: Re: Plot twist where the antagonist wins I’m putting together this story and its formative stages are almost complete. However, I am genuinely interested as to how the ending would appear to the

@Phylliss352

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As a reader, my biggest problem with what you're describing isn't that the protagonist loses, but that he just loses at the last minute through plain bad luck. If you pull something like that out of nowhere, your readers will rightly feel cheated. You've invalidated their reason for spending however many hours reading what went before, because nothing before that point is relevant to the conclusion.

A common trope in bad writing is the deus ex machina, where an external element comes from nowhere and fixes everything. This is infamous in crime novels, of course, but it's not at all uncommon elsewhere. Your suggested story is also a deus ex machina ending, except with a malign deity, I suppose. Any writing resource can give you multiple reasons why a deus ex machina is lazy writing which makes your story a failure, so I won't list them all here.

If there's a strong reason for events to turn out unexpectedly like this - Ned Stark's death in Game of Thrones being a great example - then of course it is acceptable. But then you wouldn't be posting here, would you, because these events (however unlucky) would be key elements of your story, and you wouldn't be asking for this kind of advice. I think it's clear that in spite of the well-meaning advice from other answers, this concept cannot be saved. By all means have this outcome from the fight if you want, but you'll need to alter everything that went before to ensure that outcome is believable.

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