Meta-Surprise

In a good whodunnit, the identity of the murderer is a surprise. But if you're watching a rom-com and somebody gets murdered, that's more like a meta-surprise.

Talking about "spoilers" is more complicated for meta-surprises. Obviously if you're reading/watching a mystery you should "keep the secret of whodunit locked in your heart," so that other people can enjoy the discovery for themselves.

But for a meta-surprise, even just revealing that there is a surprise is a spoiler. Some of the best meta-surprising books are almost unrecommendable: sometimes just saying that there is a twist can spoil part of the experience of the twist.

Maybe counterintuitively, working in a brand new medium seems to give more space for meta-surprises. You would think that the lack of pre-set expectations would make it harder to subvert expectations. Perhaps it's more a fact about the selection effects in publishing, where once expectations get set in stone perhaps it's harder to get your expectation-defying work published. Or perhaps it's a fact about human psychology, somehow: with an untouched field ahead of us, any path we take feels surprising.