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Nested Story Reveal
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For the last two hours, we've been following the adventures of the brave Princess Alice in the magical kingdom of Marvellonia, but then the story suddenly cuts to a living room in a modern house... And we find out Alice is just a regular kid living in the suburbs, while the movie we just saw is actually a story told by Alice to her friends to spice up a boring Saturday evening. Nested Story Reveal is a Sub-Trope of Nested Story where the audience thinks they are witnessing "real" events (real within the fictional universe, that is), but later on these events are revealed to be a piece of fiction within an outer story that frames the inner nested story. Normally this is done by starting the plot with the inner story and not revealing the Framing Device until later on. The inner story doesn't have to be a literal story, it can also be a computer simulation, a role-playing game, a Show Within a Show, etc. What makes it a Nested Story Reveal is that the audience is lead to believe the events are "real", but the character(s) in the outer story know they are fiction, and this is revealed to the audience when the plot moves from the inner story to the outer one. For a work to qualify as an example of Nested Story Reveal, it needs to tell a full story, or at least a large chunk of it, before switching to the Framing Device. Fake-Out Opening is a subtrope where the switch comes after only one scene. If the reveal doesn't happen in the work itself, but in one of its sequels, or in another work set in the same universe, we're dealing with Recursive Canon. If the plot starts with a framing device where a character is telling a supposedly true story, but later on the story is revealed to be (at least partially) fictional, it's a case of an Unreliable Narrator. A Proscenium Reveal is sometimes used to reveal the nested story. What makes this trope different from All Just a Dream is that in the latter a character undergoes a transition between the unreal and real world that comes as a surprise to both her and the audience. With Nested Story Reveal, only the audience is surprised, and characters in the inner story and the outer story never experience any transition. To the characters in the inner story, their fictional universe remains real (except in some Breaking the Fourth Wall type of plots), wheras the characters in the outer story always knew it isn't real. Sometimes, after the inner story has been revealed to be fictional, the framing story may hint that there was some truth to it after all. Perhaps the inner story was an embellished version of something that really happened? Like with All Just a Dream, a Nested Story Reveal can make the audience feel cheated, when the story they've been following turns out not to be "real". A metafictionally oriented work may point out that the nested story is no less real than the framing story: they're both still fiction, only on different levels of the overall plot. Note: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that every single example on this list is a spoiler by default. Since Nested Story Reveal is often used as an ending trope, merely seeing a work's name mentioned here can spoil its plot. |
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Adventure Time: "Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake" seems to be a pure Gender Flip Alternate Reality Episode, then makes a sudden right-turn at the end to reveal everything was Ice King's fanfiction read to a frozen Finn and Jake. Later "Fionna and Cake" episodes establish that Ice King, Marceline, or some other character are the ones telling the story. "Five Short Tables" takes this up to a whole new level; Ice King reads a Fionna and Cake fan-fiction that, at one point, has the Ice Queen sharing her fanfiction, in which her stand-in character Ice President is sharing his fan-fiction. At the end, the story is revealed to be a series of themed vignettes just like in the "Graybles" episodes, and then it shows the whole thing was Cuber watching one of his graybles. |
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Super Mario Galaxy 2 is either this, or a Cosmic Retcon of the first game. | |
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A Pack of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean is a collection of short stories with a frame story in which a young man starts working at a secondhand shop and sells objects to unlikely buyers by telling intriguing tales about their origins. The final scene of the book reveals that the frame story is itself another story the young man is telling. | |
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The ending to Umineko: When They Cry reveals that the repeating time loop is actually Toya Hachijo's attempt to recreate and speculate on the events of Rokkenjima 1986 by writing mystery novels based on the two original message bottles (Legend and Turn of the Golden Witch). | |
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Exaggerated in The Simpsons's episode "The Seemingly Never-Ending Story": Lisa tells a story while the family is trapped in a cave, which turns into a series of stories within stories. As she finishes all the events from her story come together to have Burns, the rich Texan, Moe, and Snake all trying to steal gold hidden nearby. When the story concludes it turns out the whole thing was Bart explaining to the principal why he hadn't been able to do his homework. | |
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The 12th episode of season 1 of Laid-Back Camp starts with a scene, where most of the girls are waiting for Nadeshiko, who is a CEO now. Then she is coming by air within a tent with rocket propulsion. Naturally, this turned out to be a fantasy of Nadeshiko. | |
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Level E: Episode four, up to The Reveal in the last two minutes, is the plot of a script Prince Baka is trying to sell to television. | |
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In the season 2 finale of Roseanne, Dan builds Roseanne an office in which she can realize her dream of becoming a writer. In the final episode, it's revealed that the entire series has been based on a semi-autobiographical story she's been writing in the office. In the story, she's changed a number of details about her life that she didn't like, while in reality, Dan actually died from his heart attack during Darlene's wedding; Darlene actually married Mark, while Becky married David; her sister, rather than her mother, was a lesbian; and Roseanne didn't win the lottery. Becomes a nested story within a nested story after the revival. The epilogue from the season 9 finale is actually part of the story that she is writing, and in reality Dan is alive, David and Mark are with Darlene and Becky respectively, they didn't win the lottery, Bev is gay, and Jackie is straight. |
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Atonement was supposedly completely truthful and written by Briony, but she gave it a happy ending instead of writing down what actually happened: that is, that her sister and Robbie both died before they could reunite. Then you start to wonder how much else she made up, and whether she could really have known the whole truth anyway. | |
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Cloud Atlas: Each story cuts off halfway through to jump to another. All the stories are "real" but the protagonist of each story only has access to half of the previous story. After the final story this is reversed, with the second half of each story being presented in reverse order as each protagonist finds the rest of the previous story. | |
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In The Big Bang Theory Season 5 episode The Recombination Hypothesis, Leonard considers asking Penny out again and their dates go horribly, although there are frequent bedroom encounters after the fact. Leonard gets more and more confused and it is eventually revealed that he is still in the original scene contemplating asking her out. Having "thought it through", he decides to ask her out and in later episodes they eventually get back together. | |
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The first five minutes of the extended music video for Thriller are revealed to be a werewolf B Movie starring Michael Jackson and a girl—who are both in a theater watching the film. | |
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In the penultimate mission of Saints Row: The Third, you have to choose between going after Killbane, the game's Big Bad (who is about to escape on a plane) or save your teammate on the other side of the city. If you let Killbane escape, the final mission is a climactic showdown between you and him on Mars... which is actually just a movie the Saints are making after becoming a massive cultural icon. | |
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Over thirty years after the release of Super Mario Bros. 3, Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that the events of the game were all just a play Mario and friends were performing. This is heavily hinted at in-game, though, with the game beginning with a curtain opening and the blocks being bolted to the background, for instance. | |
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In Ultra Fast Pony, the episode "The Butts Family" has an abrupt and depressing shaggy dog ending... then the scene cuts to the other ponies telling Pinkie Pie that her "scary story" was terrible. | |
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Love Live! has a Cold Open in season 2 with a scene that's half this and half All Just a Dream - the girls are around the computer, waiting for the results of the recent preliminary competition. The results come in, and after a few "almost"s ("Mi...Mi... Midnight Cats! Mi... Myu... Myu... Mutant Girls!"), they aren't on the list of teams that made it. Cut to Honoka saying, "And that was the dream I had!", to which the rest of the team reacts along with the audience. | |
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DoDonPachi Resurrection BLACK LABEL's consumer-exclusive Ketsui-crossover Arrange Mode appears to be a plotless crossover at first, with the game being a mishmash of Resurrection's and Ketsui's game mecahnics, and a variation of Evaccaneer DOOM as the True Final Boss. However the ending reveals that it's a training simulation for the Ketsui pilots in preparation for their assault on EVAC Industry, making it a Stealth Prequel. | |
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The last scene of the goofy drug comedy The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) reveals the story to be an idea that star Douglas Fairbanks is pitching to a writer at the studio. The writer tells him to "go back to acting". | |
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At some point in The Invisibles we find out that a future version of Dane, the main character, is recounting the events of the comic to his dying friend. One possible interpretation of this is that it's all just a story made up by Dane to cheer up the friend before his death. Later on, the series also suggests that its story might be a case of self-insert fanfic written by Ragged Robin, or a massive virtual reality video game where various characters are roles the players can choose. Let's just say The Invisibles is fond of this trope. | |
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Completing Sonic Mania in the unlockable & Knuckles mode while playing as Knuckles reveals that the events of the mode are actually a story called Sonic Mania & Knuckles that Knuckles reads to some animal buddies. | |
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The Adventures of Baron Munchausen does this, though it also suggests the Nested Story might've been real after all. | |
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Super Mario Bros.: Over thirty years after the release of Super Mario Bros. 3, Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that the events of the game were all just a play Mario and friends were performing. This is heavily hinted at in-game, though, with the game beginning with a curtain opening and the blocks being bolted to the background, for instance. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is either this, or a Cosmic Retcon of the first game. |
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The ending of The Housemaid reveals that the whole film, a dark tale of adultery and murder centering around a man who sleeps with his maid, is actually a hypothetical story that the man tells his wife. She is not amused. | |
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In the first "Anthology of Interest" episode of Futurama, the Professor invents a Fing-Longer (a glove with an extended index finger), which leads the crew to discover his What-If machine. The rest of the episode is a series of shorts played out on the What-If machine based on questions that the others ask it. At the very end of the episode there's a cut to the Professor watching the What-If machine alone, and he says "So that's what things would be like if I'd invented the Fing-Longer." | |
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In Opplopolis a brief sequence about an alien race is apparently revealed to be a fantasy of Marvin's. Later, the same aliens reappear and discuss future events of the comic, in the process implying that Opplopolis is actually the nested story (one told to the aliens by something called "the marvedyne"). | |
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The second half of Next is this, being revealed to be a precognition of what would have happened has the protagonist taken a different action. | |
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The Audio Play version of Daughter of Discord, (the sequel to Bride of Discord) reveals that the story was being told by Twilight to a now slightly older Zany and Applespike, as well as her daughter Twinkle and Rarity's youngest daughter Jewel, the latter having not even appeared in the fan fics, until stories later in continuity. | |
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Twixt starts with Baltimore Hall deciding to write a book about the murders in the small town he stopped in. After many alternating dream scenes and fantastic events that reflect the dream and involving vampires, the film cuts to his agent saying that he loves the story, implying that the events of the story were merely the plot of a fictional book. | |
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The episode "Doing Time" from SpongeBob Squarepants has the entire plot of Mrs. Puff being imprisoned after the car went off-ramp (thanks to Spongebob driving like crazy) being entirely inside Mrs. Puff's head. Even has multiple nested story reveal as well after the part where Mrs. Puff is carted into isolation! | |
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Doctor Who: The majority of "Extremis" takes place in the latest of many computer simulations created by the Prophets of Truth in preparation for their invasion of Earth. The Doctor, Bill and Nardole that we see for most of the episode are simulacrums in this virtual reality. This time, however, the simulated Doctor manages to send the real one an email with his memory-print of the last several hours, alerting him to what's going on. Most of the episode is just that — the Doctor watching the recording. | |
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In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, the dialogue "Contrafactus" involves a "Subjunc-TV", which is a television that can tune into channels that show events under various hypothetical circumstances (illustrated by the characters watching a football game and seeing "subjunctive instant replays" showing how a play would have gone if, say, footballs were round, or if it were baseball instead of football). The Crab mentions that he got the Subjunc-TV in a contest, but eventually reveals that he didn't actually win; the whole story is then revealed to be a Subjunc-TV broadcast of what would have happened if he had won. | |
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One episode of the The Dead Zone had Johnny bump into a woman in a bar. He sees various visions which snap back to him bumping into her in the bar. He avoids all the visions by calling his friend the sheriff and asking him to wait outside for the woman's future murderers. | |
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In Tank Girl, several stories turn out to be the characters spinning tales to each other. | |
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In Little Women (2019), there is an ambiguous example of this trope. It is revealed that the scenes showing Jo and Friedrich's romantic happy ending are fictitious and are part of Jo's novel. But they may be real; it is up for interpretation. | |
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The Handmaid's Tale ends with one of these, in the form of a transcript of a speech given at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held at the University of Denay in 2195. The speaker is...skeptical about much of the preceding 300-odd pages. | |
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A common interpretation of The Fountain is that the "Conquistador" subplot actually comes from a book written by the protagonist's wife. It's also possible the "Astronaut" subplot is something the protagonist added to the book later on. But since the movie is very much a Mind Screw, it's hard to tell. | |
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The South Park episode "Woodland Critter Christmas" is revealed to be a story narrated by Cartman near the end when Kyle objects to "Kyle" agreeing to host the Antichrist. | |
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There's that two-part episode of Family Guy called Stewie Kills Lois and Lois Kills Stewie where Stewie tries to kill Lois, then tries to take over the world when he realizes she survived, then she tries to stop him by any means necessary, but at the end of the second episode it turns out that Stewie was just running a virtual reality simulation to see what would happen if he finally tried to kill Lois. The use of this trope is Lampshaded by Brian, who comments that anyone who were "watching" the simulation and found out at the end it didn't happen would feel like they'd been given a "giant middle finger". In the later episode "Forget Me Not", the entire plot is revealed to be an experiment by Stewie to test Brian and Peter's relationship. |
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Happens twice in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Living Witness". First events are presented on-screen as if they are actually taking place, despite their representing what would be very uncharacteristic behavior for the Voyager crew. This proves to be a "re-creation" of historical events, presented to a tour group by guide and historian Quarren. The rest of the episode focuses on Quarren's interaction with a reactivated holographic Doctor. Until the final scene, where we see another guide and historian has been presenting the entire story to a tour group, some 700 years after it took place. | |
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How I Met Your Mother: In "Symphony of Illumination", the episode opens not with Future Ted telling a story to his kids, but with Future Robin telling a story to her and Barney's kids. For context, the previous episode ended with Robin telling Barney she was pregnant. Here, they're both relieved when it turns out to have been nothing more than a pregnancy scare, but this takes a sudden turn when Robin is informed that she is infertile. Despite never having wanted children, she's devastated by the knowledge that she now does not even have the choice. It turns out that the framing sequence was all just Robin attempting to console herself by telling this story to her imaginary children, and saying that she is glad they are not real. "The Time Travelers" is set forty-five days before Barney and Robin's wedding. Barney and Ted are visited by versions of themselves from twenty minutes, twenty hours, and twenty years into the future and they all debate the potential ramifications of Barney and Ted going out and having a fun night getting drunk together. Later, Ted notices a woman in the bar he met and was attracted to seven years earlier (specifically in "Okay Awesome") and never pursued, but he's stopped from making a move on her by two different versions of the woman from twenty months into the future. They both warn Ted that any relationship he starts with her will inevitably fail just like all his past relationships have. In the end, it turns out Ted imagined the whole thing: he's sitting alone in the bar while Robin and Barney finalize their wedding plans and Marshall and Lily take care of their baby. The episode closes with Future Ted narrating that if he could have relived that night, he would've run to the Mother's apartment so he could've met his future wife forty-five days earlier than he really did. |
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The Dragonlance short story The Storyteller is about a popular tavern tale-teller who the people love, especially since the Dragonarmy occupied their city. They love him so much in fact, that he's arrested and sentenced to death for inspiring rebellion. But the people aren't going to take this lying down; his friends at the tavern organize and break him out, starting a revolution in the process. Except not. That was just one last story he told to his cellmate. No one was brave enough to try to rescue him and he's hanged at dawn. | |
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In one episode of Frasier, the eponymous doctor is seriously doubting whether he should help strangers in need. While driving his car, he sees a woman standing in the rain, and decides to give her a ride. The woman turns out to be a transgender prostitute, and Frasier soon gets arrested by the police, who mistakenly think he's soliciting for her services. The whole event ends up being publicized in the media, making Frasier a laughing stock. Just before the episode ends, it cuts back to the scene with Frasier in the car and the woman standing in the rain. Turns out everything that happened was just a worst-case scenario Frasier had been considering in his head. He gives the woman a ride anyway. | |
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Inception falls somewhere between this trope and All Just a Dream. The events of the first story (and possibly the whole movie) are revealed to be a dream, but unlike with a typical All Just a Dream scenario, most of the characters know they're within a fictional story, since they're the ones who created it. Also the events in the dream are in the same continuity, with the characters' interactions carrying over. | |
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