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SeekingBlood  1yr ago (text post)   2642 thread views

I feel that people often praise movies that call out or subvert expectations of their genre solely because they do that, even if execution of the subversion itself is not good.

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When I read A Game of Thrones back in 2004 (while I was supposed to be paying attention in Grade 9 English), I was absolutely floored by Ned's death. All the fantasy books I had ever read drilled into me, consciously or not, expectations about how the story would go. The hero always survives, good ultimately triumphs, things come around in the end. There's a sort of nervous, excited energy you get when you realize a story isn't going to go the way you thought, and all of a sudden instead there are a million possibilities. I can remember vividly some of the times this has happened to me and Ned's death was one of them.

From a writing perspective it's also a very well constructed twist: it's set up in the book itself of course, but I'm referring more to the way it toys with the reader. The reader is used to seeing the protagonist escape seemingly impossible situations, and the book gives you various different reasons why it would make sense within the logic of the characters and the story for Ned to survive (not to mention the reader's knowledge that this is book 1 of a series). And then he doesn't.

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