How to make this not seem like an Ass Pull

Hi, everyone!

OK, so in order to make this make sense, I'll need to explain pretty much the whole plot of the story I'm working on. It's the plot for a web animation series I'm writing mostly to file away for the future while I get my 3d animation up to par. The spoilered part is the stuff I'm having issues with.

Basically, it's a Low Fantasy Crapsack World with very little magic involved. The current king took power after a long war, and is currently in the process of raising taxes to brutally high levels, forcing conscription, imposing a new religion, and ferreting out all remnants of the Government in Exile and supporters of the rightful ruler. Needless to say, La Résistance has shown up on the scene and been trying their damndest to take down the usurper. They've been surprisingly successful and have actually liberated quite a few isolated pockets.

In order to combat them, the king has brought on the architect of many of his more brutal policies during the war, a Complete Monster and Chessmaster by the name of Sathis Inoden, to manage security and propaganda.

That's backstory. The plot begins when La Résistance, here called the Prevaren (after the rightful king, Prevar) takes in a man named Jutha Kral, The Hero of the piece. Jutha quickly proves himself in battle and becomes a valued member of the Five-Man Band that the story centers around.

While Jutha seems amiable enough to begin with, as soon as he's alone he begins demonstrating far more Ax-Crazy tendencies than his compatriots would like to see. His Character Development consists of the other Prevaren discovering his nasty streak and eventually helping him move past it.

The ostensible reason for his hypercompetence and viciousness is as follows: Jutha isn't just a fresh-faced recruit. During the aforementioned war, he was one of Inoden's top men and the closest thing the latter had to a confidant. At some point, Jutha developed a conscience, realized exactly what it was he'd been doing all this time, had a Heel–Face Turn, fought Inoden to a standstill and managed to escape. Inoden wasn't happy about this, and had Jutha's family executed in order to bait him into retaliating and falling into a trap. The plan went off without a hitch, which resulted in Jutha spending somewhere around six months in a torture chamber. The results were some rather horrific scars of both the physical and mental variety.

So, eventually this whole mess culminates in a massive Storming the Castle, during which the usurper is killed and Jutha and Inoden have one last fight to the death. Inoden is killed, and the Prevaren all meet the rightful king for the first time (He's spent the entire plot thus far as either King Incognito or He Who Must Not Be Seen). At the peak of the ensuing celebration, Jutha is invited to kneel before the king. Jutha looks up, smiles, and proceeds to slit the king's throat right before guards show up and slaughter everyone else.

See, here's the thing - there is no Jutha Kral, nor was there ever a Jutha Kral. Our "hero" was really Inoden in disguise, who's been using his cover to infiltrate the Prevaren and play both sides as part of his own power grab. The "Inoden" killed by "Jutha" was an imposter brainwashed into thinking he was the real thing for the express purpose of losing to the real Inoden during that fight.

After this happens, I'm considering either ending it right there or doing a Time Skip to a few years later, which would show how much worse things have gotten under Inoden and deal with a survivor of the aforementioned massacre's attempts to finally bring him to justice.

As it stands now, pretty much every single scene of Inoden as Inoden is set up to foreshadow The Reveal - his face is never seen, he's never shown at the same time as Jutha unless it's a flashback and the latter is narrating, and the brainwashing is hinted at a few times well before it's actually shown. My question is, does this sound like a decent - if depressing - ending, or is it worth planning to do a second part that finally sees that bastard die for real?

edited 29th Dec '11 12:09:22 AM by GreatNameless1

No it does not sound like a decent ending.

You will leave your reader feeling cheated, betrayed and really angry at you, the writer. Heck, I read just that summary and felt kind of annoyed that you would pull something like that.

In order to make it a decent ending, you have to be able to answer this: WHY does this happen? What is the point? Not the point plot-wise—what are you, as the writer, trying to say with an ending like this?

It doesn't sound like an Ass Pull. It does, however, sound like a shocking tweest for the sake of a shocking tweest. I second the above - why are you doing this?

If you've had narration from Jutha's perspective, in which Inoden and Jutha are seen together (as opposed to Jutha speaking to others about it), then readers are going to feel cheated by the reveal, since it's assumed that our perspective on the thoughts of a character are the actual thoughts of that character, and if you change it around later on then it just looks like the narrator was lying to you. This could be good if you narrate from the perspective of another character who is completely taken in, or don't have any omniscient perspective at all (though the latter is kind of hard to pull off). I would find this interesting if there's later stuff in which we get to see the guy die; otherwise, not so much. I'm usually not much for Downer Ending unless it's really really good.

To clarify: Was Inoden backstabbing the usurper king as well in letting him get killed, or was that an accident, or what?

For clarity's sake, Inoden-pretending-to-be-Jutha will be referred to simply as Jutha.

First off, it's a script, so there's no narration or thought-showing to speak of. Jutha and Inoden are never seen together outside of flashbacks and the final battle, which involved Inoden "recruiting" a double to stand in for him. Also, the outcome of the fight between the two imposters isn't shown - Jutha walks Out of the Inferno covered in blood, limping, and carrying Inoden's weapon. I also go seriously out of my way to never show Inoden in any real detail and foreshadow the hell out of this - any time Jutha gets a What You Are in the Dark moment, he's suddenly much more vicious and brutal than normal. Also, when evidence comes up that one character who'd started acting suspicious of him is actually The Mole, it's shown that they're a Red Herring Mole. Jutha is the one assigned to execute said character, and when the "mole" makes one last protest that they're innocent, Jutha whispers something in their ear that causes a Freak Out right before he slits the "mole's" throat.

Jutha's plan from the start has been to backstab the Usurper and ascend to the throne himself by manipulating both the Prevaren and the king into a full blown war, taking the side of the Prevaren during the fighting to take out the ursurper, and then killing off the survivors.

My original goal with this was to set up a Halfway Plot Switch which would follow a survivor of the massacre and Inoden's Mook Lieutenant, who's finally starting to see his boss for what he is and might be susceptible to a Heel–Face Turn, two years afterwards trying to adjust to a Dystopia. This part would be much less action-y and more of a character study that would focus on having to deal with the aftermath of what's essentially a military coup. Through developments that I haven't really put much thought into yet, Inoden does eventually get Laser-Guided Karma. The problem is that as I've been writing the thing, the aforementioned characters have developed in ways that would essentially require total Character Derailment for the second half to work, hence my question of whether I should just end it here.

Ah. If the plan is to make it a movie or similar, then it's much easier to pull off, because you've got a non-omniscient narrator perspective right off the bat. Just to make sure, I would also make Jutha's introduction/appearance kind of suspect—make sure there's no arguments that anyone could make later that you were lying to the audience. It sounds interesting, but it also sounds as if you'd need to do it well.