Random Events Plot: Difference between revisions

'''Homer''': Exactly! It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

'''Marge''': But it certainly was a memorable few days.

 

 

Most stories are fairly predictable to at least some degree. You meet the characters, and you may not know who is important, but you know they are in some way. You see locations and items that you just ''[[Chekhov's Gun|know]]'' are going to be an important part of the plot. And there's a degree of excitement in knowing that something [[Rule of Cool|cool looking]] is going to somehow be used later on.

{{examples}}

== Non-comedic Examples ==

* [[Superman: At Earth's End]]. Go on, try to explain where any of this came from. What was the first apocalypse, who designed the biomechs, what's with the children, and the [[Broken Aesop]] (Guns are bad, after Superman clearly used guns to solve his problem.) was horrible. And it's part of [[The Dark Age of Comic Books]]. The last one should be a turnoff for most people...

* Early ''[[Tintin]]'' books are this. Hergé tossed his protagonist from one solved situation into the next unsolved one or rather tossed situations at him. Just about only the location remained constant. It goes to show that Hergé had no experience in writing comics at all when he started at the age of 19. This wasn't received poorly, though; ''[[Tintin]]'' was originally released in a weekly kids' magazine page by page instead of in books all at once, and the Belgians in the late 1920s didn't have that many comics to compare ''[[Tintin]]'' with anyway.

 

* To some, ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]''. Apes. An alien artifact on the moon. Suddenly, a crazy computer plot out of nowhere! And just as suddenly, something trippy.

** On the other hand, [[Mind Screwdriver|if you've read the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, then the narrative thread connecting these becomes apparent]].

* ''[[Red Zone Cuba]]''. It sort of makes sense as the three protagonists join the army, invade Cuba, get captured, and escape from Cuba. Then the story completely falls apart as they decided to find the wife of a guy they left behind in the Cuban POW camp, committing a series of petty and not-so-petty crimes along the way

* ''[[Spice World]]''. [[The Nostalgia Chick]] even developed a random weird shit-o-meter to help them pad out the movie for as long as possible.

* ''[[Birdemic]]'' is like this and that the film meanders for about 45 minutes before the birds actually appear lends itself to that. In fact the birds don't really appear so much as just happen to the movie as there's a one minute sequence of about ten establishing shots and the last one just suddenly features birds attacking the city.

 

* Season three of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]''. It's like the writers had [[Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny]]. A lot of weird crap happened. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't predictable.

* Many of the episodes in the third season of ''[[Robin Hood (TV series)|Robin Hood]]'' are like this. Prime example is ''Let the Games Begin'', which involves the outlaws just running around the forest, chased by Prince John's "elite guards" who are defeated when giant fishing nets are thrown over them. Guy of Gisborne has a pet lion that he releases in order to kill the outlaws. The outlaws respond by throwing mustard powder at it. Meanwhile, Little John has been drafted into a rigged gladiator school. Guy's never-before-mentioned sister turns up, and Robin quite fancies her...then he finds out she's Gisborne's sister...then he insists to the outlaws that she's trustworthy...then he grabs her face, pushes her into a tree and steals her belongings, acting as though they've been in a lengthy relationship instead of having known her for about five minutes.

 

* ''[[Atlanta Nights]]'', but [[Stealth Parody|it wasn't meant to be taken]] [[Stylistic Suck|very seriously]] to begin with.

* Almost everything by [[Bret Easton Ellis]].

* ''[[Lonely Werewolf Girl]]''. [[Justified Trope|Justified]] since a major theme is that things never work out the way you wish they would.

* The entire ''[[Maximum Ride]]'' series, although it only really becomes noticeable during the third book. At least one or two new plot developments comes up every chapter, and without fail are never explained, elaborated, or even mentioned again.

* ''[[The Subject Steve]]'' by Sam Lipsyte

 

* The "Smooth Criminal" segment of ''[[Moonwalker]]''. It starts with [[Michael Jackson]] and his kid friends playing soccer in a verdant meadow. It ends with him performing a concert at a club. In between, we have a dance number in a 1930s club that's deserted one moment and inhabited the next, Michael transforming into a spaceship to defeat an evil drug lord wielding a giant laser, and other stuff. Why? As with much of the film, Jackson wills it.

** Also applies to the full-length "Black or White" video. It starts with a suburban kid blasting his grouchy dad to Africa with a powerfully amplified guitar chord, continues through an "It's a Small World"-style celebration of diversity climaxing with a morphing montage, and then goes into an extended—and music-free—dance sequence in which a black panther turns into Jackson, smashes up a car and streetfront windows, and grabs his crotch a lot before changing back. A coda reveals that Bart Simpson is watching all this on TV, much to Homer's displeasure.

* Almost any RPG system out there is capable of producing one of these, depending on the whims of the GM and the players. To create an exhaustive list of specific examples is superfluous.

 

* Even [[Shakespeare]] did it, in ''Pericles''.

** Shakespeare stole his plots—even his random events plots. The original of ''Pericles'' was ''Apollonius of Tyre'', a [[Chivalric Romance]].

 

* ''[[Jak and Daxter|Jak 3]]''. Haven City gets attacked by Metal Heads and KG robots, Jak is blamed for it and is banished to the Wasteland where he is rescued by Wastelanders of Spargus City. He begins undergoing a series of trials and tasks to be accepted as a Wastelander. Then Jak, Daxter and Pecker use some old Precursor-techno-railway-catacombs to return to Haven city. Then they find that Count Veger hase some [[Knight Templar]] plan to rid the world of all shadows. They then start helping Torn battle Metal Heads and KG robots. Then it turns out Vin is still alive as a holographic AI in the Haven City control room. Then it turns out that Erol (formerly Jak's racing rival, now a cybernatic [[Omnicidal Maniac]]) is still alive and is commanding the KG robots. Then it turns out there's a bunch of Dark Precursor entities called "Dark Makers" preparing to invade the planet and <s>Erol</s> Errol is working for them. Then it turns out [[Luke, I Am Your Father|Damas, King of Spargus is Jak's father]]. Then it turns out the Precursors are really Ottsels like Daxter. Then it turns out Jak may actually be Mar, the founder of Haven City. Throw in Jak developing Light Eco powers and a romantic subplot between Jak and Ashelin than never amounts to anything after the game (while Jak's main love interest Keira is [[Demoted to Extra]]).

* The majority of ''[[Resonance of Fate]]'' consists of your three party members running errands and interacting with each other while [[Omniscient Council of Vagueness|shadowy]] [[Anti-Villain|Anti Villains]] plot something far, far away. The two groups only cross paths near the very end, mostly because one of the random events made a party member upset, and the other two [[Berserk Button|didn't like that.]]

** This actually works pretty well within the story as the 3 main characters are basically freelancers, each with a [[Dark and Troubled Past]] that is connected with the [[Anti-Villain|Anti Villains]], who are trying to live their lives in peace.

* ''[[Shadow the Hedgehog]]'' suffers from this trope badly, [[Multiple Endings|due to the way the game was structured]]. You could pick 3 different paths per level, Good, Evil, or Neutral. Depending on your choice, you end up in a completely different level, but the game always has to justify why Shadow ends up there, and more often than not, [[Heel Face Turn|especially when it goes against every other moral choice you've made up to that point]], the justifications are [[Villain Teleportation|piss-poor]] or [[Random Teleportation|completely arbitrary]].

 

* The ''[[Justice League]]'' episode "Hereafter" was like this to some degree. As one review put it: "And boy, does it avoid the obvious. There's not a predictable moment in this story. On the other hand, it's unpredictable only because it's pretty damn arbitrary. The wake gets interrupted by... [[Lobo]]? Superman hacks through the jungle and finds... the Watchtower? He's met there by... Vandal Savage? I have a vision of the writer at his keyboard with a Random Event Chart and a thirty-sided die."

** The trope is then [[Subverted]], as the following episode provides [[It Makes Sense in Context|the context that makes sense of]] the events of "Hereafter"... except for Lobo's appearance, which only makes sense to someone who has seen the ''[[Superman: The Animated Series]]'' episode "The Main Man".

* ''[[Titanic: The Legend Goes On]]'' strongly suggests the guy who pitched it wasn't even aware that the Titanic disaster was an actual thing that happened. Plot elements and random-ass shit come literally out of nowhere, including an occasion where a character responds to an expression of gratitude by breaking out into a completely irrelevant rap song. It suggests nothing so much as that the creators played an old adventure game to figure out how to make the movie; "To make a BLOCKBUSTER HIT, you'll need A STAR-CROSSED ROMANCE, TALKING ANIMALS, WACKY HIJINX, and A RAP SONG to show we're hip with the kids."

 

* [[Real Life]], mostly. Maybe this is caused by so many people trying to be the author of their own story, which inevitably creates a mess when their opinions happen to clash.

 

== Comedic Examples ==

* ''[[Baccano!]]!'' stars a colorful cast of characters with varying degrees of sanity as they ride a train for some purpose or another. We have one set of characters trying to rob people as hilariously as possible, another set of characters out to kill everyone, a third set orchestrating grandiose schemes, a fourth set trying to figure out just what the hell is going on, and that's probably not even half the characters featured. When all of them come together on a curiously-named train the sheer mayhem that erupts can be described as any number of things, but predictable is definitely not one of them. In this case the author of the original book pursued this trope deliberately, citing the title as Italian for "stupid commotion," or "ruckus." This could qualify as either a comedic or non-comedic example.

* ''[[FLCL]]''.

* ''Yotsuba'' and ''[[Azumanga Daioh]]'' certaintly are this.

 

* ''[[My Immortal]]''.

* An in-universe example in ''[[The Vinyl Scratch Tapes]]'', when Vinyl writes a rock opera. Celestia starts a nuclear war and builds a dystopia inhabited by robots. Then Luna returns from space on a chariot made of lasers and fire and throws the mysteriously explosive moon at Celestia. And then Celestia [[Scaled Up|turns into a serpent]].

'''Vinyl''': Clearly you’ve never heard a rock opera before. }}

 

* ''[[American Graffiti]]'' is one of the sterling examples. It works, for the most part, because it shows how a large and diverse group of people handle a normal rite of passage, rather than focusing on a few characters or a single, famous event. Tying a series of random events to a [[Leitmotif]] is also handled fairly well in the movies ''[[Dazed and Confused]]'' and ''[[Go (film)|Go]]''.

* ''[[The Big Lebowski]]''. Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski is attacked by some thugs who urinate on his rug, shake him down for money, then leave after realizing they shook down the wrong guy. In a quest to get a replacement rug, he stumbles into a kidnapping and extortion plot which propels him from one bizarre situation to the next, all the while his friend [[The Millstone|Walter]] makes things difficult. In the end the kidnapping plot is resolved [[Shaggy Dog Story|in disappointing fashion,]] and then the movie goes on for a further fifteen minutes on a completely unrelated plot. Strangely, The Dude seems to be more or less cool with it, as the movie settles on a "Life goes on" [[Aesop]], which is really the only way any of it makes sense. That, and [[Rule of Funny]].

* ''[[Napoleon Dynamite]]''. Even the supposedly main story about Pedro running for Class President is shuffled all over the place.

* ''[[Pulp Fiction]]''.

** In fact, the majority of [[Robert Altman]]'s films (comedic and non-comedic) are examples of this trope, by their very nature.

 

* ''[[Alice in Wonderland]]''. Alice falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, and just sort of keeps bumping into odd characters. That's pretty much it. Arguably the weakest parts of the new [[Tim Burton]] adaptation are when they wander away from the whimsical randomness and kick off the tacked-on [[Chosen One]] plot.

* ''[[Don Quixote]]'': Given that the first part of the novel is a [[Deconstructive Parody]] of [[Chivalric Romance]], and those books were not more than a [[Knight Errant]] in the road reacting to the events that happened to him, the first part of the novel is this, (the second part has a plot in [[Damsel in Distress|Dulcinea’s rescue]]). Only that instead of being boring or confusing, Cervantes aimed, and was able, to reproduce the feel of [[Real Life]] in his book.

 

* Every episode of ''[[The Young Ones]]'', to the extent that sometimes it feels more like a sketch show that happens to use the same set of characters repeatedly.

 

** There's also a [[Brick Joke]] in there.

** Also, "Everything You Know Is Wrong".

* The music ''[[Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (song)|Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny]]'' by [[Lemon Demon]]. First we have Godzilla in Tokyo, suddenly Batman threw a grenade at him. Then Shaquille O'Neal intervened in the fight. Then Aaron Carter "[[Lampshade Hanging|came out of the blue]]" before started beating up Shaq. Then Abraham Lincoln popped out of his grave and took an AK-47 from [[Magic Hat|his hat]]. And that's just the first one-third of the song.

 

* ''[[Little Nemo]]'', like ''[[Alice in Wonderland]]'', moves from one bizarre place in [[Dream Land]] to another, never with too much continuity.

 

* Almost ubiquitous in ''[[Mountain Time]]'', and especially noticeable in [http://mountaincomics.com/2010/08/16/the-unstartled-giraffe/ this] extended story arc.

* ''[[Jail Break]]'', as you'd expect from a forum game in which every action taken in-universe is nothing more well-thought-out than the first suggestion given by any of the other forumites at the time. It helps that said forumites had a rather...''odd'' sense of humour. ''[[Problem Sleuth]]'' also started out as this, but it gathered a plot revolving around defeating Mobster Kingpin fairly early on. ''[[Homestuck]]'', in ''complete'' contrast, not only has had a plot since the very beginning, but has [[Writing by the Seat of Your Pants|evolved]] a [[Kudzu Plot|ridiculously]] [[Jigsaw Puzzle Plot|complicated]] one with [[Continuity Porn|mind-boggling continuity]].

 

* All ''[[Charlie the Unicorn]]'' episodes. As well as most other Filmcow videos.

 

* Plenty of episodes of ''[[Family Guy]]''.

** They actually did a [[Lampshade Hanging]] about this very early on, before most of the plots even fit this trope. In the [[Spoof Aesop]] ending of "Blood Feud", the family concludes that the episode had no moral, that it was "just a bunch of stuff that happened" but "certainly was a memorable few days". ''Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happened'' could have been another name for this trope.

** [[Lampshade Hanging]] in another episode that starts with the family going to a funeral house to look for caskets for Grandpa Simpson (while he's alive, natch), the plot segues into tennis. Homer's comment was "Betcha didn't see that coming."

 

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