| rdfs:comment | - Imagine, if you will, that a character does something despicable or foolish. Perhaps they were acting in an immoral way; perhaps they merely dared to rally against fate / the gods / the futility of existence / their own humanity. Whatever the reason, the universal kismet doesn't like it, so something totally unexpected but poetically just happens at the end to drive the lesson home, hard. Such endings are all but explicitly moralistic; it isn't enough for the universe to bring a situation to a just resolution, it has to resolve the situation in such a way as to both reveal what the moral of the story is and "demonstrate" the correctness of that lesson. This is a Karmic Twist Ending -- a Twist Ending designed to force An Aesop.
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| abstract | - Imagine, if you will, that a character does something despicable or foolish. Perhaps they were acting in an immoral way; perhaps they merely dared to rally against fate / the gods / the futility of existence / their own humanity. Whatever the reason, the universal kismet doesn't like it, so something totally unexpected but poetically just happens at the end to drive the lesson home, hard. Such endings are all but explicitly moralistic; it isn't enough for the universe to bring a situation to a just resolution, it has to resolve the situation in such a way as to both reveal what the moral of the story is and "demonstrate" the correctness of that lesson. This is a Karmic Twist Ending -- a Twist Ending designed to force An Aesop. Much of the power of this trope derives from the twist at the end; it isn't merely unexpected, but it suddenly puts established plot elements into an entirely new light, revealing them to be loaded with new meaning via the connection to the aesop. Sometimes these connections are causal or logical, and sometimes they're merely metaphorical. Such a sudden shift of meaning is essential to the trope. For example, a Corrupt Corporate Executive makes a huge deal via unethical tactics... But it turns out that the deal was with the devil, and he's just lost his soul. A guy comes across a device that stops time and uses it to make himself rich, spy on the girls' locker room, etc... But it breaks, stranding him in stopped-time. A diminutive cheating jockey wishes he wasn't so short, and his wish is granted... Turning him into a 10-foot tall freak who can't ride horses any more. Whatever the case, the ending always makes the lesson to be learned abundantly clear in the end. It's worth noting that when many people claim that a situation is an instance of 'Irony', they mean that this trope seems to apply to it. Often this usage is applied to actual situations, and denoting this trope with 'Irony' is one of the most familiar ways to apply the comfortable sense of narrative closure found in fiction to real life. Some who are supposed to know about this sort of thing think that this is an incorrect usage of the term, and the rest are familiar with the term "situational irony". Compare to Earth All Along, Tomato Surprise, Fawlty Towers Plot, and Cruel Twist Ending. As this is an Ending Trope, beware of spoilers. Examples of Karmic Twist Ending include:
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