: 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

@Yeniel532

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I think one problem with this is as an ending is that it’s a very common plot twist—in the middle of a story. If you stop there, it doesn’t feel like something the reader’s never seen. It feels like a three-act story stopped at the end of Act I. One recent movie that reminded me of was Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Everyone knew it was the first of a trilogy, so

Many reviewers were surprised that Rey won against Kylo Ren at the end. I remember several asking how he could be a credible villain after that. There was also a backlash against the main character for being a wish-fulfillment character who always succeeded at everything, especially without needing to earn it.

The story structure that reminds me of the most, though, is sports movies. Those often have the structure that the main character needs to win a series of elimination matches to reach the championship, and there are some famous examples where the scrappy underdog narrowly loses, while winning everyone’s respect. You’re telling the story of the undefeated favorite who unexpectedly loses on a last-minute fluke. That is, the rival in a movie like The Karate Kid.

That’s not a terrible idea—there are, in fact, sequels from the perspective of the boy who fought The Karate Kid, and where the boxer who fought Rocky retires and becomes a mentor to his former rival after he too suffers shocking personal and athletic losses, and the original hero later mentors his rival-turned-mentor’s son. The so-called villains turn out to have been good sports with interesting stories of their own to tell.

A lot depends on execution. But. If you told a superhero story and end the first time the hero loses, or you tell an underdog sports story where we don’t get to know or root for the underdog, it would probably come across as incomplete.

There are a lot of interesting things you could do with that plot twist. Maybe the point is that life isn’t fair and we all need to learn to cope with adversity. Maybe it’s that the people we compete against are not less deserving or our enemies. Or that everybody’s luck runs out. All these themes are at least as old as Gilgamesh. Or maybe it’s just that the hero should train better and come back next season.

I think, if you worked out what the purpose of the twist ending is meant to be, you’d end up developing it and rewriting the story around it, so that the reversal of Fortune happens earlier and there is more time to react to it, or the reasons it happened are foreshadowed.

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