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Cruel Twist Ending
- 108 statements
- 20 feature instances
- 319 referencing feature instances
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A Twist Ending that serves no purpose other than to be excessively cruel. The Cruel Twist Ending is basically the Evil Counterpart of the Karmic Twist Ending: in the latter, the twist is a form of divine justice, a bad thing happening to stop a bad person from getting away with it (or a good thing happening to someone who deserves it). In the former, it's just Finagle's Law: the universe is a mean place and wants to hurt you. Often, a Cruel Twist Ending is what happens when a writer attempts a Karmic Twist Ending, but fails to carry it off. It can be used for cruel irony and very dark humour but has to be undeserved and unsatisfying in order to be different from the karmic one. Most common in genre anthologies with a darker tone such as The Twilight Zone: Tales of the Unexpected, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, The Outer Limits (1995) (so often, in fact, that "Outer Limits Twist" was the previous trope name), etc. Lighter-weight versions come up very often in shows where Failure Is the Only Option, especially when the show has run for a long time, and the writers need to contrive more and more extravagant reasons why the protagonists can't win. It can also be used as a shock subversion of a stereotypical happy ending. If it's overused, it becomes a Mandatory Twist Ending. If the ending makes you wonder what the point of the story was, it can come across as a Shoot the Shaggy Dog. The Diabolus ex Machina also often gets involved. And Then John Was a Zombie is often an example. Compare Not Quite Saved Enough and Sudden Downer Ending. Frequently becomes an Audience-Alienating Ending. This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE listed below is a spoiler by default and will be unmarked with a tag. Only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list. |
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In Sluggy Freelance, Torg's "Greatest Comic Book of All Time" — Gunman Stan McKurt, the guy who shoots evil in the face, vows to kill anyone in order to keep the Gates to the City of the Damned shut. It turns out he's already inside the city and doesn't know it because he can't read. | |
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Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The novel Lady Of Sorrows follows a group on The Quest to break a curse over their town: every generation Lady Olynder sends her nighthaunt processions to destroy them, only being beaten back at great cost. A prophecy foretells that the curse can be broken, and the group of soldiers, priests, scholars, and wizards travel across Shyish to break into Olynder's fortress, suffering a Dwindling Party all the while. At the very last, it looks like the Sole Survivor has broken the curse. And he has. The curse on Lady Olynder that prevents her from ever destroying the towns, no matter how many ghosts she sends or how close she comes. Meaning she is now free to utterly annihilate everyone they had spent the entire book fighting for. The entire quest and prophecy was one massive Batman Gambit. The end. | |
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A very, very common trope in Choose Your Own Adventure books, which take an extreme amount of pleasure in describing in great detail how many ways you get killed, even when everything up to the very last sentence leads you to believe that you reached a good ending. | |
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Puffin Forest: The finale of the Curse of Strahd campaign saw the Shenani-guys successfully kill Strahd, install a new ruler, and part ways on good terms. Then the DM got to the epilogue. The new ruler turned out to be just as evil as Strahd and proceeded to break Garo's will, forcing him to become her subordinate as she slowly strangled the life and hope out of Barovia. Gouda was cursed by her patron to "always be the hero", meaning she is doomed to wander the Demi-planes of Dread for all eternity, spreading chaos in her wake. Krusk will follow Gouda for the rest of his life, unaware of just how damaging her actions are. Only Boshack had a happy ending. | |
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In Time Masters, a ragtag bunch of space travelers are thrown back in time 60 years by an Omniscient Council of Vagueness made up of space aliens. Turns out that the little boy, Piel, is actually the same person as Silbad, the cheerful old man with them, and they just represent two different times in his life. Silbad has a Burial in Space all because the aliens felt it was right. Unnecessarily cruel? | |
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These show up in the similar Nintendo Adventure Books as well. In one particular ending, you can have Mario knock down a brick wall with a hammer you found earlier in the quest (collecting certain items is necessary in all of these books)...after reading an entire page, the wall collapses on him in the very last sentence. | |
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Neuroshima: "Mercury" type campaigns are supposed to rely heavily on those.note Campaigns in Neuroshima are divided into four "colours" defining the overall mood. Besides Mercury there is optimistic Steel, hedonistic Chromium and pessimistic Rust. | |
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Raging Loop intentionally does this in its second true ending, A Wedding Celebrated By All. After snagging the final two wolves in a single Feast, where only three humans died in the entire route, Haruaki and Rikako announce their love for one another, he brings Meiko to the police station to hopefully find her home again, then sells all his things so he can live a happy, married life in Yasumizu with Rikako and the rest of the survivors. When he gets back, he finds everyone except Rikako and Nosato with their heads split open. He searches for the other two, and finds them in the meeting hall, where Nosato is holding an axe and babbling about how the wolves are coming...and Rikako hanging from a noose in the center of it. He then kills Nosato and jumps off the cliff at the Hanging Pine. The intentionally part ties in, when it's revealed very late in the game, the entire reason behind the cruel twist was that Rikako was behind the entire event the game is around, which requires the wolves winning the Feast alongside Rikako staying alive. She was responsible for all the death, as the timeline resets upon presumably everyone in the Feast's death. In spite of this, she was having second thoughts; a part of her did legitimately want to live happily with Haruaki. | |
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The Let's Play Grand Theft Auto V episode "The Grand Heist": The Fake AH Crew (Geoff, Jack, Ryan, Michael and Gavin) are able to escape into a Titan and take off with Ray pulling off a Heroic Sacrifice to get them all into the air. It seems things are doing well until the Titan stalls out, causing it to plummet and hit a helicopter flying underneath, destroying the Titan and killing the entire team. | |
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This turned out to be mere foreshadowing. Two years later, Funky Winkerbein itself (as well as Crankshaft to a lesser extent) made the jump from a zany gag strip to a depressing and grim drama where Cruel Twist Endings are the norm. | |
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Zany gag strip and Funky Winkerbean spinoff John Darling (in)famously ended◊ with the title character having his career ruined without ever achieving his dreams and then, completely out of the blue, being murdered on live TV by a crazed gunman. This was partially motivated by Tom Batiuk being in a contract dispute and wanting to discourage his syndicate from claiming and using the character, but Batiuk later stated the primary goal was to give the strip (which was on the verge of cancellation due to the TV pages - which the comic was usually run on due to its TV-oriented humor - being crowded out by the explosion in cable channels) a dramatic sendoff rather than let it "wimp off into the sunset." This turned out to be mere foreshadowing. Two years later, Funky Winkerbein itself (as well as Crankshaft to a lesser extent) made the jump from a zany gag strip to a depressing and grim drama where Cruel Twist Endings are the norm. |
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Loving Reaper: Inverted. For a webcomic that is very tragic most of the time, the endings can sometimes be surprisingly heartwarming. The fox who's drowning in a pool ends up being saved by the teenage girl and Life. A dog, with a seemingly maimed face, is never adopted, and belittled by people who are looking in shelters for dogs. The woman working at the shelter starts getting desperate, and gives up. She ends up taking him home and adopting him. |
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Six Rules is a heartwarming historical fiction short story about two children from Feuding Families who met and became friends...And then bam. Just kidding; it was a horror story all along, with no Improbable Infant Survival. The Minamoto clan is slaughtered by the Taira clan. Yukiri then reveals to a despairing Ryouji that she was manipulating him all along so to get information about the Minamoto clan. Ryuji is then captured and Yukiri mocks him for breaking the six rules before he's executed. Another View reveals she betrayed Ryuji in order to get love and recognition from her family...but the last words reveal that despite her intervention in the death of the Minamoto clan, her family is still cold to her and she's still as miserable as before. | |
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The ending of the side story 'Flower Knight' in Drowtales. A knight quested for years to find a flower beautiful enough to win the heart of his city's queen. He succeeds in finding this flower and brings it back to the city, presents it to the queen and wins her heart. The two live Happily Ever After for decades, producing countless children and rule their city well. The flowers, which have bred, seeded and multiplied and are now owned by everyone in the city then drain the life out of their hosts, killing the entire Knight's family, wife, and city, leaving him the single survivor of his entire kingdom. He sets out to find and destroy the being that gave him the flower and is never heard from again. The cruelest twist? The flowers are still around and threaten to begin their destructive cycle all over again. | |
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The Platypus Comix story "Vess MacMeal Starring in: The More You Know!" has an ending evoking those of cautionary stories written during the Cold War. The comic traces the introduction of an electronic tablet called, "The Kimwon". As the tale progresses, the Kimwon develops new apps that do everything from streaming movies and TV shows, to scanning groceries, to synthesizing food. These new apps eventually take over all the Americans' jobs. If that doesn't sound bad enough, it also turns out the Kimwon was invented by North Korean Dirty Communists as part of Kim Jong Il's plan to Take Over the World. If that doesn't sound bad enough, Kim Jong Il also reveals that the Kimwon is made of people! | |
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The Grand Finale of Arby 'n' the Chief can be considered this to a degree. Arbiter, having just ripped Master Chief to pieces for killing Cortana, and having heard Tyler being murdered by a Police Officer outside his room, is about to kill himself by jumping out the window of Jon's Apartment from being traumatized by both events, until he is stopped by Claire. Despite Claire reassuring Arbiter that she'll always be there to comfort him, and insisting on rebuilding their relationsip, JUST as it seems it just might work, Arbiter changes his mind and joins Chief in being blown up in a gas explosion. | |
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Doki Doki Literature Club!: The normal ending can be easily classified as this. After Monika restores the game and the rest of the characters excluding herself, everything seems to be going well...but unfortunately, when Sayori finds herself alone with the player, its revealed her new position as the club leader transformed her into a meta Yandere just like Monika. A post-Heel–Face Turn Monika decides the Literature Club is a place for no happiness and deletes the whole game to spare her friends from her pain. | |
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Happy Tree Friends: In "Out on a Limb", Lumpy gets his leg pinned under a tree and is forced to amputate it with a spoon. The process takes him hours but he finally does it, reducing the spoon to a useless piece of bent metal in the process... Only to realize that he accidentally cut off the wrong leg, and the episode ends with him getting ready to do it all over again with a dinky little paperclip. | |
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Similarly, the Give Yourself Goosebumps books all have far more bad endings than good endings for the reader. Many involve the player dying horribly (getting Eaten Alive is pretty common), but readers can also end up permanently transformed into something awful (ex: an insect, a monster, or an immobile-yet-self-aware statue), enslaved or imprisoned, getting hopelessly lost, or simply missing out on the whole adventure. | |
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The Creepypasta "NoEnd House" ends with the protagonist, after nine rooms of psychological torment, finally escaping into the lobby and claiming his $500 prize. The dissonance between all the hell he went through and the money waiting there as if it wasn't a big deal makes him laugh, and he laughs all the way into his car, down the road, and to his home where a tiny "10" is etched into the door. | |
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