More Than The Twist

I recently read Subnormality's #200 comic. Please take the time to read this story before continuing, because this post will have spoilers, and you may not have a damn clue what I'm talking about without the context.

This is an amazing short story. This young man is searching for anomalies, making discoveries and progress, dedicating four years to it, with the plan to dedicate his life to discovering these anomalies, only to fall victim to one in the end. All those years, all that energy and research, just blinked out of existence.

I felt a sort of dread as I was approaching the big reveal; I was so certain that this was going to be the twist, and it was.

In a sense, this story did something I would normally disapprove of: I was able to guess the twist before it happened. (Admittedly, it wasn't until right before, and I wasn't 100% certain it would happen, but I bet many people would have guessed it from the premise, especially if they were really trying to figure it out.) But in a different sense, that didn't matter at all because there was so much more than the twist to this story.

I left this story thinking about stuff, reflecting on the questions the characters posed.
"Are you the same person you were yesterday?"
Are anomalies common in nature? Did they exist before structure?
Why has nobody else been studying this? And in retrospect, does nature abhor letting people be aware of its inconsistencies?

This is the point of the story, thinking about these questions, pondering their worth or their potential truth, and what it would mean if we could find them to be true. The twist is merely an event that happened that was as critical to the story as all the other events.