This is a trope where the audience suddenly starts seeing the world from a character’s perspective OR where we find out we were always seeing it from one character’s perspective, and suddenly start seeing things as they really are. Either way, it’s a complete gut punch if done right.
The Suicide Squad
An example of the former. Polka Dot Man is telling everyone about how his mother performed experiments on him to give him superpowers at the expense of his physical and mental wellbeing. When asked where his mom is now, he answers “everywhere” and it cuts to a POV shot showing that everyone looks like his mom to him.
American Dad
An example of the latter, Stan realizes he’s overweight and decides to get back in shape, but the more he tries, the fatter he gets. His family are also sabotaging his efforts by tricking or forcing him to eat fatty foods. During a blowup about this, everyone tells Stan that he’s not fat, but anorexic. Stan scoffs at this idea, but the next time the camera cuts to him, we see that they’re right, and that we’ve only been seeing him as fat because that’s how he sees himself.
My dad told me this funny story about how his buddy Steve got so high one time he completely understood boomhauer on king of the hill. I finally watched the firehouse episode a few years ago and had an epiphany. I think dad’s buddy Steve got so high that he didn’t even realize Boomhauer was talking normal and everyone else was talking gibberish. Which makes it even better
Boomhauer is not hard to understand, and I'm not from the South at all. He's extremely formulaic
"Talkin' 'bout/dang ol'" are set piece phrases that you can ignore, and then from there once you can hear the words through the accent it's very straightforward
I found him very hard to understand when I started watching, but after years of watching got used to it. I was like "Does anyone really talk like this?" And years later, I saw an interview of a person on the street in Texas and the guy sounded like Boomhauer.
I don't see why in the heck y'all think these dang ol' youngins are gonna sit there and watch Porky's dang ol' butthole, time after time after time after dang ol' time, and don't y'ever get tired of it
This reminds me of going to see Brave with my ex who's Scottish. There's this character who seemed to speak total gibberish. Afterward we (Americans) were like, "Was he saying anything real?" and my ex was like, "Yes, I could understand every word he said. He was just agreeing with people in a very long-winded manner"
It's crazy how something in the same language can sound like total nonsense until you pick up the dialect and then it's perfectly clear
I come from the North East, and when we went back up there for my Grandad's funeral, my wife said there were moments at the wake when she had absolutely zero idea what anyone was saying.
Northern Irish is another one that can be impenetrable if you're not familiar. My brother moved there and there were a few times I spoke to my nephews and absolutely could not understand what they were saying.
One night, I was drinking with some Lithuanians, this was the first time I ever met someone from the country, we were together for the last 5 days. We had a lot of fun, and for my convenience they were usually talking in English with each other to include me as well. That night we were pretty hammered in a hotel room and they were arguing about something which I wasnt even giving much attention to. At one point I said something related to the discussion, and they turned and said something to me and continued the conversation. About 5 seconds later one of them stopped and asked me how the hell did I understood them, I said weren't you guys talking in English, they said no.
To this day I don't know if I just started understanding a language after just binging drinks with these dudes and dudettes for 5 days or they were so drunk that they started talking in English without realizing.
I love the bit early on where they go camping and wind up committing an illegal act by killing an endangered animal.
A ranger comes and asks what’s going on, and Boomhauer IMMEDIATELY fesses up, but the ranger has no idea what he said, so he just says “Well, if you do hear anything, let me know.”
The others as well. Dale sees himself as buff with long beautiful hair, while Hank is a drill sergeant.
Bill sees himself as much more overweight and completely bald.
Meanwhile, Hank sees them all as kids again living their fantasy of being firefighters. That is, until it's time to jump into action and they all mature.
I love that episode, it's one of the best ways to show how the four main cast see themselves.
Not a gut punch but a very dramatic shift, the whole episode focused on the point of view of Theo who is Deaf, as such we get the entire episode from his POV and we're just kind of left with the music and ambiance and an episode with no spoken dialogue.
This is the whole episode and it's pretty cool honestly.
I really enjoyed this episode. I tend to like the no standard episodes of shows, like Hush from Buffy or Savage Seduction from Warehouse 13, but Only Murders in the Building was a grounded and realistic version of that kind of episode that really stands out
Yeah, I feel like the "special episode" thing is a whole separate trope all by itself. Musical episodes, dialogue-free episodes, documentary episodes, genre homage episodes, etc. They're almost always fun.
Switched at Birth has a couple completely deaf perspective episodes like this that are always interesting. I seem to remember one where the whole episode centers around a misunderstanding that results from the deafness so the audience gets to experience that feeling along with the cast as it unfolds.
I really liked how they put the actress (Lynne Ashe) in all those costumes for that shot. They could have cheaped out and just pasted her head on all the actor's bodies. But no. They went the extra mile and made separate costumes for her.
Also, it looks like they actually made all those costumes in her size. They could have just put her in ill-fitting costumes and have that be part of the joke, but they actually took the time.
Thinking about it now, they probably could have pinned oversized costumes behind her since she is just standing still for that one shot, or maybe it’s really good CG
The sad thing is that she is still 100% benevolent. She really is just trying to make all the lost spacefarers be at as much ease and comfort as possible after they found their way to her home due to a routing error.
it's just she knows that her true nature and their circumstances is too much for them.
Another sad aspect about her character is she is stranded too. She looks for companionship and does her best to conceal her appearance to all travelers who end up stranded like her. All while easing them into the reality that they will never be able to return home. She’s completely selfless.
Yea it's implied in the original story that she's in a parasitic relationship with the place. She feeds off of it hoping to eventually find an escape since she's capable of surviving there. Doesn't enjoy what she has to do to survive but tries to make it pleasant for those trapped with her. And if I recall she doesn't feed on the people so much as their ships fuel. So the more she eats the faster they die but she waits for age and sickness to take the crew before she takes the ships.
I think it's not even like this? They have a little colony there which is more like a hospice, because all of them are very, very far from home. And also very far in the future. The jump itself took like a decade in hypersleep
That why the crew is dead: they painted the insides and that paint got very old, peeled, and clogged the filters, even before they reached the place
And he's the first human she ever met! So she's trying to figure out how to ease him into the idea that he is stranded hundreds of years away from home, and she's the only one with an extreme lifespan there so she's kinda the mayor
The main character is United with an old lover but maybe other people see other things.
She does that to ease the pain of being stuck at the end of the world
That Black Mirror episode where soldiers have tech imbedded in their brain. The soldiers believe they are at war with roach mutants. At the end of the episode, MC's tech malfunctions and we see that the mutants are actually normal people and the soldiers are being programmed to genocide.
The reveal hits harder because of course the evil mutants fight back with weapons and their mutated bodies (confirmation bias). If I recall correctly, MC's tech malfunctions after he murders half a family and he's devastated.
I think the point of that one was supposed to be that he knowingly got the tech repaired and kept fighting. The episode ends with him going "home" with full honors and his wife/gf is waiting for him. It cuts back to him as a single tear falls, then to the house again and we see that it's empty and dilapidated, implying that he also knows it's just the implant's illusion
Ender's Game they were combatting an alien hive race. The game was for the genocide part sure, but they were military enemies as opposed to mere victims,
Yeah, kids thinking they are doing simulations to prepare for a currently ongoing war in space against aliens but are actually commanding the real forces is a bit different than soldiers thinking they are fighting and killing an invading alien force but are actually hunting and killing refugees.
Similar concept in that they both use decption to trick people into being a better fighting force, but very different in terms of intent and execution. Both super good sci-fi stories imo.
When you also add in that the Formics didn't realize humanity wasn't a hive mind, thought they were killing mindless drones, and then tried to stop once they figured it out, it ends up being more similar.
The both end up being the same, "We're lying to you and tricking you into dehumanizing the enemy so you can kill them, but we're leaving a massive piece of information out so you can" trope.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how you get there. The end result is basically just if you knew who/what you were murdering, you'd be horrified.
Just saying the premise of the kids and Ender being tricked into fighting a war isn't similar enough to count without that, though.
I loved this episode when I saw it. Of course, when I saw it, it was a 1998 episode of the Outer Limits called "Hearts and Minds" with an identical plot, but that's mostly because I'm old as shit.
The Black Mirror episode Man Against Fire. One of my favorites in the series. Essentially follows a squad of soldiers that are fighting vicious mutants/aliens/supernatural baddies. Except they're not, they are the refugees of a holocaust-like purge against inferior humans, and the soldiers have been drugged/brainwashed into seeing them as monsters. The main character basically gets the veil lifted for a brief moment and loses his mind upon the realization of what he's been doing.
That kind of sounds like they might've copied the YA novel The Fifth Wave's twist from 3 years before. Basically same concept: A group of soldiers who believe they're fighting the alien invasion that's turned the earth to shambles in the previous 4 waves, only to learn that they themselves are "the fifth wave" in destroying humanity; they have an implant embedded into them that causes them to see their fellow humans as the aliens. One of them gets it removed for reasons I don't remember because it's been over a decade since I read the book and realizes what they've done. And because it's meant to be a series of YA novels, they start some resistance force deal and there's a love triangle the author clearly didn't want to put in there but had to because YA novel, etc. etc. Pretty good book, iirc.
ETA: you know, it might not be copying; it's not like either is the first to play with this concept, and I have no idea how long the script for the episode was in development. I'm not totally convinced that it's a rip off as much as convergent ideas.
Way back in 1998 the 1995 Outer Limits episode "Hearts and Minds" used this same concept for soldiers seeing their enemies as aliens. It has the added twist of the enemy soldiers ALSO being under similar implant chips that see them as aliens. Heck, seeing this entry on TVTropes was what had me figuring out the twist to the Black Mirror episode lol.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: the gang performs a perfectly choreographed dance number to impress their peers at their high school reunion. Everything goes perfectly well until the camera cuts to what the dance ACTUALLY looked like at the final, shown below
Kevin Can F Himself has each episode shot from 2 perspectives. The scenes from the husband’s (Kevin) perspective are very Everybody Loves Raymond tone where the set is bright and it’s a comedy and he’s just the doofy husband.
But the scenes from the wife’s perspective are shot with darker, more realistic lighting and the tone is a drama where she loathes her husband. Every time Kevin comes into the room, it turns into the sitcom. So the audience never see’s Kevin from her perspective until the last episode in which we find out what he’s really like.
THANK YOU! I kept scrolling because I wanted to make sure this show was mentioned. If you hadn't I was going to.
Of note, even scenes from the wife's perspective but when Kevin's in shot are sit-commy. It's like she and everyone around her can't control themselves and their world view when he's in the room.
Also the question arises is her viewpoint any more or less "real" than Kevin's? Do they each influence the world when they're there, his influence is just stronger?
And at the end, I always thought that was us seeing her viewpoint start to finally overpower his. So until then even he saw himself as the sitcom character, but now that he's being forced to see himself as she does we see that it's all massively unraveled.
Yes, people make the mistake of seeing her PoV as strict reality, but it's more that she's in a Drama and he is in a Sitcom. That's important because elements of "her story* are exaggerated in different ways - she does some truly horrible things during the show that really only make sense in a television drama and not something more realistic. But there are clues; the lighting isn't fully real, it's intentionally desaturated and drab.
There's a very hidden reality between both things. E.g. the show actually cuts a few times to indicate real world violence or abuse and doesn't show it from either of their perspectives; when he's pressuring her into sex it cuts, when he "accidentally" hits her it cuts. So I don't think we are supposed to assume either PoV is fully real, hers is still a coping mechanism as well.
Great call out that she is also not a reliable narrator. I think that’s easy to forget as you’re so focused on wondering what he’s really like. Because of course the husband is typically the main focus we end up tricking ourselves to not look at her more closely.
Yes! I never tend to post on these things but I finally had a perfect example that wasn’t mentioned haha.
And yes we clocked that too where even the shifting tone was part of his “personality problem” (to keep it vague 😅) as if he just forces everyone into his version of his world.
We’ll be watching again to see if we notice anything more on a second watch. This was really well done
I also REALLY started to feel bad for his best friend, the neighbor/brother whatever. He'd bought into the fun reality for so long and didn't realize how much of himself was wasted and subservient. And then when he tries to pull out and be his own main character it's just too much for him. Like...I really can understand and sympathize with that idea of "reality is too fucking hard, I just want to escape" and know that it is by the grace of some higher power that I myself haven't broken and ended up with my own pair of grippy socks.
Oh absolutely worth watching. I also thought it was just another sitcom until someone on reddit explained the premise. It’s just different than most things I’ve ever seen and everyone in it is great.
The last episode when Kevin finally enters that "drama" is absolutely horrifying because it shows what kind of monster such a character would realistically be.
Doctor Who - Asylum of the Daleks. The Doctor attempts a rescue mission of person they think is trapped on planet of insane/malfunctioning Daleks. At the end of the episode we find out the stranded person as actually a Dalek that thinks they are human trapped in a ship.
it's not realy handwaved away because the doctor keeps asking her about the milk. the girl is waving it away as a coping mechanism.
also something similar happens in the same episode with another guy, who get's influenced by the nanobots of the planet. he suddenly sees a bunch of people in the ballroom dancing just to find out they are all daleks
In the game We Happy Few, the residents of the city Wellington Wells are living in a 1984 style dystopia and fed Joy pills which keep them all in manic good spirits and changes the way they see the world around them. The beginning of one of the playable character's stories includes him skipping his Joy before being invited to an office party, where he realizes the pinata theyre all hitting and eating candy from is actually a large rat, and theyre eating its viscera. IIRC you can choose to take Joy at other points in the game and it will make everything brighter, more colorful, and change the things you see and hear people say to be much more pleasant and friendly.
Did you play it when it first came out? I only played it last year, and it seemed pretty linear to me. I did hear that it was a complete mess during the original release.
The early Silent Hill games loved this trope, either explicitly showing it, remarking on it, or making the player question it.
Silent Hill 2 has the most explicit example during the last interaction with the character Angela. There have been some earlier hints, such as the innocent child Laura being unconcerned with any sort of monsters in the town, and the bullied-asshole-victim-turned-murderer Eddie mentioning everyone looking like his former tormenters. But in the last scene with Angela, suddenly the entire structure the main character is standing in is completely engulfed in flames. When he notices Angela is unconcerned and pleads with her they should leave she responds, "For me, it always looks like this."
In Silent Hill 3 it's invoked again with the character Vincent, though the reality of the claim is dubious at best. When the main character of that game, Heather Mason, discusses having to kill monsters to survive, he responds with, "Monsters? They look like monsters to you?" Vincent is one of the antagonists in the game, along with his sister, though they have competing goals - so the veracity of anything he tells Heather is always questionable.
Silent Hill is honestly really good when it comes to making the player end up questioning what the fuck is the deal with the important characters until we can piece together the whole picture.
Like for example with Walter, we knew from those throaway lines and newspaper from SH2 that he was a serial killer and most likely suffered from mental ilness, but in SH4 we end up finding out that The Order had groomed him to basically be their Plan B incase their OG plan of using Alessa / Cheryl to birth God was fumbled, and even then he already had a fragile state of mind due to him being neglected and abandoned as a baby in Room 302, which led him to believe that the room itself is his mother.
Combine those two factors and we get one of the most interesting characters in Silent Hill lore.
EDIT: Also shoutout Shattered Memories and having those VHS endings that seemingly seem at random at first depending on how we play as Harry, but if we combine them with a logical cronology we can see how his family life fell apart and how him and Dahlia ended up making peace just for Cheryl's sake.
Shattered memories ending is that trope fully.
Changing of perspective in therapist office that reveals that's the person who getting therapy is Cheryl and Harry is a ghost all this time. Dam, that's hits hard in the context of the game. I think it's one of the best scenes and endings in SH series.
About Silent Hill 3, just watched a clip on youtube and what an interesting scene.
The villain pulls out the most cliched speech ever about how the protagonist is just like them fr and how they actually secretly enjoy stepping over and killing others, only for her to respond by asking if he's talking about "the monsters", and this dude suddenly has one of the most convincing shit-eating looks of a sudden realization hitting him I've ever seen in a videogame while responding with "Monsters? They look like monsters to you?" and then immediately backtracking and claiming it was just a joke once the protagonist recoils in horror.
Like he was trying to get a completely unrelated gotcha but got a "holy shit this is actually so much better it's almost not even funny" instead.
I always thought that line in SH3 is more interesting when you remember that the cult doesn’t see the creatures in Silent Hill as monsters but holy beings. So you can interpret him not as saying oh you’re fighting humans or something but being amused by the dissonance - she sees monsters, they see angels.
The Shades that the protagonist and the party that they are fighting are Human souls without a physical vessel.
To his (and our) perspective, the shades are mindless monsters that prey on the people with their intelligible sounds.
Then on the 2nd playthrough, we gain the ability to understand them (only by us players) and they are heard to be pleading to downright angry with us. Some even has heartbreaking backstories.
Most fucked up of all? One of our Party Members Kaine can hear them all along being a half-shade.
In Red Starved, Finn the Human in Adventure Time spends a considerable amount of effort to retrieve this ruby to sustain his friend Marceline who feeds off the colour red. However when he brings it to Jake the Dog, he learns its actually an emerald.
There's also Ice King's wizard eyes, which allow him to see different planes of existence, but without any control over what he sees and when, meaning he's kinda just tripping balls all the time.
A french movie with Audrey Tautou. In the first half, we are led to believe that her character has an affair with a doctor who keeps promising her to leave his wife for her. In the second, we learn that she is actually a stalker who is ruining his life.
In School-Live!, the first episode seems to just be a happy adorable slice of life anime about a club that has permission to live at their school and sleep in the teachers lounge with one teacher to act as supervisor. There are a few times when a character says something or does something off and the main character just ignores it. At the end of the first episode, it’s revealed that the whole thing was a delusion by the main character, where everyone, including the teacher, except the main four have been hallucinations as a coping mechanism to deal with the zombie apocalypse. They are actually trapped inside the school instead of living there by choice, the club is just the other three characters playing into the delusion to keep the main character from having an emotional breakdown.
It's neat too, cause if you watch the first ep back you'll see a lot of stuff that's out of place but just subtly. Like barricades in the hallways that would make no sense
Jesus. It never doesn’t blow my mind how deep and heart wrenching cartoons can be. I grew up on Looney Tunes, so it’s amazing to me how complex animated shows can be now. I absolutely love it
ETA I’m realizing cartoons isn’t the right word. I think I meant more the media form of animation
I don't play the game so I might get it wrong. Pyro is a pyromaniac who constantly burns people with little emotion. The people around him are afraid of him, not knowing what is inside his head. Turns out what inside his head is cute and cuddly world, the world he sees is full of rainbow and magic. He's got a filter in his mind that makes him see everything he does looks adorable and cute, while he's doing some nefarious shits.
It actually heavily implied that it's his goggles causing this effect, it's at least not entirely in his head. They added the goggles as an item in the game later, and they change a lot of the sound and visual effects to cute wholesome stuff. Like making the flamethrower shoot rainbows instead of fire.
Nearly every texture on the maps is pallette swapped to pastel colors. Flowers are present on the maps. Health packs and ammo are replaced with wrapped presents. And when people die they instead fall down in a fit of laughter.
It is a really high effort and fun addition to the game.
team fortress 2; promotional video for pyro character showed that from their perspective everything is cute n cuddly and their flamethrower spits out rainbows
One bit that the gif unfortunately ends before is that Pyro is prancing around in their imagination but after the dead Soldier collapses we see they're just doing a threatening slow walk
The quick shifts between Pyro's PoV and reality are so damn good in general
A man murders his neighbors and holds his wife and kids at gunpoint. When Superman enters the scene, he sees a man holding someone at gunpoint. But from the man's perspective, he has killed a monster who harmed his family.
That reminds me of a recent TIL about the rare Demon Face Disorder where affected people look at other people’s faces and see a distorted demon like shape.
Widow's Bay, (spoilers because its a pretty good show and i recommend it) the fourth episode shows one of the characters following an old book instructions to make a party to become more popular, it looks like a fairly regular party and kinda seems to be working as most people look to be having fun. But then some weird things can be noticed more and more, like one shot that suddenly show all the guest are with the mouth totally open and still instead of dancing, just to return to normal that same scene, and then its revealed that actually all the decorations and even the tiara she wears are actually crude wicthcraft ritual items, the punch she made was a disgusting potion that ensnared the guest minds and the regular looking book was practically a necronomicon.
Even funnier when you consider the previous episode of the same day with the Mayor and he's also yelling at Rosemary and giving her shit whenever she tries to help.
In the Always Sunny episode "The High School Reunion Part Two: The Gang's Revenge," the gang performs what to them seems like an awesome choreographed dance routine. Then reality snaps into place and we see that the gang has no talent at dancing, and are just drunkenly flailing around the stage.
That one was rough, Sydney was always one of my favorite recurring characters and the way he worked with Hawkeye to get him through his break in that one definitely hits hard in the feels.
When I was a kid it upset me so much that the chicken got smothered. It stayed with me. Years later I brought it up to my mom and she said, "It was a baby." I was like, "No way, I remember the chicken!" And my mom said, "Yeah, he remembered it as a chicken to deal with the fact it was really a baby." I adamantly refused to believe it, but then when I finally looked it up...
They were on a bus together and needed to be quiet to survive. She smothered a chicken because it wouldn’t be quiet. She was holding it so closely to try and get the chicken to be quiet, eventually the chicken died. It wasn’t a chicken
Utterly brutal! What’s the overall context of the episode? I’ve only seen a little bit of MASH but this sounds quite different to something the episodes I remember would feature
It was from the finale. They are doctors iperating at a near front line hospital in the korean war. They went out to the coast for a day at the beach. On the way back the run inro some soldiers who have been fighting/escaped the enemy. Then they have to pull off and hide in the dark as an enemy patrol goes by them. They baby starts crying and if they are heard they will be at risk of being killed in the dark mistaken for soldiers or taken as prisoners of war. The main character angrily tells/begs the woman to shut the baby up because the soldiers are getting closer and she ends up smothering the baby so that they wont get killed/caught. Obviously he didnt mean for that to happen but cant help but feel its his fault she did that/the general horror of the situation and has a mental breakdown
The lead character (Alan Alda) had a severe mental breakdown and was in the hospital, and his psychiatrist friend (a recurring character played by Allan Arbus) is dragging this story, which seems to be the catalyst of his breakdown, out of him.
Aldas memory of the day starts as a fun picnic, but with each retelling he remembers more of it and it gets more serious until they finally end up on a bus hiding from a NK patrol and he yells at a civilian Korean woman to "keep that chicken quiet, or we're all going to be killed" and she does...
The lyrics to that song were written by Michael Altman, the then-14-year-old son of Robert Altman, who directed the original MASH movie. Robert told Michael the song would be called "Suicide is Painless" and to make it as stupid as possible - basically literally trying for an "I'm 14 and this is deep" vibe.
And then everybody loved it, so Michael made some money off the royalties.
I haven’t seen it but I’ve heard about this episode. Basically, they’re in a dangerous situation where everyone NEEDS to be quiet, or else they’ll be detected by enemy soldiers. There’s a lady with a chicken that keeps making noise, so Hawkeye tells the lady to shut it up. She ends up killing the chicken to keep it quiet. But during a therapy session, Hawkeye remembers that the chicken was actually a human baby. And the lady suffocated the baby while trying to keep it from crying. Hawkeye realizes and it is devastated.
A main character keeps telling a background character to keep her chicken quiet so the enemy doesn’t find them. He increasingly becomes more scared and insistent that she shut up her chicken until she smothers it to death.
I think the chicken is a stand-in for a baby that a character had to "silence" or else they would be found by enemy soldiers. I could be wrong, though.
Hannibal TV series. A couple of examples come to mind. First when Hannibal asks Will to draw a clock in his notebook, and lies to Will it looks perfectly normal, when it reality it shows that Will is far from being fine:
This is a real tool, the Clock Drawing Test, used in psychology to assess cognitive decline in for example demetia or, more probable for Will, schizophrenia. I did the Leonardo pointing meme when this scene came up, as I studied psychology at the time and recognized it from one of my textbooks.
I came here to post that. One of the best moments in television. It’s a realistic TV show, so there’s no magic and no fantasy. Just someone so stressed they are having hallucinations / altered reality due to grief.
When it pulls back after JD delivers the line my wife and I actually went, “Ooooooohhhhhh no. No no.”
One of the running traits of WORM's Taylor Hebert is that she has NO FUCKING IDEA how terrifying she is. We're in her head for most of the book so we see her how she sees herself: Reasonable, logical, forgiving. But every time we leave her perspective we're slapped in the face with the reality that literally everyone around her is scared shitless in her presence.
The first big example is at the end of Arc 3. Arc 3 is about Taylor robbing a bank with her friends. She goes in not really wanting to hurt anybody, takes some hostages, stops the Wards (basically WORM's equivalent to the Teen Titans), and gets out with some money.
Then cut to the Arc 3 Interlude. We get a chapter from the Wards, and get to see Taylor how they see her: As this fucking psychopath fifteen year old dressed in fully black and armed with a knife who went into a bank, put venomous spiders on people to keep them hostage, swarms people with wasps, can see everything through the eyes of her bugs, can attack from any direction, and has zero regard for law or morality.
Gen V. The character Sam experiences hallucinations whenever he does something or sees something extremely violent. Including himself tearing apart soldiers with his super strength.
It’s sort of implied to be a coping mechanism to help him deal with the trauma he’s suffered.
Throughout the series the titular Kevin's perspective is a stereotypical three-wall multi-camera sitcom with laugh tracks, bright colors, zany shenanigans, and how everything goes back to the status quo at the end of the episode. All the characters are stock, the "goofy fun-loving husband", the "nagging wife", the "dumb best friend", "girl who's 'one of the guys'", etc.
Throughout the series, whenever Kevin is offscreen, it's a depressing single-camera show where the other characters have to deal with the realistic fallout of Kevin's 'zany antics'. All the characters are dealing with real problems, and have more depths and struggles.
At the end of the show when Kevin's antics cause him to alienate everyone around him, we see him as the emotionally abusive and violent manchild he really is when the protagonist finally confronts him for a divorce.
We happy few
A game which takes place in a dystopian England but thanks to the drug Joy that everyone is taking, people see an idyllic 60s settting.
In the intro, the main character is invited to an office party with a pinata filled with candy that he and his coworkers consume.
It's not a pinata though, that's the drug
That one shot where she’s dancing in the crowd and as it pans past the one person all of their faces were suddenly agape, my wife just about jumped into the ceiling. My favorite episode in a show with no weak episodes.
30 Rock when Tracy goes to space. Kenneth sees the world as singing Muppets, Jack sees the world as dollar signs, Tracy sees the world as everyone is him.
Another example from Always Sunny: after smoking a pcp-laced cigarette, Rickety Cricket meets a sweet natured girl named Belle and falls in love with her. However, Belle is not who she seems...
Bioshock. Not really a literal perspective shift, but you realize at the end your “friend” has been commanding you to do things via brainwashing the whole time. It makes you reconsider the whole game.
I played BioShock for the first time two months ago, having wanted to since I first saw the posters as a kid when it came out, and I assumed if there was a big twist I'd have been spoiled for it by now, so wasn't expecting a twist at all, let alone one that good
In a Robot Chicken skit, Anakin goes to his happy place and imagines himself in a field of Sunflowers cutting them up, but the reality is that he is murdering children
This movie's based on the Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme murder case, where two girls basically form this bizarre, obsessive, potentially lesbian best friend relationship/religion where they invent a whole fantasy world and genuinely convince themselves that they're there. Juliet's parents are divorcing and sending Juliet to South Africa, so Juliet and Pauline chat while sharing a bathtub about murdering Juliet's mom, so they can stay together forever. Later, on a hike, they beat her to death with a rock. They were both young teens, so they were sent to jail for five years on the condition that they never see each other again after they leave.
A lot of the movie is about contrasting the completely wondrous visions Pauline and Juliet have of the Fourth World with the reality that both of them are completely fucking insane.
In CODA, there is a scene where the fmc is singing in from t of the auditorium and her deaf parents are in the audience and the perspective shifts to them and we hear nothing, just the reactions and that is a gut punch.
I haven't watched a lot of American Dad but I have seen this one and I thought it was one of the best representations of body dysmorphia. I have never had an eating disorder but I felt this was a good representation of it.
Saya no Uta (story by Gen Urobuchi who is more famous for Fate/Zero and Puella Magi Madoka Magica). It's an eroge but that's not the important part. The main character suffered a head injury in a traffic accident and after that sees everything and everyone warped to grotesque flesh. He is horrified but tries to hide this and then meet a girl who appears as "normal" to him. As you can probably guess, this girl named Saya actually is a cosmic horror. When we see her from non-MC point of view, we get to see what she looks like and what the MC and Saya are really doing.
I couldn't find a screenshot of the exact moment, but in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you find out you're not actually Big Boss, but a surgically and psychologically altered copy of Big Boss. You start the game by waking up from a coma 9 years after the events of the prologue Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, and a doctor explains about you being injured by shrapnel embedded in your body, arm amputated, and other supposed psychological damage. There's a moment where you are being led to believe you're creating an online avatar, which the doctor claims will be your new face to hide from Cipher, a shadowy government agency that's out to kill you, but during "The Truth" ending, it's revealed that the avatar you made is your actual face, and that you were turned into a doppelganger, not just physically but also through brainwashing, so that the real Big Boss could escape and build up his army again in secrecy while you become the public face of Big Boss.
The name game sequence from American horror story Asylum. Sister Jude, once mentally sane, has spent years drugged, electricuted and god knows what else. When Lana finally meets her again she seems to be in a kind of dissociated state and doesn't recognise anything. After being asked "do you know your name?" The record player starts we get Sister Jude's perspective of everyone breaking out into a polished colourful muscial number to show how she now truly has lost her mind.
yellowjackets season two: the camera cuts to shauna to show she’s been talking to jackie’s corpse (we’d previously seen her as a ghost/lively)
the voices: most of the movie is from jerry’s perspective and everything is bright, clean, and sunny, he starts taking his medication after a woman he’s killed starts talking to him and we see the reality of his apartment being covered in trash, animal waste, and body parts
In Kevin F**k Himself, the sitcom framing is used whenever Kevin is onscreen where it portrays Kevin as a bumbling, lovable husband. When he leaves it switches into a drama where it shows the reality of living with Kevin and his actions.
I can't believe that no one has mentioned the game Spec Ops: The Line. The only example of this I've seen that genuinely left me speechless.
Its been a while but the spark notes version is that you start the game as a generic military shooter set in the middle east. Eventually you end up having to use white phosphorus mortar on some enemies, which actually turns out to be innocent civilians. The game shifts from that point on from being a power fantasy to outright accusing you, the player, of atrocities while your character loses his sanity. IMO that was the biggest tonal shift/gut punch I've ever had while gaming. It's completely changed my perception of FPS and other shooter games ever since.
Shallow Hal is pretty much based on this idea. He gets hypnotized and sees everyone as pretty. But eventually the hypnosis breaks, and he starts seeing people as they really are.
He gets hypnotized to see everyone’s inner beauty. So people who are kind and good look conventionally attractive to him. People who are unkind look unattractive to him.
He doesn’t see everyone as pretty, but rather their outer beauty is a reflection of their personality. If they’re a good person they’re beautiful, but if they’re a bad person they’re ugly.
In Smoke, one of the main characters sees himself as a handsome, fit man who is charming and likable. It’s only when he’s told that he’s been caught and looks at his reflection in the two way mirror in the interrogation room that the audience gets to see him as balding and portly
A recent example of this from Strange New Worlds "The Griffin Incident".
A long lost Federation ship is found adrift, apparently pristine but deserted.
Various spooky goings on later, Spock calms his mind through logic and sees through the illusion to see that the pristine interior is in fact badly damaged, blood streaked and littered with corpses. We see the ship again from the outside and realise that it's a wreck.
Another example from the book "There Is No Antimemetics Division" where the headquarters of the Division in question is littered with the corpses of dead colleagues that no one is able to perceive until one of the characters takes an enormous dose of "mnestic" drugs which allow them to perceive the building as it actually is.
Holy Holy by Geordie Greep fits, I think. The first half of the song is this incredible sleaze somehow picking up a woman at a bar with lines like "The barmaids know my name, / I've had them all before. / You are new - I'll have you too, / It's time to give in." He can't stop talking about how "holy" he is, how lonely and easy to seduce this woman will be, culminating in the lines "How 'bout we take this further? / I'll meet you in the bathroom / I bet your pussy is holy too"
The second half takes place some time before. The man has hired a prostitute, and set this whole situation up to make him feel/look like an utter Casanova. "I'll arrive at around 7pm, / And I want you to get there no later than 10. / I want you to be dressed like a sophisticated tart, / With too much makeup on, will that be alright?" He sets up the whole interaction, every little beat, every little ego boost. When he hits the final line of the first half, she's to slap him, then kiss him, then they go to the bathroom and sit around for 15 minutes. His speech is constantly peppered with "How much would that cost?" "Will that be alright?" His final, ultimate request is "I want you to put your hand on my knee / Would that be alright? / I want you to look at me as if you're lost. / How much will that cost?"
OOH I liked when Agatha all Along did this with her first meeting with Billy. We first see it from her perspective, she’s interrogating him for breaking into her house and it plays out like an average interrogation scene in a cop show, albeit with Katherine Hahn chewing the hell out of the scenery.
Then later, we see it from Billy’s perspective after he releases Agatha from the hex. Agatha is in a t shirt reading “Bohner family reunion” instead of the sleek suit from the first go round. She’s still speaking in detective jargon, but gone is the interrogation room, having been replaced with the house she had been trapped in the whole time. In the first scene, she kicks his chair over with him in it. In reality, she just kicked him a lil in the arm, didn’t even have him tied up or anything.
I have no idea what the name of it was. But there was a visual novel where a guy starts to sees everything in the world has horrible living flesh, except for a mysterious girl who seemed normal. And sometimes it cuts between the different perspectives.
He tries painting his walls to make it look normal. But in reality he just painted a mess of random colours.
Another example from The Suicide Squad
Harley Quinn fights her way in a prison break from the military and while brutally killing them in her perspective all the blood and guts spilled are all just beautiful flowers petals 🌺.
In the realistic detective game Disco Elysium, you roll a Savoir Faire check to “teleport” to the top of a building. If you pass the check, you miraculously appear at the top of the building, but your partner Kim informs you that you just closed your eyes and scrambled up a ladder.
People have mentioned the muppet reveal in 30 Rock, but the show does this a few times, especially with flashbacks.
I'm the school reunion episode, we see popular kids bullying Liz and her mumbling comebacks. Then we learn she actually said those insults full volume and absolutely scarred her peers emotionally.
In an earlier episode, we see flashbacks to when Liz and Jenna were struggling creatives in Chicago. Liz remembers going to Jenna's terrible plays and paying her insincere compliments which Jenna lapped up while Liz had hot boyfriends. Jenna remembers doing amazing plays which Liz would avoid complimenting (which Jenna definitely noticed) and Liz dating decrepit old men.
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u/Jephph0624 Aug 28 '26
The Little Sisters in Bioshock see everything as an elegant party