Needs Help: Tomato Surprise

I think this trope needs some tightening, or at least clarification, and possibly splitting. The laconic version is "Revealing the one obscured detail that makes everything else different," which I think is so broad as to cover the vast majority of twist endings. While we may want to keep that as a super-trope (though it's very similar to The Ending Changes Everything), I think there should be an article that reflects a fairly distinct "concealed environment" variety of Tomato Surprise, where the the twist reveals something to the audience/reader that the characters knew all along and is unremarkable to them: they're all hideous aliens, they're all 16th century Peruvians, they're all apes. This is quite distinct from the characters themselves discovering something remarkable about themselves or the world they live in (the protagonist discovers he actually is on a spaceship, is actually a ghost, is actually a mental patient, etc.) Both the techniques of concealing the secret and the method of revealing it are totally different between those two cases.

In a typical Twist Ending, there is key information that is concealed from at least some of the characters (and the audience), which is then revealed, to the surprise of those characters (and the audience). When the twist is fundamental enough, The Ending Changes Everything. What distinguishes a Tomato Surprise is that there is NO surprising revelation to the characters involved, just to the audience. If any of the characters are just as surprised as the audience, it's just a vanilla Twist Ending.

The laconic may have problems but the actual description addresses your issues.

Ninety percent of laconics are bad.

So fix it :)

Okay, thanks. I've fixed the laconic and begun to review the examples to make sure they fit the description.

Laconic looks good now. GJ! :D

And then there's the problem that "tomato surprise" is an established term, not for this trope but for a recipe involving tomatoes. I believe there was an earlier thread discussing that.

edited 2nd Apr '12 7:07:50 AM by Spark9

There was and we came to a solid conclusion than no one would ever assume we were actually troping a recipe.

And the problem that we associate it with the unrelated, mutually-exclusive Tomato in the Mirror.

Could you please link us to that solid conclusion? Because I don't recall there being a lot of agreement on that issue.

I think it would be more of a common sense judgment. If someone really thinks that Tomato Surprise is a recipe page on a tropes in media wiki and links to it accordingly from a works page, well, there's not much we can do to help that person.

If I remember right, the conversation was a little more complicated.

No one argued "people will mistake this for a recipe." Instead, people questioned the name's basis. Others responded that it was an outside term. Some research proved that it was an outside term for the trope - but it was far more commonly used as an outside term for a recipe. This called into question whether its outside status really supported the name at all.

I don't see that as an issue, though. It's kind of like how Lampshade, while a pre-existing term as we use it, more commonly means a shade for lamps. But since this isn't a home decor wiki, nobody's going to think we're talking about those.

edited 2nd Apr '12 8:32:01 AM by Martello

OK. So, do we have something else to do here, or can this be closed?