1. Vagrant Tale

    Vagrant Tale Active Member

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    Twist? Or Bait & Switch?

    Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by Vagrant Tale, Jul 25, 2016.

    I've been playing around with the idea of doing a fantasy story that progressively becomes more and more surreal at times when dealing with supernatural elements. But the imagery and the logic behind the paranormal elements would be very subtlety cyberpunk ideas, with recurring motifs. It's never elaborated upon. Sometimes the words are just switched.

    For example: the main character encounters a formless, shapeless, freakish mass of unknown matter that moves around like it is intelligent, but it doesn't appear to be organic, and they run from it until they escape. The only way they and other characters describe it is "a demon." But behind the scenes, I'd have written it as a virus.

    Or the character sees a massive, flat, perfectly smooth, perfect rectangle floating just above the ground. They reach out to touch it and their hand moves right through it, encountering no resistance or even feeling at all. They only describe what they saw, and do not have any understanding of what the "object" was. Behind the scenes (something that is never stated) is that this is a rogue polygon.

    The idea is that the fact that this is cyberpunk(I thinks?) wouldn't be known unless you really paid attention and thought about things. Other than that it would be a fantasy story with some surreal imagery and a unique and strange set of rules and a strange and not well understood pantheon.

    The question (sorry it took so long to get to this!) would this be in the fantasy bin or the science fiction bin at the bookstore? Would the discerning reader who figured it out feel like the story was cheapened because of this? Would figuring this out be a twist or would it be a bait & switch?
     
  2. NiallRoach

    NiallRoach Contributor Contributor

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    Twist, I guess. Maybe an Easter egg? Does the terminology matter?
     

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