History Main / NestedStoryReveal

[[caption-width-right:350:[[UpToEleven And that's just one part of it.]]]]

* The initial premise of ''VideoGame/{{Inscryption}}'' is that the player is trapped in a cabin with a shadowy figure, and needs to play a card game against him in order to survive. Upon victory, it's revealed [[spoiler:you're actually going through the video logs of a man named Luke Carder that recorded himself playing an in-universe ''Inscryption'' game]].

* In the play ''A Madhouse in Goa'' by Martin Sherman, the second act reveals that the first act was [[spoiler:a fictionalized account of events written by a character in the second act; in the second act a CorruptCorporateExecutive wants to make the story into a movie musical.]] (Production notes say that the first act may be performed separately, under a different name).

** Another short interactive fiction game, ''The Tale of the Kissing Bandit'', is about a bandit whose ambition it is [[TheCasanova to kiss every woman in the land]]. It's actually the internal monologue of a boy [[CasanovaWannabe trying to kiss every girl at recess]].

* The ending of ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' reveals that [[spoiler:an old man was retelling the events of the whole trilogy to his grandchild under an AlienSky; the child then asks for another story about "the Shepard"]].
* Completing ''VideoGame/SonicMania'' in the unlockable [[spoiler:& Knuckles]] mode [[spoiler:while playing as Knuckles]] reveals that [[spoiler:the events of the mode are actually a story called ''Sonic Mania & Knuckles'' that Knuckles reads to some animal buddies.]]
* TheStinger of ''VideoGame/SonicAndTheBlackKnight'' shows Sonic narrating the events of the plot to Amy and denying that he's just making excuses for standing her up. Whether he's telling the truth or not is [[AmbiguousEnding left unclear]].
* The interactive fiction game ''[[http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ii0k5l53vhghqyh6 Broken Legs]]'' is about a VillainProtagonist named Lottie who sabotages all her rivals to get selected for a prestigious singing job. Until you learn at the end that [[spoiler:it's a story made up by Mary, one of Lottie's rivals, to convince the school board to fire Lottie so that she can get the coveted job instead.]] This is cleverly foreshadowed by [[spoiler:Mary being the only character portrayed in a flattering light in Lottie's narrative.]]
* In the penultimate mission of ''VideoGame/SaintsRowTheThird'', you have to choose between going after Killbane, the game's BigBad (who is about to escape on a plane) or save your teammate on the other side of the city. If you let Killbane escape, the final mission is a climactic showdown between you and him on Mars... [[spoiler:which is actually just a movie the Saints are making after becoming a massive cultural icon.]]
* The final ending of the ''Repentance'' DLC for ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaacRebirth'' reveals [[spoiler:the entire story isn't Isaac's {{dying dream}} as originally shown, but a bedtime story that Isaac's father, as the narrator, is telling him based on his son's vivid if dark imagination. Clearly concerned about [[TroublingUnchildlikeBehavior the grim nature of the story]] and [[DownerEnding its conclusion]], Isaac's father suggests a happier ending and Isaac agrees. When his dad begins telling the story again instead of it being about "Isaac and his mother" it's about "Isaac and his parents", removing anything to suggest this is just another loop of Isaac's dying imagination.]]

Nested Story Reveal is a subtrope of NestedStory where the audience thinks they are witnessing "real" events (real within the fictional universe, that is), but later on these events are [[TheReveal revealed]] to be a piece of fiction within an outer story that [[FramingDevice frames]] the inner nested story. Normally this is done by starting the plot with the inner story and not revealing the Framing Device until later on.

For a work to qualify as an example of Nested Story Reveal, it needs to tell a full story, or at least a large chunk of it, before switching to the Framing Device. FakeOutOpening is a subtrope where the switch comes after only one scene. If the reveal doesn't happen in the work itself, but in one of its sequels, or in another work set in the same universe, we're dealing with RecursiveCanon. If the plot starts with a framing device where a character is telling a supposedly true story, but later on the story is revealed to be (at least partially) fictional, it's a case of an UnreliableNarrator. ProsceniumReveal is sometimes used to reveal the nested story.

For a work to qualify as an example of Nested Story Reveal, it needs to tell a full story, or at least a large chunk of it, before switching to the Framing Device. FakeOutOpening is a subtrope where the switch comes after only one scene. If the reveal doesn't happen in the work itself, but in one of its sequels, or in another work set in the same universe, we're dealing with RecursiveCanon. If the plot starts with a framing device where a character is telling a supposedly true story, but later on the story is revealed to be (at least partially) fictional, it's a case of an UnreliableNarrator.

Compare ProsceniumReveal.

For a work to qualify as an example of Nested Story Reveal, it needs to tell a full story, or at least a large chunk of it, before switching to the Framing Device. If the switch comes after only one scene, it's a FakeOutOpening. If the reveal doesn't happen in the work itself, but in one of its sequels, or in another work set in the same universe, we're dealing with RecursiveCanon. If the plot starts with a framing device where a character is telling a supposedly true story, but later on the story is revealed to be (at least partially) fictional, it's a case of an UnreliableNarrator.

* ''Film/AnalyzeThat'' opens with a mob boss played by Anthony [=LaPaglia=] shooting one of his own mooks, but that turns out to be a scene from a [[Series/TheSopranos Sopranos]]-esque TV show.

* The final ending of the ''Repentance'' DLC for ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaacRebirth'' reveals [[spoiler:the entire story isn't Isaac's {{dying dream}} as originally shown, but a bedtime story that Isaac's father, as the narrator, is telling him based on his son's vivid if dark imagination. Clearly concerned about the grim nature of the story and its conclusion Isaac's father suggests a happier ending and Isaac agrees. When his dad begins telling the story again instead of it being about "Isaac and his mother" it's about "Isaac and his parents", removing anything to suggest this is just another loop of Isaac's dying imagination.]]

* ''Literature/TheHandmaidsTale'' ends with one of these, in the form of a transcript of part of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held at the University of Denay in 2195. They are...skeptical about much of the preceeding 300-odd pages.

%%* ''Literature/SophiesWorld''

* A particularly famous (and famously [[MindScrew mind-screwy]]) example happens in ''[[Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There]]''. In Chapter Four, Tweedledee and Tweedledum take Alice to meet the Red King, who is fast asleep on the chess-square/plot of land next to them (the book takes place in Looking-Glass World, a country that looks like a giant chess board). Tweedledee claims that the Red King is dreaming now--and specifically, he's dreaming about Alice herself, who is "only a sort of thing in his dream." Alice protests that this isn't the case, but the Tweedles refuse to listen to her. Later, Alice indeed wakes up, having dozed off and [[AllJustADream dreamed up]] her adventures in Looking-Glass World--but then faces a philosophical dilemma when faced with the memory of the Red King. Did ''she'' dream ''him'' into existence, or is the entire story--including the portion of Alice "waking up"--merely another aspect of ''his'' dream, which hasn't ended yet? In other words, we're not sure which of the stories is the "real" story, which is the dream, and which "reveal" we should trust. Author Lewis Carroll seemed deliberately ambiguous about this puzzle: the final chapter is titled "Which Dreamed It?", and the last line of the book--"Which do ''you'' think it was?"--challenges the readers to

* After his HeroicSacrifice, [[TheHero Emmet]] and the audience learn that the events of ''WesternAnimation/TheLegoMovie'' up to that point have been [[spoiler:a game played by a young boy using his father's Lego set, with the central conflict mirroring his relationship with the father.]] PlayedWith in that Emmet remains aware in the real world, and with great effort [[spoiler:is able to move to get the boy's attention, inspiring him to return him to the story.]]

Nested Story Reveal is a subtrope of NestedStory where the audience thinks they are witnessing "real" events (real within the fictional universe, that is), but later on these events are [[TheReveal revealed]] to be a piece of fiction within an outer story that [[FramingDevice frames]] the inner nested story. Usually this is done by starting the plot with the inner story and not revealing the Framing Device until later on.

** "Five Short Tables" takes this up to a whole new level; Ice King reads a Fionna and Cake fan-fiction that turns out to be [[spoiler: a series of themed vignettes just like in the "Graybles" episodes, and at the end of the episode it shows the whole thing was Cuber watching one of his graybles.]]

%%* The episode "Doing Time" from ''WesternAnimation/{{SpongeBob Squarepants}}''.%%

* The third episode of the 2014 ''Series/{{Cosmos}}'' shows an elderly man watching [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herschel William Herschel]] walking along the beach, teaching his son John about astronomy. At the end, it's revealed that the old man is John, and the scenes were his memories.

** Over thirty years later, WordOfGod (from Miyamoto himself) confirms that the events of ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros3'' were all just a play Mario and friends were performing. This was heavily hinted at in-game, though, with the game beginning with a curtain opening and the blocks being bolted to the background, for instance.

* ''Anime/LoveLive'' has a ColdOpen in season 2 with a scene that's half this and half AllJustADream - the girls are around the computer, waiting for the results of the recent preliminary competition. The results come in, and after a few "almost"s ("Mi...Mi... Midnight Cats! Mi... Myu... Myu... Mutant Girls!"), they aren't on the list of teams that made it. Cut to Honoka saying, "And that was the dream I had!", to which the rest of the team reacts along with the audience.

* At the end of Creator/TheFiresignTheatre's ''AudioPlay/IThinkWereAllBozosOnThisBus'', it's revealed that all the events of the story were just a vision seen in the CrystalBall of a Gypsy FortuneTeller.

* [[http://www.drawingboardcomic.com/index.php?comic=142 This strip]] of ''Drawing Board'' is a rather extreme example of this trope, showing a guy imagining what could happen during his train trip and going through multiple nested story reveals.

* [[http://www.drawingboardcomic.com/index.php?comic=142 This strip]] of ''Drawing Board'' is a rather extreme example of this trope.

* The episode "Doing Time" from ''WesternAnimation/{{SpongeBob Squarepants}}''.