grandma rants about plot twists & 5g

I have a confession to make. I’ve gone digging in my mentions over the years, and have seen a fair amount of discourse about my writing outside the scope of ao3 stats. This involves social media posts across multiple platforms and also, hilariously, a goodreads author page (which I have no affiliation with, for what it’s worth). I out my embarrassing ego trip because this is how I learned that multiple people hate the “twist” in the dean winchester beat sheet. “Twist” is in quotes, because what some would call the unexpected plot development approximately 80% into the narrative, I would call… a plot development. For anyone who doesn’t know, care, or remember, the “twist” in that college au is that Cas isn’t a normal college student at all, but working undercover as a member of an ornately wealthy media conglomerate run by his family in order to suss out the hacker (Dean’s best friend, Charlie) who stole a bunch of money from them and hire her. Essentially, the entire plot is revealed to have been a job interview for Charlie. The devil you know, you know?

Now, the twist people don’t like isn’t that Dean is the b-plot of his own story (hence the title, which also draws on themes of how debilitating the pressure to follow societal scripts can be ((SCRIPTS, get it??)), and, very loosely, follows the generic save the cat screenwriting beat sheet), but that Cas wasn’t just a regular joe-schmo college kid. Ignoring the fact that Cas being exactly as he seemed would’ve made for a very boring story, I’m more interested in the accusation that this so-called twist came out of nowhere.

This inability to see the very obvious twist (aka plot development) incoming is not the result of any one thing. The main reason I can see why people wouldn’t clock it is that overly long college AUs don’t usually have plots. The mind craves consistency, and a large portion of the fanfiction-reading audience wants their tropes straightforward and easily digested. However, I would be remiss to not mention how terrible our collective reading comprehension has gotten. That tumblr post from years ago about pissing on the poor seems only more relevant as time goes on and the internet infiltrates more and more aspects of our lives.

In a vacuum, the plot point that Cas isn’t who he says he is gets spelled out in glaring neon letters. To the point where I was worried it was too obvious and almost eyeroll-worthy at how heavily I was hinting.

Turns out, my concerns were unnecessary!

Hint after blatant hint that something weird is going on with Cas is dropped. Literally from their first meeting, Dean’s instincts regarding Cas are, “Something’s up with him,” the joke of course being he’s right, but he’s not right for the right reasons (gay panic). Har har. Cas takes mysterious phone calls. Dean overhears mysterious conversations. Charlie “off-handedly” mentions her hacking exploits multiple times. There’s a whole not-very-good sideplot with Cain that Cas reacts weirdly to. They run into one of Cas’ old marks who flips out at him.

Maybe the most obvious is that this storyline follows the arc of Cas’ first season on the show— he’s being controlled by his creepy weirdo powerful family and only at the end, once it seems like he’s fully brainwashed by them does he figure his shit out and throw his lot in with Dean and co. With a tiny bit of his season 6 betrayal sprinkled on top for some seasoning.

This all seemed very straightforward to me, but not everyone. And those comments have stuck with me since I first saw them and they made me reconsider what a “plot twist” even is. I really like the wisdom that an ending is surprising but inevitable. Or as I often think of it, I always try to ensure my stories earn their endings, which is a very similar philosophy. This isn’t saying every single reader is expected to predict exactly what is going on— the specifics of the twist/plot development are unique to the story, and also part of the fun. A lot of people guessed Cas was in the mafia, which is a relatively common trope in deancas AUs (presumably because of the complex familial obligations inherent in the trope, but also hilariously in part because Misha Collins is some amount of Russian), which, based on context clues, was an acceptable guess, and I assume quite enjoyable when that guess was close, but not exact. Surprising, but inevitable, right?

And yet, should a twist not be the same? Surprising, but inevitable? Earned by the story that preceded it? Unexpected maybe, but surely a good twist lays the ground work with appropriate foreshadowing? The concept of a twist at this point in the cultural zeitgeist feels hokey. Like in a dumb action movie where you’re pretty much playing roulette to see which character is going to turn out to have been evil the whole time. Or the entire final season(s) of Game of Thrones (which is unique in the sense that you could also discuss it as an adaptational failure on behalf of HBO, but that’s another discussion). Or in a crime drama mini series where at some point you get the inevitable montage of potential suspects doing suspect-y things and maybe they’re really in on it! Though probably not. But also, is that a red herring and not a twist? Or maybe red herring falls under the twist umbrella?

One of my favorite thrillers is Shutter Island. Man, I love that movie. It’s also a movie that is based entirely on a “twist” (that I am about to spoil). However, I’d argue it’s a good movie and an interesting twist that, upon re-watch, earns it. Turns out, US Marshall Leonardo DiCaprio who is supposedly investigating a missing person at a remote psychiatric hospital is literally the inmate running the asylum as part of a radical new therapy! Wahey! Had the movie been made with the viewer in on it the entire time, it would have been a completely different film. Instead of noir gumshoe Marshall Leonardo DiCaprio investigating a spooky missing person’s case on a moody island with his aw shucks good ol’ boy partner Marshall Mark Ruffalo, we would have the ominous Dr Ben Kingsley and his employees running around like chickens with their heads cut off as leo distresses other patients and blows up cars. Not exactly the same vibe, right? Maybe that’s a key component to a twist—were it told from the “untwisted” point of view, it wouldn’t really work. Certainly not in the same way as the original.

Who is in on the twist? Maybe the hokeyness of a twist comes from duping just the viewer, as opposed to the viewer and the character(s). For example, one of the most bizarre “twists” I’ve ever seen comes from a terrible Netflix show a few years ago that got cancelled after one season. You may remember it—it was a starcrossed teen lesbian lovers vampire romance called First Kill, which, UGH, don’t you wish it had been good based on the premise alone. Unfortunately, it was not good. No chemistry between the leads, terrible acting, bad writing, bad worldbuilding, Elizabeth Mitchell?? Nothing against her—I was just surprised to see her.

I digress. The twist. To this day, I remain baffled by it. For the first three-quarters of the season, the two leads (vampire hunter/vampire, respectively) live in a world that is not just implied to not know about the supernatural presence amongst them, but in fact is made so clear by the meta of the show that I never even once considered any other possibility. It was just like, okay, this is a Supernatural/Buffy style setup where the general public is not aware that vampires are just runnin’ around town. All good.

And then an episode ends with the “reveal” that the public actually… does know about vampires? And have known all this time? Despite none of said general public referring to the many supernatural events at have been happening around town since the beginning of the season. Like, it was implied to be this huge secret that is one of those heartstring-tugging tradeoffs that our noble protagonists make in order to preserve normie life. BUT THERE IS NO NORMIE LIFE AND FOR SOME REASON NO ONE MENTIONED IT UP UNTIL LIKE EPISODE SIX OUT OF EIGHT???

I can’t truly articulate how insane this made me, because the show both treated it like a twist, but also hadn’t set up the twist whatsoever so it truly felt like it came out of nowhere and made me think I was having a psychotic break from reality. No one in-universe was surprised, but I sure as hell was. It was baffling to me in a way even the worst TV often isn’t, because even a show like Supernatural, at its worst, understood the most fundamental storytelling techniques of making sure the audience is aware of what’s happening onscreen in front of them.

Maybe you just had to be there. I’ve been upset about this since 2022. Maybe this is the thing that finally did me in and made me realize so much of what’s being made in a post-COVID world is little more than those neural-net brainrot images that almost look like recognizable objects, but in reality are just AI-generated garbage scraped from the bowels of the internet and smashed together in the world’s most evil hadron collider.

But maybe that’s just bad storytelling. Can a twist be done so ineptly it can no longer be called a twist but simply bad storytelling? Are all twists just shit, and any “good twists” are simply good storytelling?

It’s weird because in the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes definitions are a bit mushy, and in some cases, that’s totally fine. And yet, now that I’m writing about it, I feel compelled to find a specific distinction between the two. I feel deeply unsettled that something so fundamental to our understanding of storytelling cannot be easily defined, despite its prevalence in so many of the narratives we consume.

We’re entering, “grandma, did you forget to take your pills again” territory, but think about the real life version of this that plays out in front of us, over and over. The way dipshits like trump can become obsessed with one phrase, one nickname, one chant, one echolalia, over and over, and regardless of the truth, it becomes the truth for an entire demographic of the general public (lock her up, build the wall, etc). It’s a twist, but it’s a real person in the real world trying to twist reality into something it’s not (and succeeding in frightening ways). This utter breakdown in the importance of definitions, what is true and what isn’t, has seeped into our feeds and social media and streaming networks and content creation and newsrooms in ways that I don’t know if we can ever recover from. The way we (the royal we) continue to enable the spread of misinformation and the eroding of language and truth as we know it feels like a never-ending death knell of critical thinking, narrative control, and our integrity as a species. 

The collective damage COVID did to our psyches and society as a whole, pushing us farther apart and deeper into radicalized online spaces, confining us to our homes/apartments for months on end while the world seemed to spiral faster and faster out of control with every passing second of the 25/8 doomscroll, fucked us up so bad, in so many ways. The fact that one of these ways is that so much more of the escapism on offer sucks in sometimes incomprehensible fashions is so minor, and yet, here in this blog post, has me ranting and raving like every guy on a 5G forum. The rot has spread. We are all in the sludge. What do plot twists have to do with any of it.

You know how people have their bingo cards now? “Wow, Katy Perry detonating an H-bomb over Wisconsin was NOT on my 2032 bingo card”, and so on. “Not on my bingo card” is just another way of saying, “didn’t see that coming!” We’ve entered a space where art no longer imitates life, but we are imposing our understanding of art and cultural narratives onto life. Which is very worrying, since life isn’t art— it’s just life. That’s why we have art in the first place, to help us cope with being alive. Vice versa-ing this, claiming that life imitates art, is a bad idea, but it’s not a surprising one, given the current state of affairs, where everything and your mother is monetizable (I mean literally… you know how many YouTube shorts I’ve seen where ancient, stooped-over grandma keeps getting a camera shoved in her face by her grandchild making bank off her? More than you would expect!). Consider this: how many shows that have predicted real life events predicted events that aren’t shitty?

When everything exists to generate profit, money is truth. More money, more truth. Netflix churns out so much garbage on what feels like a daily basis, and fucking how? They just recently got into hot water for creating AI images of the subject of one of their true crime miniseries, What Jennifer Did. All non-fiction content skews the truth to some degree because they are making an argument, and that’s how arguments are made, but surely this is less skewing, more skewering, when you are literally trying to alter reality.

I don’t have stats on this, but keeping in mind that this post is technically about plot twists, think about how much skew(er)ing so-called “true crime” or other non-fiction content goes through in the editing room. Every episode needs to end on a cliffhanger. There will be red herrings and twists and other detective ephemera and CSI-speak thrown in, because they aren’t depicting the truth, they’re depicting what people have been proven to watch, and as such, what will make money. This is way less of an issue for fictional shows, but when you enter the non-fiction realm and (theoretically) have a responsibility to the truth, people generally expect, y’know, the truth. But if your plot twists and cliff hangers are more important than the truth (if your money is more important than the truth), then where does that leave you? Your audience? Their brains?

The ethics are questionable. The definitions are questionable. The artistry is questionable. I feel like a surly op-ed writer complaining about those damn kids or whatever else about today’s world that I don’t understand, that scares me and is incomprehensible to me. Then again… that incomprehensibility is the problem! So now I don’t know. At least op-ed writers get paid.

To bring things full circle (wonky as said circle may be…) I think the only way to muddle your way through this is to wield your media literacy like it’s a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire and you’re in a zombie movie. It may be impossible to peel back every layer of misdirection and misinformation, especially these days, but at least you can bludgeon your way a little bit closer to the brain inside that maybe, possibly hasn’t rotted away completely? Or at the very least, ignore the apocalypse altogether and take the long way round.

Something that people may find interesting in the context of this post is a bit of dean winchester beat sheet trivia: For the first thirty thousand words or so, I had Cas’ storyline written as him already having left his evil media conglomerate family, he had made the break from them, and was planning to embark on normie life when he meets Dean. Eventually I was like… something isn’t right with this. And it was the fact that that completely obliterated the most obvious character arc for Cas, that his decision to leave should be a result of the events of the story, as opposed to something that happened offscreen and before the narrative even started. Had I continued in that original vein, the story would have been completely different, completely boring, and, potentially, much more enjoyable for at least some portion of readers. Funny how things work out sometimes.