I went for a choose-your-own adventure as the medium for this project, using Twine to organize every node in the story. The narratives I based this project on were also digital interactive fiction of sorts; it would be hard to capture the essence of a diverging story without divergence.

I ended up creating a game consisting of, at last count, 33,242 characters, 5,258 words, 31 pages, 12 endings, and 8s [sic].

Intention

When I thought about this week’s assignment, I focused on subverting the reader’s expectations. Narratives have become sophisticated enough that we come to expect certain events. Action movies feature a tough, quick-thinking, and impossible male lead, a sensuous yet just-as-tough female lead, a comic relief friend of them, and an antagonist that fights against the male lead with as much wit as lead. We have come to expect the typical tropes, but we also crave twists to these expectations. Subverted tropes are what make stories compelling and interesting, after all.

We’re at a point where we want to satisfy both expected tropes and subverted tropes, but there are few ways to rehash a story to make it not reminiscent of previous works. The concepts and twists our stories take nowadays deconstruct the medium itself as much as the story. Films are no longer linear but use in media res and other chronological alterations. Video games chastise the player for trying to win or achieve a high score. What is even considered a story is up to discretion for some media.

Hence, for my project, I deal with the expectations people have and suspend for media through twists of varying caliber.