I’m getting good enough at spotting very precise tropes now so I spoil tv shows for myself. 😖
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The one that inspired this tweet: a passenger left alone in a car while driver goes into a store will discover a secret in the glove compartment. It’s not really a trope but a shot clue: if they show the left behind person rather than follow the other character there’s a reason.
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An annoying one: in a detective show, a recognizable character actor showing up in an early scene in a minor role with unnecessary lines is probably the murderer. You don’t need to know the plot to guess that they wouldn’t use a speaking role established actor as an extra.
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I guess these aren’t tropes so much as subtropes. I think I’ve mentioned the second example before in some thread.
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i watched "oblivion" this weekend with my son and he had decoded most of the plot in the first few minutes. it was sort of eerie watching him decode the tropes in real time on a first watch
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Did you notice a similar phenomenon with regard to board-games as well, which made them hard to enjoy after playing a few times?
twitter.com/longhandnotes/.
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Replying to @atishayokti and @natselrox
Perhaps "solving the game" was among the slow-burn off-stage rites of passage by children outgrowing it, with their elder cousins/siblings keeping the cheats from them. Or perhaps, the casual setting of the game meant that people rarely devoted "serious work" to solving it.
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I like when I guess the show correctly.
Being saved from a spoiler often feels like being wowed by a magic trick, it's lame. There's more layers underneath it to be wowed by that are interesting.
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There's an advance stage: mapping these archetypes as well as standard structures onto the timeline. "they're arresting X, but there's 10 more minutes, so probably that's a red herring" or "attacking the bad guys, but at 50%, so this will fail somehow or be a pyrrhic victory"
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Ayup. Conversely, I'm always pleased when I fail to predict the plot; it means the writers are doing something original.
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For me it’s certain camera angles that suggest that there’s someone else in the room or behind them






