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Random Shocking Moments in Fiction (With Zero Build-up)
- Thread starter SOLDIER
- Start date
House MD Season 5 spoilers
the death of Kutner. I said goddamn. No build up. Character had been in since near the start of Season 4 to near the end of Season 5. No indication of depression and....boom. Found dead with self inflicted gunshot wound. Really brought to the fore the unexpected nature of those who otherwise seem 'ok' in life, then are gone the next. I know it served just to get House to the point he got to in the finale of S5, but christ
Goku is an alien and has a long-lost brother.
American viewers will never be able to appreciate that twist since most of us saw Z before the original Dragon Ball, so Goku being a Saiyan has always been a part of his identity here, but for everyone else that was huge. There were some suggestions that Goku wasn't quite human but they were never flat-out like "yo, aliens."
American viewers will never be able to appreciate that twist since most of us saw Z before the original Dragon Ball, so Goku being a Saiyan has always been a part of his identity here, but for everyone else that was huge. There were some suggestions that Goku wasn't quite human but they were never flat-out like "yo, aliens."
That's a really good one. I just got done rewatching BSG and I had totally forgotten about that moment and I audibly gasped. They kind of telegraph in retrospect but it is very shocking.
Pretty sure they mean
Primrose being burned to death by napalm.
Which yeah, was quite fucked up.
This was pretty big, but I do think The Good Wife still has it beat in terms of 'out of nowhere' with
Will being shot and killed in court midway through season 5. I don't think, at the time, anybody had an idea that Josh Charles was leaving, or that it would be a significant episode. The way the episode is shot, too, means it's not readily apparent what happened for a while. Will has multiple storylines going on, the case he's in court over had spanned multiple episodes and was set up for a big Kalinda Saves The Day thing, then he's shot off-screen and the characters go to hospital only to find his body.
I kind of also want to call out The Good Place here; it's not going to be effective anymore, but the end of season 1 was jaw-dropping in large part because there was no reason to expect any sort of plot twist at all. That it makes sense when you go back and rewatch the first season is great, but the just gigantic swerve where they flip the entire show as we'd understood it for the entire past season upside down was out of nowhere at the time.
Yeah, that one was massive.
Law and Order is chock full of these kinds of moments too. Pretty much every single ADA on that show gets some explosive surprise send-off XD
Holly Gribbs is a fresh out of school, rookie CSI assigned to Gil Grissom's team in the first episode of CSI. She interacts with all the main characters and learns about how to do her job, and she's setup as the audience surrogate for the series.
Then, on her first investigation, she's murdered.
Then, on her first investigation, she's murdered.
Ehhhhhhhhhhhh it might have seemed kind of "out of nowhere" but the previous few episodes really go out of their way to set the stage for it. I remember watching the episode right before it and saying out loud "Well, they're about to be killed off."
Next episode: bang.
Doesn't Homura shoot the fuck out of the cat creature thing before the tonal shift happens though? At least for me I knew something was up once that happened, like a normal magical girl show doesn't just riddle the cute mascot's body with holes.
Why search for the first Jedi temple if you're not even going to read the books? If he just wanted to die he wouldn't have gone through the extreme effort to find Arch-To. He just would have hid out on Degobah or Tattooine. It's a major plot hole. The extra annoying thing is in the initial trailer he says "it's so much bigger", blatantly hyping the audience to believe he found a new enlightened understanding of the force and was going to teach it to Rey. It was the biggest build up to nothing ever.
I've said what I have to say on TLJ. It's not a plot hole and it matched my expectations.
Anyway, I mentioned the LA Law one earlier, but I suspect people don't know what I meant.
Parodied on Friends well after the fact.
Anyway, I mentioned the LA Law one earlier, but I suspect people don't know what I meant.
Parodied on Friends well after the fact.
While there is considerable buildup to it, the "moment" in Captain Phillips remains one of the most shocking, literally breath taking scenes I've seen in films.
Mark shaving his beard - The Room. There's even evil music to tell you what he did was morally reprehensible.
Prim. She was suddenly airlifted into the scene out of nowhere, and immediately bombed into oblivion.
It's like, "Hi, here's the sweet puppy character who was the underlying motivation for all of the main character's actions. The main character (and you) are supposed to love and want to protect her above all else. Here she is.
Okay, now watch her die because fuck you."
It's like, "Hi, here's the sweet puppy character who was the underlying motivation for all of the main character's actions. The main character (and you) are supposed to love and want to protect her above all else. Here she is.
Okay, now watch her die because fuck you."
Doki Doki Literature Club
I'm probably one of the only people who didn't know about this before playing.
I didn't know about it before I started, but personally it was exceedingly obvious that it was going to happen.
(I did know there was a twist, though, but nothing about that part.)
I thought it was really interesting how the game showed how her depression was coming across as typical tropey romance/jealousy, but then as soon as she didn't come with you to school afterwards I immediately knew what was up and just rolled my eyes at it. Actually walking in was still a shocking moment due to how sudden the cut was (especially coming off DR V3, which always has a clear buildup to corpse reveals), but I absolutely knew what I was about to walk in on.
I do not like the game overall anyway, but the fact that it had that brief moment of promise and then immediately went for the shocking suicide twist instead of exploring that further really disappointed me.
I thought it was really interesting how the game showed how her depression was coming across as typical tropey romance/jealousy, but then as soon as she didn't come with you to school afterwards I immediately knew what was up and just rolled my eyes at it. Actually walking in was still a shocking moment due to how sudden the cut was (especially coming off DR V3, which always has a clear buildup to corpse reveals), but I absolutely knew what I was about to walk in on.
I do not like the game overall anyway, but the fact that it had that brief moment of promise and then immediately went for the shocking suicide twist instead of exploring that further really disappointed me.
I've always wondered if it was the same helicopter that would go on to fall and crush him to death. Speaking ER the whole Dr. Carter and Lucy incident sought of came out of nowhere. There was a brief moments of the build up with the character appearing a few times through different episodes, but the actual episode. Damn.
The biggest swerve in movie history as far as I'm concerned haha
Man, I forgot about that but then Joyce's death was equally out of the blue and perhaps even better done.
Haven't seen it mentioned but one of the climatic scenes in 10 Cloverfield Lane is a good example of this.
Jesus Christ. This one is great. I remember telling a friend of mine about this book in high school (he'd never heard of it) and sort of went through the plot, and then was like
"Oh and then one day the rope snaps and the girl dies"
Harry Potter: (4 specifically)
Cedric's death at the end of the Triwizard Tournament was pretty shocking. First real good guy casualty of the series and it's a student, one who'd been introduced in the previous book even. No real build-up to it either (besides a few "I retire in two days!"-esque lines), Wormtail just comes out of nowhere and ices him in one shot. Probably one of the most tragic deaths in the series too since his death was so pointless, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Haha, I love this one! That smile when he pops out of the closet is classic.
This is set up well and built up perfectly.
Dee is obviously despondent and over her whole shitty life when they find what's left of Earth (well, OG Earth) and has one last good day with Apollo before ending it all on her own terms. It's "shocking" in the sense that it was an extreme solution that you wouldn't jump to immediately with the character, but it's totally set up and understandable in retrospect.
God the end of that series was so bad. It was like the author had to hit a certain page count and when she did she threw her hands up and walked away.
I agree. Mockingjay gave me the impression that the author suddenly decided she hated the series for some reason, so she burned the story to the ground and salted the earth as hard as she could so that she would never need to touch it again.
All the books have pretty much the same numbers of pages (looking it up, they're.. 374, 391, 390).
It was worse in the second book because there's a paragraph near the end where they suddenly describe what other characters had been doing behind the scenes, which was way more interesting than the entire rest of the book, and I was left wondering why she didn't just actually show any of that interspersed throughout the book. Then I realized how similar the page counts were between them all.
It's even worse because
she actually drowns to death, in a really ominous way kind of foreshadowed by the events of the beginning of the book, when Jess feels ill with her composition about scuba diving
That said, the movie does a pretty good job with the book. It's pretty heavy emotionally speaking but the actors nailed it.
I didn't either.
Doki Doki Literature Club
I'm probably one of the only people who didn't know about this before playing.
Game Grumps' reaction to it (particularly Dan's because Arin knew what was coming) was great. Dan honestly thought this was a cutesy anime dating sim until this.
I mean it's 4 years old now .. I'd imagine it should be fair game .. i'll go edit the post regardless.
I say this with zero exaggeration: that woman is the worst actress I've ever seen in a professional production.
That was great because it was so out of left field and I loved Rohm. But man, the drunk driver killing Claire and the one ADA that they found dead in a trunk were both ton of bricks moments.
