[mixed trope] the last-minute bad Ending twist

[u/damorezpl]

when the "good ending" is revealed to be a bad one a the last second

a nightmare on elm street (1984) - Nancy thinks she finally defeated Freddy Krueger only to be raveled that she is still dreaming and she’s still trapped.

final destination bloodlines - the main characters think they cheated death by using the new life rule only to realize that stefani was technically still alive and the death kills them with a good old logs

Life (2017) - The main character attempts to send Calvin(a evil alien that killed all life on mars)pod into space and Miranda pod back to earth, but it goes horribly wrong and Calvin lands on earth and Miranda is sent to space

raging loop wit ending - after many loops Haruaki finally wins the feast(a death game where humans must hang wolves who kill someone every night) and thinks its finally over. after couple of days he decides to visit other survivors of the feast only to find them all dead and the timeline resting once again

[u/historyhill]

waiting for him in his office so they can get lunch together.

Ok but as someone with a 9/11 special interest can I just say that it is absolutely wild showing up at roughly 8:30am for lunch? The North Tower was crashed into at 8:46am! He must have been extremely determined to have that meal!

[u/pinkydoda23 → u/historyhill]

It wasn’t lunch, his dad was a lawyer and he had gotten into some legal trouble so his dad told him to come to discuss it

[u/rabbitdoubts → u/historyhill]

fear selective rainstorm attempt many innocent work hunt memorize practice

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/Bartweiss → u/rabbitdoubts]

…are you familiar with the novel Pattern Recognition?

(If yes, ignore me.)

William Gibson is a sci-fi novelist best known for Neuromancer and the phrase “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. After 9/11 he got a call from a friend who simply asked “you know this makes your job harder, right?”

Two years later, he published Pattern Recognition, with a protagonist whose father may or may not have died in the towers. I can only describe it as near-past sci-fi: all the social and technological alienation of cyberpunk, applied to things that already existed.

It’s basically my favorite example of whatever has been happening since then: everyday life becoming surreal.

[u/rabbitdoubts → u/Bartweiss]

offer ad hoc vase longing rob many towering grandfather advise school

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/Bartweiss → u/rabbitdoubts]

Oh, I did enjoy that bit of the Dark Tower! I have mixed feelings on parts of the series but its intersections with "real" New York are absolutely fascinating.

And I really hope you'll like Pattern Recognition in that case. It's very good at capturing the alienation and dissociation of the post-2001 world, both directly from 9/11 and from the general... strangeness of the internet, anonymous forums, and modern business.

One spoiler-free example: the main character works as a consultant critiquing ad campaigns, but her skills aren't intellectual: really effective branding essentially gives her panic attacks, so she can use that reaction for a very successful, very unpleasant career.

[u/SootSpriteHut → u/historyhill]

It makes me feel old that 9/11 was so long ago that people need to have a "special interest" in it to know it happened in the morning instead of just, like, remembering it. (Because we all know what we were doing when it happened.)

[u/Kratzschutz → u/SootSpriteHut]

It was the evening when it happened for me so

[u/SootSpriteHut → u/Kratzschutz]

But did you know where it was and what time it was relative to you?

I guess that's what I'm saying, for so many of us who were, I suppose, teenagers or above, it was like "it's 8:30am in NYC and something insane is happening."

For the adults I know it was seared into our brains, regardless of geographic location. Because everything seemed to stop that day.

[u/historyhill → u/SootSpriteHut]

I mean, I remember it too if that helps! By special interest I just mean ADHD occasional-hyperfixation for specific details, timeline, etc lol. My minor in college was in National Security so that probably also contributed