Tomato Surprise



The resolution of a plot (usually but not always for a Speculative Fiction story) by the sudden revelation of some important detail which has been deliberately hidden from the viewer. Had this detail been made known at the beginning of the story, much or all of the dramatic tension would have been missing from the plot. However, the detail hasn't been hidden from the "viewpoint" of the character(s), and is often something that they would consider an obvious and mundane detail.

Note that withholding important details from the audience is not, in itself, anything special: think of all the murder mysteries that don't immediately reveal the very important detail of who did the murder. The true Tomato Surprise is only a surprise due to the withholding of information that the reader might reasonably have expected to have been told up-front, like "the story is not, as you probably assumed, set on Earth" or "the protagonist is not, as you probably assumed, a human being". A story that ends with a character learning the unexpected truth about his strange illness is not necessarily a Tomato Surprise -- but if the unexpected truth is "he's turning into a butterfly -- and, by the way, he's been a caterpillar all along"...

In skilled hands, a Tomato Surprise can make for a stunning ending with a powerful impact. Unfortunately, in the hands of a hack or novice writer, it will almost always come off as a cheat or an Ass Pull.

While this trope is often used for dramatic effect, it can also be used -- especially in Science Fiction -- to illustrate a moral or ethical situation in such a way as to invoke a different set of prejudices. Once the viewer has fully understood the dilemma as it applies in their assumed environment, the author reveals that the assumption is false and that the circumstances are different, leaving the viewer to reconcile new conclusions with old prejudices. For example, a story might describe the difficulties faced by society before finally revealing that the character is a visible minority, thus hopefully forcing a bigot who sympathized with the character to reconsider their position.

The trope name comes from a set of writer's guidelines distributed circa 1980 by Analog magazine, written by its then-editor, George Scithers. The guidelines named the trope and gave as one of the examples hiding the fact that the hero is, in fact, a tomato.

See Earth All Along, The All Concealing I, I Am Who, The Ending Changes Everything. Related to Karmic Twist Ending and Cruel Twist Ending. The opposite of this trope is Dramatic Irony, when the audience knows something that the characters don't know.

Contrast with Tomato in The Mirror, in which the protagonist (rather than just the audience) learns a surprising fact that causes everything that came before to be reevaluated. If the twist comes as a surprise to one or more protagonists, it is probably a Tomato in The Mirror rather than a Tomato Surprise.

Anime & Manga

 * The Big O uses actual tomatoes, though in a metaphorical manner; one of the final episodes ends on the main antagonist having come to a realization about his forgotten origins, declaring to himself "I'm one of the tomatoes".
 * "We are all TOMATOES"
 * And I'm here to answer your questions!
 * Ef a Tale of Memories - Pulled an awesome example, revealed in the second season of the anime (first episode_. Revealed at the very end of the game).
 * Tokyo Magnitude 8 does this. After Mirai and Yuki finally make it home, we find out that
 * Kanon - The true natures of both Makoto and the demons Mai is trying to kill are pretty big tomatoes by themselves, but the author pulls this twice in fairly-rapid succession with Ayu:
 * Sola - The whole cast doesn't seem quite right from the beginning.
 * Pulled not once, but three times in Durarara, each time proving our Ordinary High School Student protagonists to be not quite so ordinary: Whew!
 * Ingeniously played with in the short novel from the anime Death Note: The BB Murder case in which detective Misora Naomi is sent to do the field work to solve an intrincate case of a serial murderer, helped from behind by the famous detective L who she has never seen in person; and also by a strange character with "panda eyes" that pops out every now and then. Now if you've seen the anime before reading the novel, you'd be inclined to suspect that . But near the end, the reader finds out that he was, in reality , who helped her   and then  . And the reason why people may be confused at first is that  . Of course, Death Note fans already knew that.

Comic Books

 * This page showcases some particularly clumsy Tomato Surprises from old comics.
 * The Warhammer 40000 comic Damnation Crusade tells the story of three different Black Templar Space Marines: A neophyte, a battle brother, and a Dreadnought. In the very end, it is revealed that
 * In Enigma, a story about a superhuman who patterns his life after a comic book superhero in an attempt to give his life meaning, the hilarious yet bitterly sardonic narrator is revealed in the end to be.

Fan Works

 * The Touhou fan comic "The End of the Maiden's Illusion" concerns Reimu's death (of old age) and then segues into a reflective, long and sad conversation between her and Komachi. But scroll down the last strip and BAM!
 * A Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic, Blast to the Past makes this interesting. Taken as a reference from the comics, Sonic and Eggman were once friends. But then a terrible accident happens to one of then-benevolent Eggman's machines. Sonic tried to stop it but clumsily pulled out the plug by tripping, and it got worse. The good doctor tried to see if his young ward was alright, but trips on his foot and crashes into the machine, causing a devastating explosion. When the flames subsided, the now evil Mad Scientist we all love to hate was born and immediately blamed Sonic for his transformation. Sonic also blames himself for his friend's Face Heel Turn, say that it was his fault that Eggman is trying to rule the world.
 * The Danny Phantom fanfiction "Smokescreen begins with Danny waking up after a fight. He's pretty disoriented afterwards, and as time passes, he has more and more trouble with memory gaps and his powers going berserk. Eventually it is revealed that

Film

 * In Ben X,
 * Identity, starring John Cusack.
 * In Cypher, the protagonist Morgan Sullivan

Literature

 * The Agatha Christie novel The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd is a murder mystery with a Tomato Surprise ending. Some readers might find this clever, others might feel cheated -- there was a long and difficult debate about it in the pages of the London Times Literary Supplement the year it was published, difficult thanks to the debaters' desire to avoid spoilers.
 * Endless Night is another Christie example, and a particularly striking one.
 * The Neil Gaiman short story Murder Mysteries features as the main character an archangel, created by God to serve as the living embodiment of the Vengeance of the Lord, who is tasked by God to solve the murder of another angel. In the end, though, it turns out that.
 * Another Neil Gaiman story, A Study in Emerald, is a crossover between the Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu Mythos universes. It's a re-telling of A Study in Scarlet, except the blood around the room is green. A familiarity with both Conan Doyle's and HP Lovecraft's works is preferable before reading this story.
 * Novelist Alistair MacLean had a variation on this where the narrator would simply omit to mention certain essential pieces of Backstory. Done most effectively in Fear Is The Key, in which.
 * Many science fiction and fantasy novels use this strategy. A particularly good example is Emma Bull's Bone Dance, in which a vital fact about the protagonist is very cleverly concealed from the reader.
 * Let the Right One In manages a similar thing as the above example until the reveal, despite being written in a third person POV!  Sadly this doesn't carry over to the English translation.
 * In Sheri S Tepper's novel The Family Tree, the story is told from two disconnected points of view through most of the novel, until it is revealed . Then shortly thereafter we find out that.
 * One of Robert Sheckley's short stories appears to show two men high on drugs beginning to hallucinate that they are insects...
 * Similar is a short story by Julio Cortázar, The Flip Side of Night, in which a man suffers a motorcycle accident and begins having hallucinations that he is an ancient Mesoamerican warrior about to be sacrificed by the Aztecs. The resolution is much the same:
 * Bruce Coville's Unicorn Chronicles, where it turns out that the Hunter clan includes everyone who has Hunter as a last name,.
 * A Len Deighton short story in the Declarations Of War anthology ends.
 * An old science fiction story featured a group of aliens who intend to take over earth. They can take the form of any living thing, so they figure that infiltrating society will be easy. They land and take the form of the first humans they see. Then they walk into town, fully expecting to blend into the populace, but are instead immediately arrested. Turns out they landed next to a nudist colony.
 * In My Best Friend Is Invisible from R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series, Sammy ends up with an invisible friend named Brent. The twist is that Brent turns out be a human, while Sammy turns out to be a member of an alien species. The story apparently occurs in a time where humans are considered to be an "endangered species". The Tv episode reveals that this is the future where aliens have taken over the world, and they gang up on Brent.
 * This is a common twist in Goosebumps, especially the "protagonists are really monsters/aliens" version. It often has little to nothing to do with the rest of the book
 * A notable example in Attack Of The Jack-O'Lanterns. The main character notes in the beginning that a lot of extremely overweight people have gone missing. Then he and his friend join the school bullies to go trick or treating. They meet up with some friends wearing pumpkin heads who convince them to take a different route that will lead them to the biggest candy haul ever and they give them pillowcases to carry the candy in. The people at the houses on this street are all wearing pumpkin heads and giving out enough candy to fill the bags. The kids want to go home but the Pumpkin-headed friends start breathing fire and threatening the kids into eating all of the candy, telling them that they'll be sent back to eat more and more. Instead, on the second trip into the forest, the bullies run off, weaving through the trees.  But then
 * In Welcome To Camp Nightmare, which inspired the first episode of the TV series, the weird conspiracy at the summer camp was actually.
 * One short story features a group of kids who believe that a new girl is a vampire. Turns out,
 * In another short story, the protagonist meets a new friend who is enthusiastic about bats because her parents are bat scientists. We ultimately find out
 * There's a short science fiction story called The Hunters in which the world is being invaded by your typical merciless alien invaders who mass murder people and destroy civilization entirely. At the end of the story it is revealed that the "aliens" are humans.
 * There's an Ursula K. Le Guin short story called The Wife's Story, which at first looks like a standard werewolf story but is not.
 * In The Five Red Herrings, Dorothy L Sayers explicitly says she's omitting the identity of a crucial object from the crime scene, as "an intelligent reader ought to be able to figure it out".
 * The great Robert Bloch's short story The Yougoslaves (sic) used this: the narrator has thus far seemed to be a perfectly normal, though insanely determined old man. Then he survives what should be lethal wounds, and it's ultimately revealed that he's
 * In the 13th book of Erin Hunter's Warrior Cats series, The Sight, it took until the end of the 2nd chapter or so to find out that a new main character, Jaykit,
 * This was especially clever because those chapters are told from his point of view, Most readers don't notice this the first time.
 * Thomas Ligotti's "Notes on the Writing of Horror" is a short story in essay format. It starts as a famous horror writer demonstrates his technique on a basic plot. Each retelling of the story-within-the-story goes a little more off the rails, perhaps revealing more than the writer means to. By the end, it's clear that the author is:
 * An even more unsettling use of the trope occurs in another short, "Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes", in which the protagonist, a powerful hypnotist (and lover of monologue),, then proceeds to . This descends into full-on horror when.
 * at the climax of My Work Is Not Yet Done contains several of these, the most important being.
 * One of Isaac Asimov's short stories The Segregationist, consists largely of a doctor acting disgusted at how a patient wants robotic organs and ranting about how humans and robots should stick to their own kind. It's not revealed until the very end that the doctor is a robot.
 * Quite a few of Asimov's short stories end with the revelation that the main characters are the aliens, and the humans are creatures from another planet.
 * An other short story, Exile to Hell, deals with a man sent to exile because of some criminal offences..
 * Diana Wynne Jones' book Power of Three has a Tomato Surprise revealed halfway in the book -
 * The novel The Thief combines this with Unreliable Narrator, as for most of the book, the narrator Gen seems to be a classic Street Rat,.
 * Actually, the whole series abounds with these. (A hint to fellow tropers: if you ever plan on reading the series—really don't read the spoiler tags!)
 * Science-fiction writer Randall Garrett's Despoilers of the Golden Empire contains the Tomato Surprise to end all Tomato Surprises. While the story is a wonderful read, Garrett includes an apologia supporting it.
 * The short story Shards is very surreal, and starts with the protagonist awakening in a dark place. Slowly he discovers more about his surroundings, and increasingly weird things begin to happen. It's in first-person and it's clear he's not quite all there, making it difficult for the reader to work out what's really going on around him. The truth is, This is why he perceives the world in a weird way and can't seem to interact with anything in the early part of the story -.
 * Steven Erikson's Malazan series loves these. For example, at the beginning of the second book, Deadhouse Gates, it is revealed that.
 * Dean Koontz's novel Lightning. Throughout the story, the reader is led to believe that the totalitarian nation using time travel as a weapon is in the modern day, possibly the Soviet Union. Near the end of the book it's revealed that the nation is actually.
 * Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons conceals an amazing Tomato Surprise with its Anachronic Order, as the plot thread going further into the past finally hits a crucial event in the hero's past. Meanwhile, the plot thread working into the future catches up with one of the few characters who knows the twist...
 * Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov has its narrator, Charles Kinbote, pestering his friend, the famous poet John Shade, to write an epic poem about his home country of Zembla and the tragic fate of its king, who was forced into exile after a revolution. Shade ignores this and writes his final poem "Pale Fire" as an autobiography, causing Kinbote to hang onto the most minor details to tell the king's story anyway in his annotation after Shade's sudden death put the poem in his hands.
 * Fredric Brown's short story "The Sentry" is a perfect example of this trope:
 * A recent New Yorker short story, Daughters of the Moon, ends in a perfect example:
 * In Charles de Lint's The Blue Girl, there are three narrators: Imogene, Maxine, and Adrian. In Adrian's first chapter, he describes the first time he saw Imogene (who he has a crush on). The sentences "She just looked right through me, the way everyone does" and "For all that was special about her, she paid no more attention to me than anyone else did" just seem like a description of a typical teenage social outcast... until we find out that
 * The children's poem The New Kid on the Block by Jack Prelutsky features a litany of abuses perpetratd by a new neighborhood bully. At the very end, it's revealed that the bully is a girl.
 * A few of the Arsene Lupin stories actually use this. The POV character or a protagonist appears to be some normal, often helpless, man who is embroiled in a conflict between Lupin and whoever opposes him. Then the story reveals that said character is actually Lupin is disguise, keeping tabs on the other side.
 * Another story (813) had this used as a Crowning Moment of Awesome:
 * Below Suspicion by John Dickson Carr has an opening scene from the point of view of a young woman accused of murder. In the narration, the woman desperately thinks to herself that she's not guilty of the crime, and is despairing of anyone believing her. Since this is an internal narrative, the reader can be assured that she is perfectly innocent, and she is.
 * Robert A. Heinlein, Columbus Was A Dope. Some men are in a bar, discussing the launch of a new space ship. One of the men declares that it's ridiculous for men to go out exploring when everything is fine just the way it is. The title comes from the man saying that Columbus should never have bothered leaving home.
 * In a more minor case, Starship Troopers reveals on its very final page that "Johnny" Rico is actually Juan Rico, a Filipino. Nowadays, this is no big deal, but at the time the novel was written nearly all heroes in American SF and war fiction were stereotypical square-jawed white men. (Cf. pretty much any movie from the 50s.) And then the movie went and cast Casper Van Dien to play him.
 * And in an even more minor case, in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, it's revealed in a single throwaway line about four-fifths of the way through the book that the protagonist is half black.
 * Another throwaway line in his book Friday reveals that the main character is Native American in coloration. This didn't stop the publisher from releasing the book (even newer releases) with a white woman on the cover.
 * A Jeffry Archer short story compilation, A Twist in the Tail contained one story where a man accidentally killed his mistress in an outburst after seeing another lover of hers leaving the apartment. He anonymously tips off the police about the other guy, read in newspapers about his arrest and attends his court case where he sees the circumstantial evidence mount against the guy to the point where it seems impossible that any jury member would believe his innocence. It is only towards the end of the story when we hear the verdict of.
 * Judith Merril's infinitely creepy short story That Only A Mother. The first half is a series of letters from a young woman to her husband, describing the later stages of her pregnancy and how relieved she is that she's given birth to a normal healthy baby, not deformed by radiation like so many are since the war. But, she realizes/reveals, the baby's better than normal: she's a supergenius, able to speak in sentences before she's six months old! The second part is in narrative: the baby's father comes home and realizes that there's something strange about his daughter -- stranger even than his wife has mentioned. Not until the last paragraphs does he realize that
 * In Gene Kemp's children's novel The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler, the protagonist is a bold, athletic, rebellious schoolchild. At the end it is revealed that . This is an interesting example of the Tomato Surprise, as the twist ending is intended as a challenge to the reader's preconceptions, rather than turning the entire plot on its head. Compare with the Lost episode "Walkabout" (below).
 * The end of the book The Lace Reader reveals that
 * One Orson Scott Card short-short story consists of a father telling his children how he and the other leaders of their society used "the Ultimate Weapon" to destroy "the enemy," and though it was a terrible thing to kill the enemy down to the last man (since there could be no defense against the Ultimate Weapon), it was a necessary evil, because otherwise the enemy would have killed all of them instead. Now that the enemy have been defeated, the Ultimate Weapon will never need to be used again. What's the Ultimate Weapon?
 * Tom Tyron's The Other appears at first to be an Evil Twin horror story with 11-year old Holland, identical brother of Niles, killing various and sundry troublesome folks in bucolic 1935 America. Suffice it to say Holland was dead long before the action of the story takes place.
 * H Beam Piper used one of these in "The Return", when the nature of the society is explained with the final reveal of their patron deity:.
 * Although really, there were plenty of clues for any fan.
 * Piper also ends up using this trope in "Crossroads of Destiny," where it turns out that Available here.
 * Gautam Malkani's Londonstani is a witty and clever examination of British Asian youth culture told in London dialect with sprinklings of Hindi and Panjabi by main character Jas. Towards the end,
 * Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote an After the End short story in which a woman loves a man who gently but firmly rejects her advances. She feels it's because she's white and he's black. After he's murdered by a white man (whom she promptly kills in revenge), it's revealed that the black man was, more importantly, a Roman Catholic priest.
 * In the Dragaera novel Orca, we have Kiera the Thief as the special guest narrator for a lot of the story. She and Vlad blunder through the complicated politicoeconomic mess that forms the basis of the book's plot, and it's only after it's pretty much been sorted out that we learn Kiera neglected to inform us (and Vlad) that.
 * All the more impressive as she's been around for six books already, and this clearly isn't an Ass Pull... in fact, it helps explain a number of things. The reason readers didn't realize it long ago is partly because it's never before been really plot-relevant, and mostly because the supposition is just bizarre enough not to naturally occur.
 * In the Transall Saga, by Gary Paulsen, the tomato surprise comes halfway through the book, when it is revealed
 * In the last chapter of Sergei Lukyanenko's The Last Watch Anton discovers that.
 * In Wilson Tucker's 1970 Science Fiction novel, Year Of The Quiet Sun,  isn't mentioned until the last chapter, which turns out to be especially surprising, as it leaves readers to make culturally-biased assumptions.
 * In the Gregory Maguire novel Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister the classic tale of Cinderella is put into a real historical context and is told in a surreal manner by one of the ugly stepsisters. All along, the reader assumes that it's being told by, until it is revealed at the end that the narrator all along has been  . This puts a whole new spin on the story.
 * China Mieville's Bas-Lag short story "Jack" is narrated by someone who claims he helped Jack Half-A-Prayer, the Remade vigilante, become the legend he was. He did, too:.
 * Andrew Weiner's short story "The News from D Street" (in the collection Distant Signals) features a detective investigating disappearances, often of people who get on an ominous bus and never return. It turns out that
 * Bernard Beckett's novel Genesis depicts a young woman, Anaximander, undergoing an oral examination about history at the prestigious Academy. Philosophical debates about organic vs. artificial life and other topics are heavily featured; in the end we learn that
 * Arthur C Clarke has written his fair share of these. In one short story, two guys are innocently talking at a bar about some rather mundane-sounding construction project. In the very last sentence, we find out they were on the moon, and the construction project was actually the most monumental thing the human race has yet undertaken.
 * In The Giver, the point-of-view character, Jonas, experiences certain objects "changing" in the former half of the story, in a way that seems incomprehensible. It is later revealed that.
 * There's a pretty good short novel for young teens, El Mundo Septiembre Adentro Y Varias Formas de Evitarlo (The World Beyond September and Some Ways to Avoid It), which is sadly in Spanish only, but it's a damn good book with a DOUBLE Tomato Surprise: The story revolves around a girl who just entered an all-girl junior high, but finds there's something strange at her new school: from teachers who are unable to laugh to a strange monster hidden in the pool that eats boredom and a weird substance disguised as vitamins that erases people's free will and turns girls into reptile-human mutants. With the guide of Fuente, a freaky girl that no one seems to notice, and the help of a boy from the other school and a nerdy girl from her class, the main character sets on a stomach-curling adventure to unveil the secrets of the school and set her classmates free. But she finds out she can't fight against the system, which leads to the first Tomato Surprise: she was actually . Then, as the science teacher--who seemed to believe her but betrayed her last-minute-- drags her kicking and screaming to the nurse wing, it is revealed that, in fact   murmuring her catch phrase, "Jr. High school does have an end..." and then adding, "but in the meantime..."
 * In Michael Slade's Ghoul, the RCMP and British police pursue a Lovecraft-obsessed psychotic, a paranoid bomber, and a psychopathic hit man, who seem to be competing for press attention with their increasingly-grotesque crimes. Turns out that
 * Ursula LeGuin's "The Rule Of Names", a short story prelude to her Earthsea series, features a duel between two shapechanging wizards over the contents of a royal treasury, which had been looted by a dragon. It's only when the more formidable-seeming of the two invokes the true name of his opponent, hoping to force him back into his true form, that it's revealed that
 * Stone of Tears has a villain appearing throughout the book, and it is always mentioned that she has an unusual eye color.  Who just invited him to a secret meeting so she can help him.
 * In Vampire of the Mists, Katya and Trina turn out to be the same person. The heroes don't figure this out until too late, however, because it never occurs to Sasha to introduce his fiancee to Jander, who would have recognized her instantly. This works especially well, because there are clues all along that make it obvious in retrospect.
 * In "Tunnel Under the World" by Fred Pohl, the protagonist discovers that a strange group of people are using mindwiping on everyone in town to make them repeat the same day over and over. He then discovers that the town is a facsimile, and the group (who walk among the townsfolk, but are never remembered the next day) are using the town as a testing ground for ad campaigns. He frees some allies and they try to flee, but are finally stopped... by a gigantic hand. It turns out that the entire town was wiped out in a factory explosion, and everyone's consciousness was stored in artificial brains put in artificial bodies... but the execs didn't see any reason to waste money by making everything proper size. The town and entire mountain it rests on fits neatly on a desk.
 * In another story in the same anthology, the narrator is contacted through a dream ("I'm sorry for interrupting your dream, but...") by a race of microscopic people living on a small area of his skin, and who want him to stop scratching at an itch because it is devastating their cities. They come to a peaceful agreement, and the narrator muses on how this experience has made him reconsider his perception of his world and its natural phenomena. As such, he's sorry for interrupting your dream, but...
 * In Piers Anthony's Being a Green Mother, It is revealed that Natasha, Orb's lover and the only other person who knows parts of the Llano, was actually
 * If one reads too quickly through David Weber's Honor Harrington stories whenever the Queen of Manticore makes an appearance, one might miss the fact that
 * At the very end of Lois Duncan's book I Know What You Did Last Summer, two of the main characters, Bud and Collie . The reader is unaware of this because.
 * Jorge Luis Borges makes use of this trope in several of his short stories. In "The Zahir," the narrator (Borges himself) outlines a story he's working on about an ascetic hermit who guards a huge treasure, protecting others from the temptation that it presents; by the end, it's revealed that the hermit is Fafnir, the dragon slain by the mythical hero Siegfried. "The House of Asterion" features a narrator who describes his home and the things he likes to do for fun (falling asleep in hallways, throwing himself off ledges, etc.), revealing increasingly bizarre details; his last words in the story speculate on the nature of the one who is destined to kill him: will he have the head of a man and the body of a bull, "or will he be like me?".
 * Shirley Jackson's famous short story "The Lottery" features a tiny, rural American town with a tradition of holding an annual lottery. The reader starts to suspect that something is wrong when a woman begins to protest when she finds out that someone in her family is going to "win." Things get even more suspicious when the woman protests even more after she gets selected.
 * A Fire Upon the Deep: In the beginning, nothing seems to be strange about Peregrine and the others. However, it soon turns out that
 * A short story this troper once read (can't place the name) has a girl driving to a party with her boyfriend at a farm some distance away. During the drive, she reflects on how boring and uninteresting her boyfriend, and everyone else around he her, is. He decides to freak her out by telling her about a weird dream he had, where he was abducted by a group of three-eyed aliens. This fails to impress her. After the party (which she also finds boring), they're driving back. Finally, she's had enough and decides to show him something weird. She lifts the hair covering her forehead and removes a band-aid... to reveal an eye.
 * In a short story in a children's book, the protagonist is a young prodigy living in a high-tech city. For his next project, he decides to build an artificial human that mimics real humans as close as possible. He spends weeks designing and building it, and finally takes the artificial human to show the city's leader. The leader looks at him and admits the android shows some potential, but points out flaws such as the lack of tannable skin, or realistic emotions, or aging. When the protagonist fails to see how this is important, the leader has him strapped into a chair and shows him an old video of a group of old men watching a young boy eat. He reveals that these men are the last living humans. The boy is their first robot designed to replace them and is able to do all the things real humans can do. The leader is that boy. The protagonist realizes that all of the city's inhabitants are robots, including him. As he is being led away to have the last hour wiped from his memory (ignorance is bliss), he takes a look at his creation and, for the first time, sees just how fake it looks.
 * In Chess With A Dragon by David Gerrold, the revelation that  is this trope. Particularly deft in that, even when their physiology is discussed at some length by the insectoids, it sounds like the writer is just confirming what a human character said in the previous chapter (i.e. that mammals are considered disgusting by other races) rather than dropping hints.
 * H.P. Lovecraft's short story titled "The Outsider" describes the protagonist's escape from a bizarre prison and his subsequent encounter with a monster.

Live Action TV

 * The Twilight Zone:
 * The second-season episode "The Invaders" uses a Tomato Surprise to put a trademark Twist Ending on the story. In a script containing practically no dialogue, Agnes Moorehead plays an old crone in an isolated cabin beset by spacemen less than a foot tall. Alas, it wasn't Earth All Along.
 * "Eye of the Beholder", currently pictured above, hides the fact that the woman undergoing plastic surgery for her horrible mishapen face has.
 * Saturday Night Live parodied this episode by subverting the trope:
 * TOS episode "Third from the Sun". A family tries to escape their planet in a spaceship before it's destroyed in a nuclear war. At the end it's revealed that the planet they're going to is.
 * There was an episode where society breaks down as the Earth moves closer and closer to the sun and people are dying of heat stroke.
 * The Twilight Zone was also prone to the "Jar of Tang" variety of Tomato Surprise:
 * The '00s series had "We are all Sims!"
 * The original series episode "The Lateness of the Hour" features a young girl who lives alone with her parents and their robot domestics, who she bitterly complains are turning the whole family into 'anti-social freaks'. Obviously, after she off-handedly mentions having children and her mother freaks out, she realises that she herself is a robot.
 * The Lost episode "Walkabout" hinges on the revelation at its end that Locke was in a wheelchair before the plane crash. In all flashbacks he is sitting at a desk or table, or lying in bed.
 * Sawyer's first Day in The Limelight had such a twist as well, when it turned out the letter written to him was actually a letter he wrote to the original Sawyer.
 * Lost did this more than once. Another noteworthy example is the season 3 finale, "Through the Looking Glass", which features a series of seemingly traditional flashbacks for Jack, one of the main characters... until he
 * And then there's the season 4 episode "Ji Yeon", which appears to feature
 * In the Scrubs episode "My Screwup" we find out at the end of the episode that
 * There is one hint for eagle-eyed viewers that at first appears to be a continuity error -
 * Another hint pops up throughout the episode, but it's so subtle that the viewer is unlikely to pick up on it until the second watch -
 * And of course, Ben's line
 * The Finale of St. Elsewhere it is revealed that
 * Interestingly, a number of shows crossed over with it in some way, if only the appearance of one "special guest star," and a number of shows crossed over with those shows and so on, resulting in a fairly massive web of shows that can be said to share a universe with it. The ending means that.
 * Nah, it just means that
 * One plot thread of The League of Gentlemen comes to an unexpected conclusion when it is revealed that  The stage show ups the ante by revealing that

Music

 * 311's song "Hey You" is a tribute to someone who the singer describes as a "constant companion," thanking him for the good times that they've spent together. In the final repetition of the chorus, it's revealed that the companion that the singer is describing is music.
 * Used to powerful effect in the video for The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up". The video is shot from first-person viewpoint, showing a clubgoer going about their routine... which starts with a line of cocaine in the clubgoer's home and later involves binge-drinking, vomiting into a toilet, accosting a woman in a bar, meeting another woman in an alleyway and then returning home with her to have sex. At the end, however,
 * Also done in a country music video called "I Miss My Friend" by Darryl Worley. The video leads you to thinking that you're looking in on the girl that the singer misses,
 * Christian song "Hammer" from the 1989 album "The Altar" by Ray Boltz is an excellent example of storytelling in a song. The narrator is an eyewitness to crucifixion of Jesus; he vocally expresses his outrage over cruel treatment of Jesus and calls out his executors. The crowd mocks him; confused, he
 * The music video for Nickelback's "Someday" seems to show a man running after his girlfriend.
 * The 1954 hit The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane sounds like a song about a scandalous young woman,
 * A well-known Spanish pop song by La Oreja de Van Gogh, Jueves (Thursday), tells a cute story of a girl who takes the subway everyday just to see a boy whom she's silently in love with, until she finally gathers the courage to talk to him and finds out he likes her too. Pretty romantic. Then, on the second-to-last verse she mentions that "this special day, March 11th" was when they declared their love to each other. On that particular day, . Then, the last verse states: " the lights of the tunnel go out. I find your face with my hands, gather courage and kiss you. You say you love me and I give to you  ", implying that they were riding one of those trains.
 * "Sally Cinnamon" by The Stone Roses seems like a typical love song, then in the last verse it's revealed that.
 * The Vicki Lawrence song, The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia (later covered by Reba) has the singer tell the story about how her brother got railroaded and eventually hung by small-town justice for a murder he didn't commit. How does she know this?
 * The Pina Colada Song could be considered a benign example, with the Tomato Surprise being that the singer's lady is secretly just as bored with him as vice versa ... at least, until they discover new common interests through the personal ads they took out behind each others' backs.
 * The 1964 hit song "Memphis" by Chuck Berry (covered by Johnny Rivers) has a man calling "long-distance information" to "get in touch with my Marie". He and Marie were "torn apart because her mom did not agree". In the last line of the song, the singer reveals
 * A very mild example in Gaelic Storm's "Go Home Girl", in that it doesn't really change the narrative any, but it does lend a slightly humorous new layer to it. Having spent the song trying to gently turn down a girl who's become infatuated with him, the gypsy narrator reveals in the last line that
 * The Offspring's "Hammerhead" seems like a song told by some kind of soldier...
 * "Save Your Kisses for Me" by Brotherhood of Man seems like a lovesong by a man leaving his loved one at home when he goes to work
 * "My Sweet Rosalie" has a similar twist. The man sings about his love for his fun-loving, free-spirited companion who always manages to cheer him up whenever he's down. Turns out that
 * Modest Mouse does this very cleverly in the music video for their song "Little Motel". The whole video is shown in reverse - we start with a woman with her child in a motel room as she tucks him into the bed. It then plays the preceding events leading up to this in reverse and the "ending" reveals that
 * Garth Brooks' "Victim of the Game" describes someone who's been hurt emotionally, possibly by a failed relationship. Turns out,
 * Immortal Technique's "You Never Know" tells a story of the singer falling in love with a ice-queenish bookish girl. They take the relationship slow until he tells his true feelings for her. She starts crying until he leaves her. We find out what happens to him and then we find out what happens to her.
 * Porter Wagoner's 1968 country hit "The Carroll County Accident". The narrator tells about a car accident that killed a prominent small-town man who was riding in a car driven by a female friend. She survives and says she found him on the side of the road feeling sick and was giving him a ride back into town. The narrator then says he learned what really happened: he went to look at the wrecked car and found  But that's not the final twist:
 * In Eminem's "25 to Life", he raps things such as, I don't think she understands/the sacrifices that I made, I've done my best to give you/nothing less then perfectness, Go marry someone else/and make em famous/and take away their freedom/like you did to me/treat em like you don't need em/and they ain't worthy of you/feed em the same s*** that you made me eat, and my friends keep asking me/why I can't just walk away from/I'm addicted/to the pain, the stress,the drama. The whole song reads as something to a girl who doesn't appreciate him. Then one of the last lines, f*** you hip hop, changes the whole meaning of the song.
 * "Stan" as well. Although the listener knows it already, Eminem (the character in the song) experiences a Tomato Surprise when he figures out that Stan was the lunatic he saw on the news a few days ago.
 * Queensryche's Gonna Get Close To You is all about the joys of being a stalker. The end of the clip, however, reveals that the woman he's stalking . For no apparent reason.
 * Led Zeppelin's "A Fool in the Rain" is about a guy being stood up by a girl. For a while, he tries to convince himself that she's just late, even waiting out in the rain for her, until he finally gives up hope. He immediately realizes that
 * The Kinks's "Lola" is about a woman the narrator met in a bar and fell in love with, but in the final line it's revealed that Lola is actually
 * Though if you listen to the lyrics, it's pretty obvious right from the beginning of the song.
 * New Order's song 'Fine Time' plays like a conventional love song praising the sexual qualities of the narrator's love-interest, until the song ends and fades out, where if the listener is paying attention...
 * Devo's "Beautiful World", the verses of which are filled with positive lyrics about the world. It's only hinted at during the chorus "It's a beautiful world - for you" that not all is as it seems. Towards the end of the song the chorus becomes "It's a beautiful world - for you - but not for me", changing the entire meaning of the song to one of sarcasm.
 * "Bus Rider" by The Guess Who appears to be an ode to the working man, who must get up early in the morning to catch the bus to work each day just to make a dime. Towards the end of the song, the singer states that he is glad to not be a bus rider, meaning the entire song was actually describing how being one totally sucks.
 * The Rays' "Silhouettes (on the Shade)" tells of the jealousy which the narrator felt when he saw two silhouettes making romantic gestures while passing the shaded window of his girlfriend's house. He rushes in only to discover...
 * Napoleon XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" is about the narrator, driven insane by the departure of someone close to him, ending up at the funny farm. And if that someone ever returns...
 * Van Morrison's "Cyprus Avenue" is told from the point of view of a man who is desperately in love with someone.

Radio

 * This trope is almost perfect for audio dramas: you can hide obvious physical features of primary, present characters by simply not mentioning them. A minor example is at the beginning of Paradise Lost in Space where an exchange between two characters speculating about life on other planets ends abruptly when one of the characters off-handedly mentions their antennae - the entire scene occurs on another planet.
 * It's something of an It Was His Sled now, but the casual (but sudden) reference in Hitchhikers Guide to Zaphod having two heads was originally intended to work this way. Trillian was the same idea in reverse; she initially seems to be another alien with her "space name", until it turns out it's a nickname for Tricia McMillian
 * In 1976, Bob Vernon read one of his "Stranger than True" stories thusly: "5 years ago today, working girl Lois Goldman of Orange, New Jersey was arrested for taking a large record player out of the WNBC studios. That large record player was BIGGIE WILSON!" (This referred to another WNBC DJ of the time, who was celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary.) Here's the aircheck with that story.
 * The Big Finish Doctor Who audio play The Natural History of Fear. To say any more would ruin it.
 * The Torchwood the Lost Files radio play "The House of the Dead" begins with Ianto in a haunted pub, waiting for Jack and Gwen to arrive, so they can interrupt a seance which will bring an evil creature through the Rift. Thus, the audience assumes that

Video Games
"Narrator: And so, having defeated the nefarious, our hero, the, wins back the heart of the lovely."
 * The plot twist in the Utsuge, Ribbon of Green.
 * Phantom Dust's entire environment is not what it seems.
 * In Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door, TEC tells Peach about Grodus's plan for her. During this scene, it fades out and in again, so we cannot read what he said. We finally find out towards the end of the game.
 * In the original Metroid, if players completed the game in a sufficient amount of time, then Samus Aran (who had until this point been wearing a huge suit of cyborgy armour) would be revealed to be a girl.
 * The Fan Vid Haloid, featuring a certain pair of armored badasses (Samus and Master Chief) taking on both the Covenant and each other, with plenty of sexual tension to go around, only to reveal at the very end that  This does not defuse the sexual tension.
 * Adam Cadre's Interactive Fiction work 9:05 has you waking up in a panic and receiving a phone call admonishing you on being late for work. You can go through the (logical) motions of taking a shower, getting dressed, eating breakfast, driving to work and doing your job...until you
 * Used not once, but twice in another interactive fiction, the very popular Photopia. In one part, the protagonist seems to be a normal, if Mary Sue-esque, astronaut, until you take off your spacesuit and . Later, the connection of this to the other plot is explained when it's revealed that
 * A lot of the best Interactive Fiction games include a Tomato Surprise somewhere, often (but not limited to) the Tomato in The Mirror variety. It seems to have a particularly powerful impact in a medium where the player solves puzzles to propel the plot. Listing all examples would ruin the fun.
 * In the bonus level of The Suffering, it's explicitly revealed that the "Inhuman Monster mode" the protagonist can enter, seemingly turning him in to a large, sub-human beast, is simply him giving in to his primal urges and tearing the demons apart with his bare hands.
 * This is supported by the fact that Torque was a killer in two of the endings, and friendly NPCs don't seem to notice or care when you turn in to the monster. Dr. Kiljoy also tried to convince you of this at about halfway through the game, but the ghost of a sadistic quack who talks like he's a member of a barbershop quartet isn't the kind of person you'd trust with that diagnosis.
 * Colonel Roy Campbell from Metal Gear Solid returns in the sequel, . However, after Raiden, he becomes increasingly erratic, nonsensical, and often breaks the Fourth Wall. Then Raiden happens to mention that he's never met the Colonel in-person. A few minutes later, Otacon confirms.
 * In Ever 17, Takeshi's . This turns out to be a.
 * This varies based on the order one plays the routes in. If one approaches the final route from Kid's perspective, he also gets tomatoed in the same manner.
 * In Soul Nomad and The World Eaters,
 * To say nothing of the fact that
 * The major mystery of Ghost Trick is Sissel's quest to find out who he was in life. All he knows is what he looks like, since the first thing he sees is his own corpse, and he finds out his name through other people referring to the 'man in the red suit' as Sissel.
 * In Final Fantasy XI, it is said the beastmen are the spawn of the dark god Promathia. Once you prevent The End of the World As We Know It in Chains of Promathia,
 * Also, the Wings of the Goddess expansion is touted as a trip to Vana'diel's past in order to ensure the war is still won, and early missions imply it...
 * Diablo II:.
 * This isn't a good example, because no attempt was made to withhold information from the player.
 * In Final Fantasy X, Tidus finds out that, . This is foreshadowed in the game opening.
 * Even bigger than that, Tidus appears to come from Zanarkand 1000 years into the past.
 * In Exmortis, five hikers wander into a forest, and stumble upon an old and decrepit house built there. Shortly afterwards, a brainwashed hermit proceeds to murder all but one of them in a plot to become a living gateway for a race of demons seeking to return to earth; at this point, the game begins with a player character waking up in the forest without any memories. At first, it's believed that the PC is the last surviving hiker;
 * Earthworm Jim 2. One sentence:


 * Hits at the mid-game climax of Baten Kaitos, in a truly brilliant execution. Whatever other game has ever had
 * In Manhunt 2, Daniel's buddy Leo, who's been following him around on his journey, often urging him to use more violence and being playable in a few levels is really the personallity of a dead serial killer, implanted in Daniel's brain. The experiment was to create a super soldier who could turn off his conscience and guilt whenever he was needed to, but Leo resisted, and secretly spent the entirety of the game trying to take over Daniel's body. On top of all that, in the end he's revealed to have forced Daniel to kill his wife and kids. Yes, he's kind of a bastard. (This plot twist was so profoundly obvious that it can barely be called a spoiler to come out and say it.)
 * Mana Khemia Alchemists of Al Revis has The Hero Vayne and his Mana Sulpher..
 * In The World Ends With You, it turns out that.
 * Also,
 * Killer 7. Somewhat alluded to shortly before the big reveal,
 * Utawarerumono - The setting of the plot is revealed to be.
 * And don't forget the whole either.
 * Cave Story: A third into the story, the protagonist is stated to be a Ridiculously Human Robot. His antennae-ears are visible from the beginning of the game, but they're easy enough to overlook (or mistake for something else) on his 8-bit sprite. It's also suggested for most of it that you're in an underground civilization, but it slowly becomes apparent that you're actually on the inside of a floating island.
 * The second Vigilante 8 game had two of these..
 * After finishing up Natsumi's route in Sharin no Kuni, there's a brief kinda-actiony sequence followed by Isono finally admitting he knew who Kenichi was the whole time. What was much more subtly built up was Apparently specifically so it doesn't look like an asspull, the story immediately starts a flashback sequence where this reveal had been hinted at. It's a lot more obvious in hind sight, especially when considering
 * In Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic,
 * In Splinter Cell Conviction, one level has you play a Faceless Goons who has to save his squad leader.
 * In Silent Hill Shattered Memories, the plot is as basic as it gets, Harry Mason was in a car crash and is now looking for his 7-year old Cheryl. The last scene of the game?
 * A lot of the Silent Hill games have this, like Silent Hill 2's revelation that  when Henry realizes that   in Silent Hill 4, and when we learn that Alex from Silent Hill Homecoming   Was M. Night Shyamalan a writer for this game!?
 * Doubtful, considering that it didn't turn out that Pyramid Head was a pawn of the true villains: the trees!
 * Don't forget Bio Shock, where the main character is NOT in fact
 * In the Minerva's Den DLC of the sequel you play as Subject Sigma, a prototype Big Daddy from the same line as the protagonist of the main game, Subject Delta.
 * In Second Sight, the main character gets frequent playable flashbacks to events in the past. However, in said flashbacks, you can actually change events in the past which then have consequences in the future which move the plot along.
 * In The 3rd Birthday,.
 * Umineko no Naku Koro Ni: It turns out that the majority of the events were

Web Original

 * The famous "Raptor Story" on Game FAQs's Current Events forum. At the beginning of the story, the first-person narrator crashes his sister's lesbian spin the bottle party and is about to make out with her...until she is revealed to be a velociraptor, something that was somehow completely unknown to the narrator. The twist is actually in the first act of the story, not at the end.
 * The parody creepypasta "DAY OF ALL THE BLOOD" wherein it is revealed that the man that all the blood was coming from
 * The third Lazer Collection uses this along with Dramatic Irony:

Webcomics

 * Used offensively in the Seventy Seas side story, Lost and Found, when a man in a stolen Toby Terrier convinces the Toby Town security guards that have surrounded him that he was a lost child who grew up in the park's lost and found, only to reveal that it was actually the park guards who had been raised in the lost and found and suppressed their memories of it.
 * During a previous storyline of Axe Cop, Sockarang completes a mad rampage where he assaults and kidnaps his supposed allies. Once they're all safely under lock and key, he removes his mask...to reveal that he's actually Dr. Stinky Head, who had disguised himself as Sockarang to trick Axe Cop and his friends. Just then, Dr. Stinky Head shows up and divests himself of his own mask, to reveal that he's actually Sockarang, who had the exact same idea as Dr. Stinky Head.
 * Sluggy Freelance uses this in the Ocean's Unmoving arc; Bunbun fights over and over again against a mysterious enemy that
 * Brawl in The Family pulled this off when they did the Cocoon Academy arc, about Dedede and "Pinky"'s days in school. Pinky is a very familiar looking pink puffball with good sucking abilities.
 * In Homestuck, Jane and Jake live in Maple Valley, Washington and a small island in the Pacific respectively, just like . Roxy and Dirk live in Rainbow Falls, New York and Houston, Texas. However, what was kept hidden from readers was that

Western Animation
"Batgirl: She's beautiful!
 * Codename: Kids Next Door:
 * "Op HOSPITAL": It's Tomato mixed with Continuity Nod in one, as the KND go to a hospital to guard a hospitalized operative. A few minutes from the end, it's revealed that said operative is... Bradley the Skunk from "Operation CAMP", who had been made an honorary operative in that episode. Cree is surprised to find the skunk on a hospital bed when she (and we) expected a regular kid, and Numbuh 4, who had been a bit jealous at Numbuh 3 for claiming to be in love with the injured operative (her exact words were "I love him"), is all "Hey!" when he sees Bradley, who she considered her adopted son.
 * "Op UNCOOL": The KND go on what they think is a mission to rescue an operative Numbuh 78 that we see get captured by zombies. In fact, we even see her getting kidnapped by a bunch of zombies. Later on, when it transpires that the "Numbuh 78" Numbuhs 2 and 44 are referring to is referring to a trading card.
 * Operation: Z.E.R.O. has two.
 * Batman the Animated Series played this in one episode ("Almost Got 'em"), where Two-Face, Poison Ivy, The Penguin, Killer Croc and The Joker met to discuss how Batman beat them over a game of poker. The Joker reveals that Harley Quinn has Catwoman tied up in a warehouse, to avenge his defeat to Batman. Then Batman reveals he was disguised as Killer Croc all along.
 * Who then reveals that all the other unsavory malcontents in the poker hall are undercover cops.
 * Another Batman example comes from the episode Mean Seasons, where a former model is taking revenge on the executives who dumped her for younger looking rivals. She talks about how she subjected herself to starvation and endless surgery in an effort to keep up, and now all we see is her wearing a mask, leaving us to wonder what happened. When she's captured and unmasked in the end, it turns out she was actually Beautiful All Along.

Batman: She doesn't know how to see that anymore. All she sees are the flaws."

"There once was a rapping tomato
 * Another episode had a new crimefighter known as The Judge, who was meting out deadly vigilante justice on Gotham's arch-criminals including Penguin, Killer Croc and Two-Face. At the end it turned out it was really Harvey Dent, who had become so distraught about becoming the villain Two-Face that his mind fragmented again and spawned the new identity of The Judge, a personality so distinct that it even went so far as to try to kill himself as Two-Face (Batman figured it out when he realized the two were never in the same place at the same time).
 * Referenced on The Simpsons when Homer submits this poem to a literary journal:

That's right, I said "rapping tomato"

He rapped all day, from April to May

And also, guess what, it was me."


 * After many episodes of suspense, cliffhangers, confusion, and even a BLAM Episode, the second season of The Secret Saturdays finally ends with the ultimate evil (the being that can be used to take over the world) being Zak Saturday...the main character.
 * Xiaolin Showdown features an episode where a mermaid and a rather savage looking barbarian thaw from an ancient iceberg. The monks immediately befriend the mermaid and try to protect her from the barbarian
 * Ed, Edd n Eddy had a mundane, but very horrifying one at the end of The Movie with The Reveal that

Other

 * There's a riddle that goes: the wet, naked body lies in a puddle of water surrounded by shards of glass near an overturned table. There are no marks on the body. How did the victim die?
 * There are literally hundreds of these kinds of riddles. In some ways, they cheat the person being told the riddle to, because in many cases, the solution is outlandishly farfetched and nothing in the riddle mentions it. Of particular note is the riddle about the man who takes the elevator in his building on rainy days and the stairs on sunny days. Turns out, he's a midget, and the only way he can reach the elevator buttons is with his umbrella, which he only has with him on rainy days. SURPRISE!
 * These become somewhat more fair (but still pretty darn infuriating) when you're allowed to ask yes/no questions in hopes of eventually stumbling onto the twist.
 * Another one is; a car is travelling along a road with no street-lights, the headlights of the car are not on either. A pedestrian in black clothes quickly walks out in front of the car. Yet the driver of the car is able to stop in good time and there is no incident. How is this possible? The answer, of course, it's daytime!
 * Of course, there are cars now with night-vision, as well as cars that automatically brake if they detect an obstacle, so this riddle may no longer work in the near future.
 * A man walks into a restaurant and orders a bowl of albatross soup. He takes a spoonful, pays, leaves, and walks into an alley to shoot himself. Why? Exactly how you're supposed to reach such a far-fetched conclusion with so many assumptions is anyone's guess, since you're likely to find several much simpler explanations with a bit of thinking.
 * Equally likely is that the man thought he was a panda, and over his meal read a wildlife manual that says a panda "eats leaves and shoots".
 * When the music stopped, the lady died.
 * 'A man lies dead in a forest. How did he die?'  and 'A man lies dead next to a rock. How did he die?'   are two common examples.
 * A boy and his father are in a car. It gets into a terrible accident. The father is killed outright. The boy is critically injured and rushed to the hospital. In the operating room, the doctor looks down and says "My God! This is my son!" How is this possible?
 * All the above in the Folder Other are known as Lateral Thinking Puzzles. These are not meant to be solved until a person has exhausted enough questions to figure out the ending of the puzzle which is proctored by one person that knows the answer and can only answer "yes" or "no" to questions. While the endings/conclusions are in fact tomato surprises to people that read the answers first, they do not qualify as examples of tomato surprises as defined by the troper page. In fact, these may be more an example of Fridge Logic than Tomato Surprise due to their nature.