I know, I know, calling everything a “subversion” went out of style already, but the thought popped into my head again and I feel the need to write out an explanation of what actually counts as a subversion.

To those of you lucky enough to never have heard of the term, a “subversion” is a term usually used to indicate when a given media property goes against the expected structure for properties of the same genre, the most classic example being “what if SUPERMAN was EVIL?” Now, that’s not… quite what that means, but it’s the way most people use it. You expected one thing, got another, bam subversion.

Which isn’t really what “subverting your expectations” is. It is subversion in the most basic form, I suppose, but it’s just as “subversive” as literally any story ever put to writing; If you could predict the entire story the moment you opened a book, it would be a bit of a shit book, no? So the book has to subvert your expectations just enough to not bore you. Even if you can guess the general direction of where things are going, you can’t know exactly how it’ll all go down. This is why I wouldn’t consider most shows that “pull the rug under you” at the beginning as subversive - sure, I am surprised at the start, but afterwards it’s just a normal story.

This last comment especially applies to a lot of “edgy” stories that get this label. The Boys is a show about “what if superheroes, but evil?” which, sure, is not what I expect out of superheroes, but after an episode or two I realize what kind of show this is. It’s a standard “the underdogs fighting the super-strong bad guys” plotline, which I’ve already seen many times over. It’s a broody superhero show where they swear a lot and sometimes are naked.¹ I’m still getting a fairly standard story, just not the one I signed up for.

So what would be subversive? In my opinion, something actually subversive would be a story where the expected structure is expected, followed, and yet still manages to be unlike the original structure. Confusing? Probably. Let me give some examples of what I mean.

Spoilers for Knives Out and Invincible S1 incoming.

Knives Out starts out as a fairly standard if stylistic murder mystery movie. We have an eccentric rich man dying, and an investigation surrounding a family of quirky assholes, each with their own motive to see him dead. However, around the mid-point we get a wrench in the works: we see exactly what happened. We see the murder, who did it, and how they covered it up. This seems like the “rug-pull” example I listed earlier, but not exactly, because the standards of the genre are respected: the murder mystery we were introduced to keeps going - a brilliant, charming detective who’s assisting the police keeps tracking down the clues and closes down on the killer - but we’re just following a different point of view. The Detective isn’t secretly evil or the real killer, turning this into just another mystery story, the detective and the suspects are exactly what we expected the whole time.

This is the key to a true subversion, in my view: we get the exact genre we were promised, but delivered through an unexpected lens. In Knives Out, we don’t know what’s going to happen next, because one the one hand our POV character seems to be a nice person who doesn’t deserve what they got wrapped up in, but the original story we were presented with is still going according to plan, and we know how those stories end. Our knowledge of the genre is used as a continuous tool against the viewer, not a one-and-done ordeal.

Another good example, for a different reason, is the show Invincible², a seemingly standard superman-esque story. The show’s been described as “subversive” many times over by featuring a gore-filled murder of supposed protagonists in the post-credits of the first episode, but as I said earlier - rug-pull, doesn’t count in my book. The reason I consider it subversive is because along with the dark and death-filled story of Omni-man, the “evil superman”, we still have the prototypical all-loving superman: Invincible himself. He still remains the all-loving teenage hero we were promised at the start of the show, that does not change. The subversive element is how different the world he occupies is from what we expect. We know how stories featuring an all-loving flying man tend to go, and we see Invincible try his hardest to stick to that story format, which is why the few times the story does divert from this storyline we’re shocked. Our expectations keep making us fall for the wrong idea of what will happen next, even when we know better.

If you’ve read this far and you haven’t watched the two properties I just talked about, I really recommend you go watch them as soon as you can. Invincible’s available on Amazon Prime, and Knives Out is probably on any streaming service you can find within spitting distance. Also, both of them are probably on pirate bay if you don’t have access to streaming. The only thing I ask of you going forward is to stop calling any normal show “subversive” just because you’re seeing a genre typically aimed at kids except the main character gets to say “fuck” a lot.