Narratives with plans that rely on luck

writing
#1

Looking for stories where you get to the end and see a character say “that was my plan all along, mwuhahahaha!” To which the audience (possible only the male mental sex portion of the audience?) says “yeah, right. I’m supposed to believe that character knew exactly how the MC would react in every momment and was able to predict all that? Unbelievable!”

It’s usually chalked up to lazy writing, but I’m wondering now how many of these could be holistic characters not linearly predicting the MCs choices and actions ahead of time, but balancing them into a trap. Something the linear problem solvers wouldn’t buy into but that holistic problem solvers would. Does this happen? Or is the lazy writing theory pretty much the explanation every time that happens?

#2

The only one I can think of is Loki in one of the Avenger movies (the one with the tesseract – I think that’s the first one).

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#3

Yep, Loki definitely fits the bill in The Avengers. The Joker in The Dark Knight also ‘plans to get captured’, and he’s a holistic character. That’s one of the few examples where this trope actually works for me.

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#4

I think for some Holistic villains, even failure is just an opportunity for growth, so they never really “lose.” Take David Xanatos from Gargoyles. At the end of every episode where the gargoyles overcome his nefarious plan, he always manages to find a way to spin it in his favor.

“I had to see how good they were, and having underestimated Goliath once before, I needed to know what he was capable of as well. All in all, I’d say the test was most… informative.”

“I have the Eye of Odin back in my private collection, and the city owes me a favor for donating it. I successfully tested this prototype battle exo-frame. And the most important thing… I was a little worried that I might be getting soft, but I was able to stand up against Goliath, the greatest warrior alive… I’d say I’ve still got the edge.”

That sort of thing. :stuck_out_tongue:

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#5

That makes me think of Game Theory (Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk on the subject) where you have finite players who want to win and infinite players that just want to keep the game going. I can imagine a linear vs holistic element being the difference. What I’d like to find is a very good example of a movie where the plan that’s announced at the end is an actual holistic problem solver rather a guy writing a cool story and throwing “it was the plan all along” at the end without really working it out that way.

Oddly enough, I just watched a show on Netflix called The Push wherein (edit:sorry, I was still a bit shocked when first posting and forgot to mention, massive sport alerts follow) ,a gentleman claims to fail to convince one man to push another off of a building to his death…but apparently convinced three other people to do it (staged of course, they only thought they had killed a man). I don’t doubt that it’s real, but I really want to. If it was real, it was all pretty unethical in my opinion. Anyway, wondering if the narrator (I forget his name, but he was the one coordinating it all) might fulfill this role of Holistic person with a plan sort of balancing someone into murdering someone. I could see all the linear planning involved, but there’s also all this gently easing someone closer and closer to doing the deed. I don’t know that there is a way to look at a storyform for it, but I’d be very interested in looking at that show through the lens of Dramatica.

#6

In Momento [spoiler alert] the end revealed that the MC had written messages on himself (and maybe other places?) to lead him to the truth about the IC/antag/whichever he was. He did know exactly what the IC/antag would do all along and at the end, which was a big moment of ‘I knew all along revelation’ concept to the audience… He just couldn’t remember ongoing because of the brain injury. It was quite clever.

An occasional romance short story might have used that format, being a cute, fun and fast reveal at the end. It seems familiar.

Angel Heart with Micky Rourke and DeNiro might be close, with De Niro’s character’s self-satisfaction at the end. I can’t remember if he said it, but for sure he indicated it to the audience.

George Burns seemed to have that kind of wind-up with their routines…but remember the brains of the duo was Gracie in real life. So, she wrote it.

The Road Runner in the cartoons.

The Usual Suspects because of the end scene.

#7

There is an idea in Hollywood that I think works generally –

You may use luck or coincidence to get into trouble, but never use luck or coincidence to get out of trouble.

The idea is that there are an infinite number of ways to create or unbalance an inequity, but once the specifics of the imbalance are established, only a specific storyform can resolve the inequity or restore the balance (even without necessarily resolving the inequity).

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