Is this sort of POV switch not recommended? [duplicate]

Question

In an story I mentioned previously in past questions (Don't worry, nothing important that won't be explained here), I was going to have the protagonist go through a hero-to-villain arc and the antagonist go through a villain-to-hero arc, and the antagonist would become the new protagonist in the story.

My plan for this was to keep with the protagonist's POV up until a certain final scene, which I am assuming is going to be the final fight and the main climax of the entire story. Then, I was going to switch over to the past going to the antagonist's POV, but as the Last of Us 2 reviews have taught me, this really tends to break immersion, flow, and suspense since you don't keep a bell-curve model, more just two bell curves but the first one drops down like a rock at the climax.

Is there any way to pull this off well without being a deity of a writer, and if not, is there any method I can use that accomplishes maintaining both POV's until this final fight while keeping the flow of the story going? The only other method I could think of was alternating the POV's between chapters, but I thought this might be a little confusing and jarring, or making it end just before this final fight and instead foreshadowing it in the last scene with the first protagonist.

Answer 1

You say you don't want to switch POVs between the two characters. I can see why, and I agree that it would probably hint at the final twist. This is kind of a difficult situation, but there's always a way around it.

The two obvious options are to either ignore the haters and do what you were gonna do with switchign the POV at the end, or switch the POV between chapters. Since you don't want those, I'm not gonna go more into them but I still recommend you consider them and keep your options open.

Another option is a parallel story. If you like the idea of switching the POVs between chapters but don't want to break the flow, go ahead and write it switching the POVs just to see how it turns out. If you decide you don't like it that way, then yank out the POV of one character and put it in it's own book. Should be some easy cut and paste, but if you change something in one book you have to make sure it doesn't mess anything up in the other one.

My last idea is to go the way you had already decided on, write it from one POV and then at the end switch to the other POV. BUT it really has to be at the end, like the last 2-3 pages. This way, any jarring plot change is kind of expected to allow for a sequel. And since it's already towards the end of the story, most readers will already start be sort of coming back to reality and will be less upset about a break in the flow.

Good luck.