It depends on your point of view

Somehow, the viewpoint the story comes from dicates much of how the audience receives the story. For instance, imagine how different the story would be if the villain were telling it as opposed to the hero? It makes all the difference, and even moreso it dictates where the audience spends the majority of their time. Pick carefully, and for good reasons.

At the same time, though, authors can have lots of fun taking audiences in wildly varied places they wouldn't normally go. Using curious viewpoints (like having Watson narrate, rather than Sherlock Holmes) forces the audience to play catch up instead of knowing everything--which is more typical. Or, giving a narrator which tells the audience and not the characters. Anyway, it's fun to mess around with and guess how stories could be different by just changing the viewpoint.

It all comes down to point of view. It's pretty easy to make the audience like/dislike whoever you want, but the cherry on top is the way you cast the story and how it gets served to the audience. My guess is we all like twists to some degree, but it doesn't have to be big and using viewpoint is a wonderful way to do it. Battle: Los Angeles is a recent example from the movies that I think does a good job by telling a smaller story within a much larger one.

- M