Major spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Juuni Taisen, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, and Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu
I've been watching The Rose of Versailles recently, and something that has struck me about the show is how it much it wants the viewer to know that things are going to go downhill really badly. For one, the series is a retelling of the events leading up to the French Revolution, so if you payed attention in history class you'll probably have a good idea of what's going to happen to most of the characters. We know what the French Revolution is like, we know who the big players are and what their roles are, and we know what happens to France and the palace of Versailles after the fact. But even if you didn't know this already, the series employs a narrator to let us know exactly what's going to happen in the future. They inform us of Marie Antoinette's tragic end, of Robespierre's role as a radical revolutionary figure, and of Count Polignac's eventual fate, so even if you didn't learn about the French Revolution's big players in school, the series goes out of its way to inform us of their fates early on. So what's going on here? Storytelling tradition seems to imply that being predictable is bad. If we know what's going to happen in the future, it removes suspense, gives us time to mentally prepare for tragedy (thus reducing its impact), and makes it more difficult to invest in characters given that we know their fates. Our lack of knowledge about what's going to happen is normally what drives the drama, and what makes the eventual result so shocking and memorable.
The most common way that stories might do this is by using our knowledge to create a sense of tragic inevitability. Watching characters we love suddenly be confronted with tragedy is plenty poignant itself, but another method of drama comes from confronting the viewer with the knowledge that everything our characters are doing is pointless. Indeed, the lack of tension in the traditional sense is a great way to create a different form of tension: tension that comes from watching our characters ignorantly carrying themselves towards ruin. Audiences tend to get invested in the main characters, we want to see them succeed at their goals. Watching a person we love try their absolute hardest to achieve something while knowing that they're going to fail by the end is heart-wrenching, as the seeming pointlessness of their actions contrasts their determination and grit. This approach is quite often done on a micro level. I'm sure you've seen the trope in which an unambiguously villainous character takes advantage of an overly trusting protagonist. In that case, we watch as they slowly bring themselves to ruin, with each choice to trust in this evil person being more difficult to watch than the last. The frustration of seeing a character we like fall to such manipulation creates engaging drama, not only because self-inflicted tragedy is appealing in itself, but because having such an unambiguous villain makes it fun to root against them. But this is something that can happen on a macro level as well, with stories hinging their entire plots on our knowledge of the future and the tragedy that will soon be unavoidable, often due to the protagonist's own faults.
This is ultimately what The Rose of Versailles seems to be doing. The series tells us at every corner that the French Revolution will come and that many of the characters we know will meet their tragic ends or do terrible things. And that makes it hit so much harder every time I see Oscar become more determined to help the people and change the nobility, because at the end of the day, she is powerless and the people will rebel and kill people she knows. There's a tragic irony in seeing Oscar talk at a small restaurant with a young Robespierre, a person who history has portrayed as an overly radical villain, as he espouses completely agreeable points about the power of the nobility and is absolutely sympathetic in his worldview. Knowledge of what he will be forced to become makes the interaction more difficult to watch than if I hadn't known about him, and that adds extra drama to this section of the story.
Finally, a story can pull off something similar to the previous example by using unreliable narration. This is perhaps the rarest method of using predictability to create drama, but when done right it can be among the most impactful. Where the previous example was about having the viewer read into things that the narrative doesn't explicitly spell out, unreliable narration comes when we are given a story narrated by a certain character, but don't realize that the story told to us comes either from their biased view of events, or from them outright omitting or changing details of what really happened due to not wanting to talk about certain things. Audiences are primed to trust everything that the point of view character conveys to them, so when we know things are going to happen a certain way but learn that events weren't conveyed exactly right, we still get that sense of drama. A great example of this occurs in Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu. This show's first season focuses entirely on Yakumo narrating his backstory, which we learn right away ends with the double suicide of his closest friend Sukeroku and the women in their love triangle Miyokichi. We also have Sukeroku's and Miyokichi's daughter Konatsu, who has vague memories of these events from her childhood and a raging hatred of Yakumo, impacting our view of the story. As Yakumo narrates it, an accident happens which causes the couple to fall off a roof, he fails to save Sukeroku and lets him fall to his death, and Sukeroku says he's counting on him for something. Yakumo blames himself, and Konatsu hates him, which makes the story even more believable on top of the confidence with which it was narrated. Thus, when Yotaro goes to visit the place where it all happened, there's no real tension because we know what we're going to find, or so we thought until it's revealed that Yakumo's story was distorted. The knowledge we thought we had makes it much more devastating when it gets completely overturned, and we're forced to recontextualize our thoughts on characters we thought we had an intimate understanding of. Giving us incomplete knowledge pays off the lack of tension that comes from thinking it will be predictable, making for a powerful plot twist.
These are just a few of the many ways that a story can manipulate the viewer's understanding of events in order to create drama. While we might think that the best way to create tension is to leave us wanting to know what's going to happen next, some stories opt to play with our expectations of events by purposefully making things seem predictable, and then creating a sense of impending tragedy, using our knowledge to create suspense, or using our comfort to pull the rug from under our feet. Stories are complicated beasts, and there's never one right way to craft them. While a straightforward thriller like Attack on Titan benefits from our lack of knowledge about what might come next, others like the ones listed above go out of their way to let the viewer know exactly what they're in for and then use our expectations to create drama. So the next time you see someone complain about a story being predictable, try to think about what it wants you to expect. Perhaps, predictability is the centerpiece of the story itself.
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