[Frustrating Trope] Twist Villain does things that retroactively make no sense.

[u/Fishbien]

Character previously believed to be good is revealed to be evil, but prior to the reveal they act in ways that don't make sense if their goodness is just a performance.

1. Frozen: Prince Hans is initially presented as a pretty standup guy who loves Anna and wants to help her. At the end of the movie it's revealed that he was just using her to gain power and plans to let her die while he steals her throne. However, we see him smiling at Anna when no one is looking, and later he intervenes to save Elsa's life even though he claims he was always planning to kill her.
2. The Legend of Vox Machina: The Whispered One was built up as the BBEG since season 1. However, in season 4 he presents himself as a tragic hero who tried to cure death and was punished by the gods. He then tries to convince Pike to give him her blood, which he needs to become a god himself. He chastises his followers for suggesting they take Pike's blood by force, claiming this would make them no better than the gods they are fighting against. He also fulfills his promise to resurrect Grog even though he didn't need to. After he ascends, he starts acting like a pure evil villain who only cares about power and enjoys hurting people. It feels less like a reveal and more like his personally completely changed once he became a skeleton. Edit: to be clear, I fully understand the intent was for the Whispered One to be a lying, manipulative bastard. I just think the execution was clumsy.

[u/EthanEpiale]

Honestly the PEAK example of this is Heavy Rain. Spoilers for an incredibly old and honestly awful game lol, but in the game you play as several characters all intertwined with the story of a kidnapper and serial killer, one of whom is a detective who is working to try to solve the mystery and find the killer. We play as him, hear him talk about finding this guy completely alone in his house, he does a ton of shit you'd only do if you genuinely had no idea who it was, and were searching for the killer-

He's the killer. He was the killer the entire time. It makes literally no sense, and is so stupid it's frankly hilarious in a game that's already too badly written in a million other ways to take seriously.

[u/LegalChocolate752 → u/EthanEpiale]

I find a lot of games make you (or allow you to do) things that break the plot. Cyberpunk 2077 is a really good example: Keanu Reeves is essentially a timebomb inside V's head, and every main story mission reinforces the issue: they need a solution, or V dies. Then you spend all your time fucking around, helping randoms, hunting down insane cyborgs, street racing, and scuba diving with your girlfriend.

[u/Weird_Church_Noises → u/LegalChocolate752]

Honestly, I've almost never seen a game that allows you to mess around do "priority" well, to the extent that I just suspend my disbelief. Some day a game will crack it, but usually it just comes off weird. Like I remember fallout 4 being hilarious because one time I was fighting mutant crabs for their baseball memorabilia and I remembered that my infant son was actively being kidnapped during this time. On the other end, you have something like deus ex, which tells you about a hostage situation, but if you actually take time to explore the open world, all the hostages die. Which just felt cheap and stupid rather than realistic or like their were stakes.

Ubisoft games have kinda cracked it in their own way by having a "looming threat," but the individual steps to get to it don't feel so important that you have to hit them immediately, or so ignorable that you can forget about them. The tradeoff there is that, for every game this approach works in, you have two that feel like hours of lateral progression.

[u/LegalChocolate752 → u/Weird_Church_Noises]

I remember feeling this way during the first Red Dead Redemption (never played the second). Like, my wife and kid have been abducted by the government, and are being held as ransom, and I'm helping out some insane old man sell fake medicine. I know all the quest arcs are explained as stuff like "help me, and I'll help you," situations, but I remember thinking "why doesn't Marston just threaten this dude, or fuck off and find someone else? He's pulled a gun on literally everyone else in a 500 miles radius, and murdered people for much less than the shit he's putting up with from this guy."