HERE BE SPOILERS! YE BE WARNED!
I actually had a different topic lined up for today, but I’ve just finished watching a strange Japanese horror series and wanted to tease it out a bit. The story revolves around a mysterious young woman who awakes in a basement seven floors beneath the surface, and in trying to make her way to the surface must get past a different serial killer on each successive floor. After striking a suicidal deal with a scythe-wielding killer, the pair form an unlikely alliance to try and escape the facility. However upon reaching the uppermost basement floor, just as escape is within their reach, a fantastic character twist is revealed; the young woman was also a serial killer, and the inhabitant of the final basement. After despairing that she would ever be able to forgive herself or be forgiven by others for the crimes she had committed, she had wanted only to die outside of the strange underground maze.
While the series had plot holes you could drive a bus through, there some genuinely creepy moments and the way the character’s twisted background was revealed had a huge impact.
Why? Because a good character or plot reveal should not just be something you didn’t know before, it should be something that makes you see everything that’s happened in the story in a new light. A great reveal can give you the physical sensation of a jigsaw piece clicking into place; it shouldn’t contradict the earlier plot events and character relationships, but should complete them in an unexpected way.
My wife and I each have our favorites. As I’ve already written in earlier articles, the alcoholic monk Cadrach in Tad William’s “To Green Angel Tower” is a maudlin morose figure, who always seems to know that he’s letting on. Near the end of the series, it is revealed that Cadrach, an archivist and scholar, had sold the villain Pyrates crucial pages of a forbidden book that allowed the villain to launch his all-consuming war for power – because Cadrach was an alcoholic and was desperate to fund his addiction. Once I had had read this, I went back through the previous books, seeing his mysterious, nonsensical and self-flagellating attitude in a completely new way.
My wife’s favorite would have to be the worst-kept secret of modern storytelling: Jon Snow’s reveal as the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Liliana Stark in George R R Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire.” Not only does this change the nature of the war between the kings and queens as Jon is arguably the legitimate heir to the throne of Westeros, but it also brings an entirely different slant to the conflicting back history of the war of the Mad King and the death of the Targaryen family. It explains why Jon’s adoptive father Ned Stark had gone to such lengths to keep Jon safe, even besmirching his precious family honor, and shows how badly mistaken King Robert Baratheon had been in destroying his marriage to Cersei Lannister while mooning over his lost love in Liliana.
It also puts Jon’s romantic relationship with his (Aunt) Daenerys in a totally different light…
Ultimately, good character or plot reveals go hand in hand with good backstory. I’d like to think that I have a few good reveals lined up for you in “The Traitor’s Reliquary,” but you’ll have to wait and see!
That’s it for now, if you enjoyed this article please feel free to repost this to your timelines. Check back with me this weekend as we uncover some great art and don’t forget that I’ve got some great free and original articles for you next week!
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