The Power of Being Predictable

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. 

But aside from stories that are about actual mysteries, stories are not questions to be answered. Stories are vehicles for drama, and there are numerous ways of creating drama aside from the suspense resulting from our lack of knowledge. In fact, our knowledge of future events can even create drama, and stories that make us think things will go down a certain way can often surprise us by doing things slightly differently than we've been led to expect. I've found that stories which aim to be predictable are often misunderstood, looked at through the lens that most media trains us too by lamenting the supposed undercutting of tension that predictability creates. Today, I want to explore the power of being predictable, and look at the many ways that stories can use our own knowledge of their conclusions to create compelling drama. 

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. 

A much more recent example of this tactic in action is Studio Trigger's newest hit Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Night City is presented as an oppressive place where dreams don't come true. Much like Rose of Versailles, power is held almost entirely by the rich (though this time it's greedy corporations rather than greedy nobles), and those below them struggle to find money and medical care. The Sandevistan that David manages to get his hands on certainly gives him more power, but he still ends up being slave to corporations by the end. The series constantly tells us that, despite him constantly saying that he's built different and can take the Sandevistan's side effects better than everyone else, this is obviously David's delusion and it won't last him forever; every character warns him that he's not going to last. The death of him and basically everyone else seems inevitable, but that only makes his downward spiral all the more sad. David is motivated by his dream of sending Lucy to the moon, a dream that I found myself deeply invested in due to the intimate chemistry these characters share. Watching that dream slowly slip away from him as he fights his worst traits and brings himself to ruin crafts drama even more compelling than if it were an actual question of whether he would succumb to his tech or not. When Lucy finds herself on the moon without David, the pointlessness of everything makes her success feel bittersweet, which makes for a poignant and memorable ending. 

Tragic inevitability makes everything the characters go through futile, and that can be a boon to interesting theming. The adaptation of Nisio Isin's Juuni Taisen: Zodiac War novel got a lot of flack for the way it followed an easily predictable formula, but I've always felt that these complaints didn't understand what it was trying to do. The series first episode was an exciting and shocking action romp that managed to be wildly entertaining due to how trashy and surprising it was. But as each episode continued to follow the same formula, in which we'd get invested in a character, learn about their backstory and motivation, and then watch them die, the idea of caring about these people started to feel pointless. The series even actively ensures we know the exact order that each character will die by following the zodiac signs to a T, and having the visuals for the ED show the order on top of that. The fact that it intentionally spoils us should have let us know that there's something going on here, and that "something" ends up being that the series is about the futility of war. While the first episode is exciting and fun, we slowly get desensitized to all the trashy fights and intense gore, and ultimately just watch characters murder each other and kill everyone's dreams. That's the nature of war, it's not supposed to be fun or exciting, it's just pointless. The series villains are people who gamble on the results of the battle royale, the very people who find it entertaining are the ones we're meant to see in a bad light. And when Rat wins and gets a wish, he chooses to forget about all the trauma he had to endure, quite literally making the entire event pointless beyond the worthless deaths of likable characters. Being forced to watch characters fight valiantly for their dreams while knowing that they're about to die reinforces the notion that war is pointless. 

So we know that stories can use our knowledge of future events to make the tragic inevitability of the story's ending a source of drama or messaging. But series can use our knowledge of future events in another way, by feeding our expectations of how the event is supposed to go, but making the end result happen differently that we'd been led to believe. There are a number of ways that a story can do this. An obvious one is by centering the tension on when a particular event is going to happen. Just because we know that something is going to happen doesn't mean that we know the moment it's destined to come, and the knowledge that it can happen at any time makes every moment feel tense. This strategy is a common tactic of great horror, as we always know that the monster will come eventually but we never know when or where it will come from. Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni centers much of its drama around this exact idea. While the first episode might be shocking while we don't know what's going on, we quickly come to realize that each set of episodes will have a series of events that end roughly the same way: with at least one character losing their sanity and killing at least a few people, followed by a reset where it all happens differently. The tension comes from our lack of knowledge on who is going to snap and when they're going to lose it. The series exaggerated slice of life elements only amplify that tension, as the goofy shenanigans are always on thin ice and it can shift to bloody slasher at any moment. Our knowledge that the shift is coming but lack of knowledge of exactly when or how is what creates the tension. 

And just like a story can leave out the very moment that a shocking event happens, a story can also leave out crucial details about the particular way the event occurs. I'm not much of a fan of the film I Want to Eat Your Pancreas for reasons unrelated to what I'll be talking about here, but it makes for a great example of this particular idea and it pulls it off well enough to be worth using as a talking point. The film opens up on Sakura's funeral, and then flashes back to the story that precedes her death. Our protagonist meets her at a hospital, where she talks openly about her pancreatic cancer and the impending death that awaits her. It immediately let's us know that the story is going to end with her death, and the vast majority of viewers will be primed to expect that she will be dying as a result of her deadly illness in a set amount of time. The fact that this tends to be the norm for stories of this type only reinforces the idea, these tearjerkers love to play on that tragic inevitability I mentioned earlier. So when she instead dies on a random day after getting stabbed, it still ends up being a plot twist as shocking as anything. The series confidently telling us that she'll die and implying exactly how creates a sense of comfort that gets ripped out from under us when we realize that the idea she'd die from cancer is something we assumed ourselves, rather than information the narrative told us. Taken together, the takeaway is that we never truly know when we're going to die, and should thus live every day as if it's our last. 

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.