: Re: Dumping an entire world for dramatic effect? About 1/3 of the way through my story the main antagonist "wins" and is able to completely remake the world of the story into his notion of an

@Tiffany377

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I would say that two things are essential to make your proposed reality-shift such that the reader doesn't feel cheated, and like they wasted their time. And I truly believe both are essential, not either or:

Make sure that the potential for this outcome is expected, to some degree, before it happens. It shouldn't be out of the blue. That doesn't mean you have to telegraph it blatantly, such that it becomes predictable. Only that the reader should understand that the very reality which they are reading is at stake, and may not be preserved.
Don't let any of the events in the first 1/3 of the book be meaningless or irrelevant to the story. It might be a little strong to claim that none of them should be irrelevant, but this is just a good general rule of storytelling. Note, this doesn't mean that all the events that ever took place during the first 1/3 of the book must be relevant, only that the events that took place on page must be relevant. Any irrelevant events must be alluded to off-page. Depending on the rules of your world, relevance of events doesn't necessarily have to hinge on them having left any trace in history or people's memories. It just has to leave some trace, whether it's by natural means or not. If you're contriving your story in such a way that all possible traces that an event can leave vanishes (from the state of the world, the state of people's memories, other parallel worlds, etc), then you're rigging it so that those events couldn't possibly have been relevant.

There may be no natural means by which you can follow point #2 and still go the route you want to go. But that doesn't mean there's no conceivable means by which this can be accomplished. You must simply have different rules in your world, which means you have a world-building task ahead of you. If you truly can't find a way to accomplish this, then you may want to consider starting your story after the reality-shifting event. (Although, if this is truly the case, I'd find it hard to argue that anything even happened before the event, or that before the event is even a coherent concept. If a tree falls, etc.)

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