: Regarding the substance of your question: The maxim that Robert McKee passes along in Story is “give the readers what they expect, but not the way they expect it”. Your first option, where

@Dunderdale623

Vote Up Vote Down

Regarding the substance of your question: The maxim that Robert McKee passes along in Story is “give the readers what they expect, but not the way they expect it”.

Your first option, where the protagonists don’t decide, is clearly unsatisfying. Even Hamlet eventually made a choice and acted on it.

The second option, killing the bad guys, makes this a standard thriller plot. If the 20 targets are shown to be sufficiently evil, then that addresses the moral question. To add moral/thematic depth, the characters can lose something at the same time that they win their primary goal: they might discover that the revolutionary government is not as progressive as they originally thought, or they might be forced to suffer the infamy of being assassins because the true evil-ness of their targets has to remain secret, or... something.

The third option, in which they choose to walk away, is unsatisfying all by itself, because if you’ve spent a whole novel setting up how evil the 20 targets are, then you can’t have the protagonists say “actually, never mind”. But they can walk away from their original mission and do something else. For example, I can think of two SF novels from the 70s (perhaps I shouldn’t name them here) where the protagonists were rebelling against a dystopian society, and when they got near the core of The Secret Conspiracy That Rules Everything, a high-level dystopiocrat (I just made that word up) says “Congratulations for having such an independent mind and seeing through the illusions that we have constructed to control this society! You’re just the kind of person we need to join us in the ruling elite.”

(0)

Login to post a comment!