Trope Talk: Unreliable Narrators

I love unreliable narrators. My favorite thing is when the narrator changes, and you can just FEEL the bias from the previous guy.

My favorite unreliable narration is from Meet the Robinsons: “Hey, Goob! Cool binder!” “Goob, wanna hang out at my place today?” “They all hated me.”

I like Emperor's New Groove where Kuzco tells himself (the Narrator) to give it rest since he really is so unreliable. The narrator can't even defend himself since Kuzco points out that the audience is very much aware of his lying since they saw the whole thing and there forth won't listen to him anymore. So he tells the Narrator to leave him alone and we never hear from the Narrator again. Pretty clever use of the trope since it's framed as Kuzco coming to accept he very much deserves being turned into a llama. He very much wants to paint himself as the victim, but the betrayal of what might as well be his maternal figure and how he's treated Pacha, who really has no reason to help him has hit him hard. And his old way of thinking doesn't work anymore, showing character growth and the taking of responsibility.

My favorite subversion of this trope is how Percy Jackson in the first series written as an unreliable narrator, but instead of portraying himself as a cool badass like any 12-16 year old would, he SEVERELY underestimates himself. He's just a silly lil guy but to everyone else he's a murder machine with ~20,000 kills across the first 5 books alone

The moment in Emperor's New Groove when Kuzco silences his own narration monologue and it remains silent for the rest of the adventure is symbolic of him getting over himself and realizing he was a tyrannical brat unfit to rule his land even before becoming a llama.

What's interesting is that the Narrator in The Stanley Parable could be unreliable, be definitely reliable but with an unreliable protagonist, or have both be unreliable! It just depends on the ending you're going for...

Adult Goob from meet the Robinsons is a great example when he tells his backstory. He believes his life was ruined completely by the ball game but in reality he just held his grudge so hard he let his life fly by him.

And what people didn't realize is that Blue was the one telling this story all along, but he's heard Red do these segments so many times that he hallucinated her doin this one too

I love the fact that Sherlock season 4 has basically become her punching bag for when writers think they’re too clever for their audiences

How do we know we can trust Red? XD

The interesting part about The Emperors New Groove: Kuzco narrating and then calling himself out later is real major character development. He’s looked back over his life and found out what really happened. It was all his fault. Had he been nicer to people he’d not be in that situation. It’s literally his own thoughts until he cuts himself off. I think it’s a great subversive take on a narrator.

A lot of the Percy Jackson books have the unreliable filter because it follows the viewpoint character and it leads to some funny moments, like when Percy realizes that one of his close friends has feeling for him and he's kinda like "When did this happen" while most readers have probably been screaming at him to figure it out since book 1. Heroes of Olympus expands this when have various characters trying to get a grasp on other viewpoint character's mindsets which leads to funny moments where one of them will comment about how inspiring and heroic the other is and how focused they are, then the next chapter perspective switches and the other character is just thinking about how they could go for a cheeseburger at the moment. It even gets played for drama where one character hears a slightly doomy prophecty before their group heads on a dangerous quests and doesn't pick up on or grasp why one of his companions kinda became sort of sad and melonchally on the trip and is talking about, which hits a lot harder on the reread.

My favorite kind of unriable narrators are when the unreliable-ness is subtle. "We were best friends!" "We hung out sometimes."

But is Red one in this trope talk? Is she secretly leading us astray with this information? Is there misinformation mixed in? We'll never know

So, I’m 40, and I think this is the first time anyone has ever spelled out for me that the narrator is a character and therefore has personality characteristics on purpose. 🤯 Like, it seems so obvious! Never stop learning kids!

6:21 I've never noticed that Syndrome completely changes the context of the "Fly home, Buddy" quip in his memory of it.

My favorite take on a narrator is The Book Thief where the narrator is death. He doesn't actually affect the plot, but he has a very distinct personality and will often voice his perspective on things

3:43 "a theoretically perfectly reliable narrator would explain absolutely everything" JRR Tolkien gave it his best shot!

One of my favourites of these is actually how Twisted the musical reframes it’s whole story, it’s a wicked style retelling of Aladdin with Jaffar as the hero and at the end it shows aladdin becoming the merchant narrator of the movie we know reframing every future viewing I had of that film

I recently read a fanfic that did something interesting with this. Usually, you don't know the narration is unreliable, at least at first, and it's some kind of plot twist - "this wasn't actually real/accurate!". Said fanfic has a character with time travel powers that is ABSOLUTELY going insane trying to fix something in the past - time travel messed with her memories, and she lost all sense of chronology - doesn't know anymore where she is, when she is, what happened before what, just a complete mess. As such, the third person narration is self-consciously unreliable regarding the order of events, and doesn't hide this. The story isn't in chronological order, and while we know we can trust it that all the events happened as told, neither us not the narration seems to know in which order, and how the different story lines it keeps cutting to relate to each other (one before the other? The other way around? Parralel timelines or something?). Just thought this was a very clever trick, because usually you can't straight up tell the audience the narration is unreliable without them losing interest in the story (aka "if I can't be sure any of this is real, why should I care"). This both keeps the tension because we know the events ARE real and accurate, while passing really well to the reader the character's sheer confusion and frustration. Edit: It's called Eternal Return by notoriousjae, look it up on ao3. Since it's a fanfic though you DO need to know the source material first, in this case the game Life is Strange