What Is The Major Plot Twist In Ties That Bind?

Question

Accidentally glimpsed a huge spoiler about those family secrets, now can't decide if reading the rest will be disappointing.

Tina Steffey · Answer

In the story 'Ties That Bind' there is a major plot twist when the protagonist realises her soulmate is not the dashing prince she had been promised to, but his long overlooked twin brother. This twist in the story reveals the true identity of the royal family member and changes the direction of the story. The focus of the story switches to the relationships between the main characters and their motivations. It is a real identity reveal and reminded me of the central conflict in 'Tied To The Wrong Brother' where the heroine is bound to a man by contract, a cold hard CEO. However, as the story progresses she finds herself more and more drawn to theCEO's kinder and allegedly banished sibling. This creates a lot of tension in the story between the two men for the heroine's affections, and the question is repeatedly posed: who is the wrong man for her to be with?

Violet · Answer

I love moments where a twist makes new sense rather than being flashy. In ‘Ties That Bind’ many of the personal histories that the protagonists have accepted as true have been manufactured by an organization trying to keep a fractured family together. Even the personal memories of the protagonist have been altered and the timelines of events changed. All of the protagonists’ deepest convictions about who hurt whom, were based on edited footage or even falsified records.

What I find most compelling in this story is that it uses the main plot twist to explore questions of identity, accountability and whether or not one can truly forgive someone for past wrongs when those wrongs have been constructed out of lies. It takes a familiar family drama and uses it to explore power and the control of narrative. It’s quite intense but in the end, somewhat hopeful.

Benjamin · Answer

When I first started watching ‘Ties That Bind’ I thought it was just going to be another family drama/thriller, but that moment about halfway through the film was deliciously cruel. The long deceased sibling that the main character had been grieving for years and years was not only alive but was the public face of the opposing side in the war that was currently taking place. But the real heartbreak of that moment was that the parent that the main character and his/her sibling loved and respected the most was behind it all and that their intentions were to use the war as a way to bring the family together under their control.

The reveals are cleverly constructed so that scenes that seemed minor and like just another domestic squabble get replayed and seen in an entirely different light. We are flooded with flashbacks and even framed diary entries that reveal the true intentions behind the actions of some of the major characters, including the parent whom the protagonist had trusted above all others.

The film skillfully reframes the title, showing how the ties that bind can also strangle. It is so messy and so real and I was so happy to get to see these characters grapple with betrayal by blood. It was really impressive and it has really stayed with me even after the credits rolled. It made me think about a lot of things that I haven’t thought of before about our histories and how we accept them without even questioning them.

Vivienne · Answer

One line from “Ties That Bind” that stuck with me was “the deepest betrayal comes from the person closest to you.” The twist here was so crisp and so sensible that the main character’s closest ally betrays him not for power, not for spite, but because the ally believes that continued conflict would result in the death of hundreds of people that the main character loves.

This perspective reframes the whole plot in a new light – all of the betrayals in the story were sacrifices by the people closest to the protagonist and therefore cannot be considered treacherous. It highlights the complexity of the ties that bind us, showing how they can bring us comfort as well as harm. It is a perspective that has stayed with me long after finishing the book and has caused me to reflect on many of the moments of betrayal and loyalty in the story.

Henry · Answer

Walking into “Ties That Bind” I had expectations of a good whodunit, and yes it delivered big time on many levels, not least of all how the twist at the end completely messes with one’s perception of identity. Early on on we are introduced to a rather mysterious network and to our various suspects each with their own credible motives for the crime. These suspicions are steered in certain directions by the story, by use of a very tight and, ultimately, rather unreliable first person narrator. And by ‘edits out of our sight’ I refer to the various inner thoughts and observations the narrator, would normally, be expect to include in their recollections of the plot. Instead we are presented with ‘missing’ hours of the story and ‘foggy’ recollections which, in the end, are revealed to be the missing sections and the cause of the ‘foggy’ memories and the mechanism behind the crime itself.

It’s also very good at presenting a moral grey area – the protagonist isn’t ‘bad’, but equally they aren’t entirely good either. The story looks at the trauma that led to the creation of the alter ego, and the ways in which society might enable and even collude with cover ups. As for technical matters, there’s some excellent misdirection going on here – red herrings and seemingly logical jumps that, upon re-reading, make perfect sense. But they also hang together in a really satisfying way, which is more than can be said for some twisty books. The story’s got a lot to say about guilt and the stories we tell ourselves, which is great.

Yasmine · Answer

I've been reeling from the twist in 'Ties That Bind' last night, despite having binge-watched it. The main character was trying to stop the very things he had caused. He is literally the architect of all the things that have gone wrong for him, and the show has been dropping little hints throughout as to how that is possible. All along, there has been a dissociative thread running throughout the story of a fractured identity, with the main character struggling to come to terms with the guilt of his past, which he has been suppressing.

The emotional ride to the reveal of who was behind the ties that bound in the end was also wonderful to experience. Instead of setting up a villain to point a finger at, we experience this hero as they slowly realize who they were when they were out of commission. We then get to experience the degradation of those relationships now that he has all of this knowledge that he can’t share. This is so very messy and hurtful at times yet we can’t help but sympathize with the main character. It was a great way to portray that all vengeance and protection are two sides of the same coin and really makes one wonder if redemption can be earned or if we just remember it and can it be had again?

Alice · Answer

The final hour of ‘Ties That Bind’ was a real sucker punch. It was so good that it almost hurt. It turns out that the person who has been portrayed as a grieving and vengeful seeker of justice is in fact the perpetrator of the crimes that she is trying to solve. She has created a false identity for herself in order to try and and deal with her past in a variety of different ways, using a combination of suppressed memories and different personas. As the reader, we have been led to believe that someone else is pulling the strings of the story and that there is a complex web of clues and tokens being left in order for us to follow. Instead it is revealed that all of the clues were being left by the main character herself in order to mislead the witnesses to the crimes that she has committed and to plant evidence in order to shift the blame onto herself in a variety of different ways.

The big twist has so much to say to the rest of the book’s meditation on memory and family. It becomes a deeply intimate psychological study once the reveal has taken place. A wonderful example of a ‘twist’ that is also of substance in its exploration of how trauma and its relief drive humans to be the worst versions of themselves. Rather unsettling and yet simultaneously somehow understandable and even sympathetic. It’s a read that will have you feeling both for a long time after the end. Rather a complex read, which is to say rather good. Fight Club and Gone Girl have some of the same feelings, but they are much darker and less intimate than this little novel.

Xenia · Answer

Stripting all that away, the central twist in ‘Ties That Bind’ is very psychological and intimate. The person we follow as he seeks the truth is actually the perpetrator of the crimes, his memory of identity having been torn asunder either by the trauma he experienced or as a result of some manipulation. And as the narrative explores the ties of blood and duty that bind this man, we see him to be both victim and perpetrator. The twist is re-framed back on earlier parts of the story and it becomes very clear how casual observations became evidence of his wrongdoing and how something apparently kind and gentle could become sinister in the context of their relationship. A very clever twist that is not just surprising, but also allows for exploration of important moral issues, and questions the intent of the seeker of truth, and the process of healing and how families tell stories of the past.

Robert M Sutera Sr · Answer

This is a genre twist story. It begins as a cozy, cute, sugary, breakfast-y, fantasy about a group of friends who run a tea shop as a business. They use their magical bond to make the perfect tea for every customer’s problem. But in the second half of the story, it is revealed that the problems of lingering sadness, anger and grief that the friends are solving with their tea are actually spiritual parasites, pieces of a long-dead lich’s phylactery. Each time they solve a problem with their tea, they are using their magical bond to absorb the parasite into themselves, concentrating it. The lich is not dead, it is being reconstituted by the friends and their tea shop. Their kindness, their charm, their tea and their community are being used against them and the town in which they live. The first half of the story is so charming that the horror of the second half is all the more horrible.

Brenda George · Answer

A temporal twist on me: one of the characters has these random, extremely painful time-slips. In each of them, he sees a ruined city, his friends and loved ones dead. He believes he is seeing the future, one that he can avoid. However, the city that he is seeing is the original capital, long-since destroyed in the war that the bonding was meant to forestall. And the friends and loved ones that he sees dead are the original bonded group. Rather than seeing a possible future that he can prevent, what he is actually seeing and reliving is the ancestral trauma of the magical lineage. The time-slips are a form of magical PTSD, stretching back through the centuries. Their struggle isn’t to prevent another catastrophe; rather, it is to come to terms with the first and to find a way to heal from it and put its ghosts to rest.

Jhey Ehm · Answer

Reframe the mentor as a twisted, yet ultimately pitiable character. Instead of being evil or absurd, he is dying. The bond between him and the students is what keeps him alive, tied to the world of the living. He set up the situation and fostered the connections in order to create a strong enough magical battery to sustain his own life indefinitely. All of his paternal, strict, sometimes hard-to-understand actions, lessons, and sacrifices were all meant to strengthen the bond between himself and the students to the maximum extent possible. The final confrontation with the group comes when they realize that the bond they currently have with the mentor is slowly killing them, physically and spiritually – and that they are being drained in order to sustain the life of the dying man. The actions of the truly villainous character in the story come as a confession of despair and pathos – an old man who loves them and wants to keep them with him for the rest of his life, above and beyond all else. He forces them into a horribly difficult choice between killing the father of one of them and slowly but surely killing them all off, one by one.

Marian Tanega Vales · Answer

It’s the dedication that reveals the twist to the book. For a long time readers assumed the dedication to “my circle, who know why” was to the author’s friends. However, in the twist to the book a fan pointed out that the words “who know why” are actually a quote from the book itself, spoken by the villain when he explains the purpose of the bond to the heroes. It makes you wonder if the author’s real-life friend group are in on the secret too, possibly even being the inspiration for the bonded circle in the book. Does this mean the story is a fictionalized account of the author’s real-life secret magical bond, or is it a story that is an allegory for the author’s own shared trauma or deep connection? It’s a meta-twist that makes the story feel like a whispered secret, or even confessional. Whether or not it’s true, it certainly adds to the re-read of the book.

Radha Kimari · Answer

I’m only here for the discourse. This twist F einmallicated the entire fandom for a solid month and then there were all these forum threads filled with theories, denial and so much angst fanart.

What Is The Major Plot Twist In Ties That Bind?

13 Answers

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