"The Reveal is always Dumbledore pilling stuff out of his ass."
This is just factually incorrect. You don't have to like the mysteries or their solutions, but they are not always or even often Dumbledore pulling stuff out of his ass (struggling to even think of what you're referring to?), and they are in fact often solvable by an observant and astute reader.
Does this type of Mystery allow the the murderer's boss who runs a criminal syndicate like Carmen Sandiego's V.I.L.E to play private detective with the story outright showing that She/He is the The Big Bad who hired the murderer and that the Chief Inspector is the real detective(thus not decieving the audience) without the actual murderer(criminal under the Big Bad's employ) being revealed?
Just gotta say that the concealing of the clues in the second FriendshipIsMagic example is (IMO) justified insofar as the first clue was a Smoking Gun, as likely was the second. Upon seeing said first clue, we would've been like Pinkie Pie and said "Case Solved" when it wasn't. After all, what would a Tomboy/Lad-ette be doing wearing fake eyelashes?
Ketchum's corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced tactic is indistinguishable from blind luck.
The Harry Potter books are like this; the mystery plot is deliberately littered with Red Herrings to lead Harry (and the reader, by extension) down the wrong path at first, but an acute reader can pick up on the actual clues and determine the true culprit before Harry does.
I disagree. The Reveal is always Dumbledore pilling stuff out of his ass. Even when Dumbledore dies, his ass continues to be an infinite source.
Change "but an acute reader can pick up on the actual clues and determine the true culprit before Harry does."
or just put the whole example in YMMV but NOT on the main page?
What if there were no hypothetical questions? There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand Binary and those who don't. Hide / Show Replies