Neglected Character Adoption Agency

I'm the kind of person to see a character the author didn't care about and ask "is anybody going to obsess over that" and not wait for an answer.

[tertiarycharacteradoptionagency]

“All women are bad drivers” stereotype is actually just a statistical error. The average woman is a totally fine driver, but I, Bad Driving Georgette, who needs 15 minutes to parallel park, am an outlier and should not have been counted.

[tertiarycharacteradoptionagency]

I hate “It Was All a Dream” so much

So … I saw that “Nemo never existed and Marlin imagined him to cope with grief” theory making the rounds again. And I want to rant about why “it was all in their head” is (usually) a betrayal of the audience, as well as praise the one time I have ever seen it done well (a Margaret Peterson Haddix book that I will THOROUGHLY spoil).

Here’s why the trope is often bad.

It punishes the audience for being invested. If you reveal that major events in the story never happened, then the emotions the audience felt about those events, and the mental energy they expended on remembering characters/events, is wasted. (Example: the 1985-1986 season of the soap opera “Dallas,” which was retconned out of existence, erasing a marriage, several deaths, and a lot of characters).

It mocks the audience for suspending their disbelief. If a story has supernatural elements, that’s not something that needs to be explained away (example: the “Harry Potter was in a coma and magic isn’t real” fan theory. The Wizard of Oz movie fits in this category, too). Authors should reward the audience for accepting the rules of the story’s universe - not act as though they’re dumb for believing in magic. To a lesser extent, that goes for minor inconsistencies in the story, too.

It’s cheap. In the fan theory space, it’s lazy because it can’t be disproven - what contradictory evidence could there possibly be? - so you can apply it to any piece of fiction. In original fiction, it’s often a cheap way to tie up loose threads or ward off fridge logic.

A Good Use of the Trope

Spoilers ahead:

“Game Changer” is the only story I can remember where a last-minute “it was all a dream” twist was not only acceptable but improved the story.

Why? Because the reveal didn’t end the story - it was the catalyst for the most important conflict.

The plot so far: softball player KT passes out during a game and finds herself isekaied to a world where academics and athletics have swapped places. KT discovers two other people - her little brother Max and a girl named Evangeline - who also remember the real world. Eventually, they realize that this world is a dream, and it begins collapsing around them.

But they don’t wake up right away - they have to fight to escape the dream. And each of them has a reason to fear returning to reality.

Max, a video-game-loving nerd, is lonely in the real world but popular in the dream; he’s the first to decide to return to reality.

KT’s dream is to be an Olympic athlete. She passed out for no clear reason - so she’s afraid that she has some undiagnosed health issue that will shatter her Olympic dreams, and maybe even keep her from playing softball all together. She’s tempted to stay, even if she dies in her coma, because if she isn’t athlete … what is she?

Evangeline’s whole identity is being “the smart kid.” She realizes that she passed out because of chemicals in an unventilated room - and she’s terrified that she’ll have permanent brain damage. She’d rather die than risk a life stripped of her identity.

If the events of a story didn’t have an external impact (because they didn’t really happen), they have to have a profound internal impact on the characters. Otherwise, the audience wasted its time. In “Game Changer,” the twist forces the characters to confront the core of their identities - and that’s what makes this a story that sticks with me, even now that I’m an adult.

So, yeah. A good “it was all a dream/delusion/hallucination/purgatory” reveal doesn’t resolve the story instantly - it creates a new layer of conflict and reveals something new about the characters.

I’m sure there are more examples, but this children’s book has always stuck out to me as a book that used this trope well.

I accidentally added a poll and can’t delete it on mobile, so… have you read this book?

Yes!

No

Voting ended onJul 28, 2025

[tertiarycharacteradoptionagency]

I can't read post-apocalypse stories because my brain switches into Problem Solving Mode. I'm enjoying myself, but not the way I was intended to enjoy it.

Take City of Ember. One of the major obstacles in the story is that the characters don't have any portable sources of light. I immediately started thinking of ways to build an oil lamp out of trash:

To which my sensible friend told me that A: maybe I was overthinking a bit, and B:

But I simply do not have the capacity to care about things like "themes" and "symbolism" when presented with an engineering problem.

[tertiarycharacteradoptionagency]

I recently reread Sisters Grimm as an adult, and I can't stop thinking about how underused Mr. Sheepshank's three children were. They only appear as cameos after TUS (in fact, they're so insignificant that Buckley got Bella and Natalie mixed up in a later book).

Their entire world shifts completely in a single day. They lose the only parent they've ever known - and their minds are probably free from a lifetime of magical manipulation. They learn that many of the things their father told them were lies. They are sent to live with birth parents they've never met, who have ten years of hopes and expectations for them to live up to. They're separated from their adopted siblings for the first time. Two of them have to deal with the emotional aftermath of murdering someone at the age of eleven.

And then, just as they're unlearning a lifetime of violence, war breaks out, and they're on opposite sides - Bella and Toby with the resistance, and Natalie returning to the Hand.