Halfway Plot Switch: Difference between revisions

* ''[[The Descent (film)|The Descent]]'' is somewhere between this and [[Developing Doomed Characters]], as the film spends a while dealing with the personal interactions and physical hardships of a group of female spelunkers, then adds subterranean cannibals.

* ''[[Hancock]]'', rather infamously. It starts as a comedy about a superhero who really sucks at his job. Then halfway through, {{spoiler|it turns into a dramatic action movie when his PR person's wife turns out to be another superhero who was Hancock's former wife and they're both immortal}}. Needless to say, people weren't pleased.

* ''Rat Pfink A Boo Boo''. The plot was altered during filming to accommodate anything and everything that passed through the director's hands. Most notably, when a gorilla suit became available, they wrote a gorilla into the movie. It suddenly shifts from being a gritty crime drama to a superhero spoof.

* ''Mortal Thoughts'' starts off as a [[Black Comedy]], then morphs into a [[Psychological Thriller]].

* Very much so in "Brainjack", where the beginning is about a [[The Cracker|Cracker]] who ends up being hired by a government White-Hat hacker group after hacking the White House and a major telecommunications provider for a neuro-headset. The plot then brutally murders its previous self and becomes about a group of the hackers trying to subvert the neuro-headsets' [[Hive Mind]] from destroying them. Can also be considered a [[Malignant Plot Tumor]].

* Arguably used in ''[[Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow|Miss Smillas Feeling for Snow]]'' where a routine murder mystery trope dives off the deep-end into X-Files-esque killer bug from space about halfway through the novel.

{{quote|"[T]he plot arrives late to the party, drunk, in a beat-up '53 Chevy pick-up truck. It drives away about fifty pages later and crashes into a tree, gets sent to the hospital, and is rarely heard from again throughout the course of the series."}}

** The same things happen in the other books. In ''New Moon'', most of the book is devoted to Bella recovering from Edward leaving her, finding out about the werewolves, and the werewolves hunting for Victoria. Suddenly, the climax of the novel goes to being about Edward planning to commit suicide via the Volturi, and Bella and Alice having to save him. In ''Eclipse'', most of the story is devoted to the Bella/Edward/Jacob love triangle, and only gives focus on the matter of the vampire army and Victoria near the end of the book. In ''Breaking Dawn'', the first two sections of the book (as well as a bit of the start of the third) are focused on Bella and Edward marrying and her having and raising her half-human daughter. Most of the third section is about the Volturi arriving to use Renesmee as an excuse to kill the Cullens, with flavors of a vampire conspiracy and the set up for an epic battle {{spoiler|that never happens.}}

* ''Father Ted'' 's "A Christmassy Ted" starts off being about the characters getting prepared for Christmas, which involves getting lost in the largest lingerie section in Ireland. Halfway through the plot changes to being about Ted being eligible for a Golden Cleric award. Graham Linehan has admitted the plots would have worked better as separate episodes.

* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' serial ''The Seeds of Doom'' started as a ''[[The Thing (film)|The Thing]]''-like story about three scientists in Antarctica recovering an alien plant and unwittingly causing great danger to the rest of Earth. The Doctor gets called in to help and arrives after one of the scientists is infected, with the resulting story apparently centering around the Doctor and Sarah having to work with the remaining scientists to stop the plant. By the second part, all three of the scientists have been killed and the base gets blown up, destroying the plant. The rest of the episode focuses on the Doctor and Sarah Jane trying to stop a second plant that's now in the possession of a mad herbologist living in an estate in England.

* The plot of ''[[Kamen Rider Decade]]'', where Decade is the destroyer of worlds, is outlined in the first episode. The rest of the series is about Tsukasa visiting alternate Rider worlds and solving their problem of the week, all the while wondering why people think he's the "destroyer of worlds." We don't actually get back to that plot until the last episodes and the second movie. The first movie and some of the last episodes didn't exactly help as they introduced a new plot in the form of Dai-Shocker.

 

* ''A Lesser Shade Of Evil'' seems inordinately fond of this idea (non-[[GMs]] are asked ''not to even read the book's introduction''), especially given that the "switch" happens during the first session. [[PCs]] are asked to make [[Exalted]]-esque demigods in a [[High Fantasy]] setting... only to learn during a centuries-spanning fast forward that {{spoiler|there is no magic in this world, all their powers come from genetic engineering, the people who chose them for this duty are having a falling out, and the results of this falling out lead to an [[After the End]] setting in which the [[PCs]] have mastered a variety of scientific principles and must use them to help humanity cling to life.}} Whew.

* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]''

 

 

* The mother of them all, ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 2''. The player spends roughly the first two hours playing as Solid Snake, the protagonist from the previous game. Then the plot moves forward two years, to a different location, with the player in control of an entirely new character (ambiguously implied to be Snake for the first few minutes) for the rest of the game. The game's creator, Hideo Kojima, went out of his way to minimise the risk of anyone seeing this twist coming.. [[Broken Base|Some thought the twist was brilliant. Some wanted Kojima's head on a stake]].

* ''[[Guild Wars]] Prophecies'' starts of as the story of a war between the human kingdom of Ascalon and the Charr that's not going well for Ascalon. You leave Ascalon after the fourth mission, and most of the rest of the story is about a religious war in rival kingdom Kryta. After the first few quests in Kryta, Ascalon and its refugees are only occasionally mentioned, and even then only in passing. (Ascalon's King Adelbern [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades this in the endgame area]]: ''"Maybe now that you are finished with this nonsense, you can come back to Ascalon and help deal with the filthy Charr infestation."'') To be fair, it does all tie together pretty well from a [[Myth Arc]] perspective.

* ''[[Xenogears]]''. At first, the plot is about two nations that have waged war on each other for generations. Then, the plot changes to {{spoiler|overthrowing Solaris, a hidden country which ruthlessly manipulates world events behind the scenes}}. After ''that'', the plot switches to {{spoiler|killing god (not ''the'' God, who is also in the game and apparently being used as an extremely long-lasting battery, but a sentient interstellar war machine that created humans on the planet to serve as its biological components)}}.

* Happens more than once during the course of ''[[Chrono Cross]]''. The game starts with Serge finding himself in another world where he died as a child, and needing to figure out how and why it happened. {{spoiler|Then Serge's body gets switched with Lynx and you need to find a way to undo it.}} Then you finally defeat the guy who's been presented as the ''[[Big Bad]]'' most of the game, only for {{spoiler|the dragon gods to merge together to form the "Time Devourer"}} resulting in another Big Bad to face who has nothing to do with the first. Then you defeat '''that''' Big Bad, and {{spoiler|discover you have to save Schala from the true Time Devourer, who was manipulating the false one.}}

** ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'' starts off as a campaign against the Gestahlian Empire until halfway through, [[The Dragon]] becomes a god and destroys half the world, leaving you to recover your lost allies and destroy him.

** ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' begins with Cloud and AVALANCHE's brave struggle against the evil Shinra company executives, who are draining the life out of the planet to maintain an electricity monopoly. About five hours into the game President Shinra is killed and the Shinra's relevance to the plot dies with him, the focus then shifting to leaving Midgar to pursue Sephiroth across the planet and stop his scheme to summon Meteor and become a god.

** ''[[Final Fantasy IX]]'', the first part of the game focuses on Queen Brahne's conquest of the continent, the plot switch occurs when the party decides to go after Kuja, Brahne's weapons supplier, and he becomes the main antagonist when he promptly offs her at the end of the current disk. A plot switch then occurs a second time with [[The Reveal]] that {{spoiler|Kuja is an alien from Terra sent by Garland to destroy the world, and Zidane was meant to be his successor and spiritually is his brother that Kuja abandoned on Gaia}}.

** Mostly averted in ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'', where the overarcing plot is always the pilgrimage to destroy Sin. Once Seymour is revealed as an antagonist, rebelling against Yevon and uncovering the secrets of the organization becomes another major plot point, but it never overtakes the fight against Sin as the game's focus.