Duplicate Trope: Meta Twist

How is this different from Untwist?

Edit: Meta Twist seems to be when the twist would be expected from the author. Is that The Same But More Specific?

edited 4th Jul '12 11:36:55 AM by Lophotrochozoa

It looks like Meta Twist has tons of misuse, but a Meta Twist is a reversal or aversion on a work's own variety of twist. The Un-Twist just averts a general twist, which is impossible to catalog.

I've started cleaning up the trope page. Can we move this thread to Special Efforts?

* The "twist" of one Agatha Christie novel, The Hollow, was that the person found standing over the corpse, holding the smoking gun that killed him, was the murderer — despite all the evidence to the contrary.

What's wrong with this example? I'm assuming the expectation would be that the man holding the smoking gun is never the murderer, because that would be too obvious.

That is an example of The Un-Twist. You expect a twist, but none occurs. But there's nothing meta about the resolution. It's not a twist on Agatha Christie stories - it's just a twist on mysteries in general.

"You expect a twist, but none occurs" isn't what The Un-Twist means. And it also doesn't describe the Agatha Christie example.

edited 4th Jul '12 2:26:36 PM by abk0100

Or rather, you expect a specific twist, but it does not occur. That is what The Un-Twist is.

Unless I'm wrong. What do you say it is?

I always thought it was "The writer expects you to be surprised by a revelation, but it was so obvious that the reader didn't even know it was supposed to be a secret."

Nope, that's a different trope.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

go on.

The Un-Twist is when the absence of a revelation or twist surprises you. It's for when you're aware of what's predictable and expect a departure from it, but none arrives.

So if a character thinks her boyfriend is about to propose, and your experience tells you this means he will actually do the opposite and break up with her, but he actually just proposes - that's an untwist, and the author didn't intend a twist at all.

Or, if there are two suspects, one who looks guilty and one who looks innocent, and your experience tells you that the innocent-looking one did it, but it turns out that the guilty one did - that's an untwist too.

edited 4th Jul '12 4:24:49 PM by Routerie

oh... I guess you're right.

So Meta Twist is a version of The Un-Twist, but the more specific nature of the subtrope takes it away from YMMV and into a trope you can objectively define?

Actually, which is a subtrope of which, or are they sister tropes? A Meta Twist can be The Un-Twist, but isn't necessarily, as it can also involve a different twist (which means it's not The Un-Twist). Conversely, The Un-Twist can be a Meta Twist, but doesn't necessarily involve a specific creator's typical twist.

Sounds like overlapping but not idential tropes, and neither is a supertrope of the other.

edited 5th Jul '12 3:11:23 AM by Feather7603

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

Maybe just make Meta Twist to be something that involves a twist pulls from a bigger canon or a franchise... by twisting expectations from it. Like twisting something from twist expectations (you know what I mean?).

Like say, if someone were to adapt Star Wars, the Meta Twist would be Darth Vader not being Luke's father in that adaptation since that's a common twist. The Mega Man X and M Night Shyamalan examples are perfect for it, as well as Speed Racer.

edited 9th Jul '12 12:37:30 PM by Ookamikun

^ I think that's already the case, a few examples of Meta Twist are authors with a big body of work like Shyamalan and Agatha Christie.

As far as I understand it, the distinction seems well defined albeit a bit hard to deal with because of their meta-ness.

Meta Twist: The Mandatory Twist Ending an author is known for is Averted.

• An author is known for having the murderer be Beneath Suspicion, but in this story it's actually the most obvious suspect.

The Un-Twist: Viewers expect a trope to be subverted but it ends up played straight.

• (Modern) viewers expect the author to avert The Butler Did It because it's such an old and cliché trope, but it's played straight.

And the above two are basically straight from the laconic's of both.

edited 9th Jul '12 1:37:45 PM by Earnest

Why should it be a different trope when you expect a twist because of the author, btu don't get one and when you expect a twist because of genres conventions, and don't get one?

A difference is that it's impossible to catalog examples of The Un-Twist. Fiction has thousands of types of twists... we can't list every aversion of all of them. Anyone might anticipate a twist and be disappointed; that doesn't mean anything.

But if an author has a particular style, we can note departures from it.

Actually, we can expand the trope's definition a little. A Meta Twist is when a work averts its characteristic trope. That trope might be a twist that the work averts, or it might be something else. But the Meta Twist is the the way the work twists its own format.

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