Tooth Fairy. Though not really, since you get money if your teeth fall out.
- Most nerds do not end up as billionaires because they had to raid that night.
- Many jocks do in fact become your bosses because they had the charisma and connections to do so.
- Germany lost both of the World Wars.
Religion
- Jesus dies.
- John (the Revelator) "dies" at the end.
- As in, he is no longer on this earth, but rather in the Heavenly plane.
Meta
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