Fuck what was the idea I thought was so mindblowing maaan I'm a genius, it was about murderous animals something, them killing each other or some stuff, a dark comedy it was and then in the end we find out that our protagonist, the sane sign of sanity in the otherwise wild world, was himself a psychopath. Light gets dim, and then dark, sad music plays in the background, and a slow, pathetic painful wait till the end. To drive the point that, awhh man isn't this so sad.
So maybe a cute pig, that's our protagonist. Pigs are easy to demonize but also they're adorable. You can call somebody a 'dirty pig' or make 'pig with lipstick on' jokes, but also call somebody 'porkie' in a loving manner.
What happens? What is it that scares us all? Besides snakes I mean. Hmm maybe some kind of...unknown...force, or energy. Because death, now that's lazy, it's easy and not totally in the realm of unknown. But forces that are beyond the grasp of comprehension, actions that are totally unexplained, that'll create fear in the readers' minds. So it has to be unexplained zombies then?
What's the reveal? That our protagonist becomes a zombie, the last person to become one, and everything's ended? Or how about the I am Legend twist where actually you were the zombie all along, and the zombies were reasonable people? How about...and be patient with me here, what if everybody was a zombie all along, and the revelation is that you were looking at it all wrong?
What awful acts can we present to make our protagonists feel injusticed? Hmm acts of random violence against them, unexplained, attributed to enemies and external provocateurs where in reality they're the sane people, the only ones around.
What's the cold, twisted reveal?
That the protagonists that we thought were actually beating and 'researching' unknown specimen were actually knowingly killing and eating babies of the non-zombies, alive. And they were only putting on a thin facade of 'normalcy', to convince the sane part of their brains that they were not total monsters.
How does the turn happen?
Slowly, towards the end, when strange things that would be incompatible of our understanding with the piggies' niceness start occurring. Like with the 'kicking the kitten' moment of sorts.
What triggers the turn?
Sort of united action on the protagonists' part that fails, and they regroup to analyze their strategy. And then you start paying attention to what you thought was this amazing well-planned assault, and it doesn't make sense. And the more they discuss it the less it makes sense. Until the reader realizes they're all brainless...zombies, well.
What's the payoff?
In the epilogue, news of success, how all the zombies have either been destroyed or gotten under control. And we find out that maybe they were never zombies, just evil entities doing evil things pretending they don't have agency on their actions. What if the epilogue's reveal is that real zombies went away a decently long time ago, and there were no zombies? Only monsters?
Damn, that's genius.
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