A cliche that bothers me is when a person says that they can't explain something without showing it, and then when the audience sees whatever it is it's pretty obvious they could have explained in a few words.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

When it happens in a book, it's considered "bad writing"--but on TV and in movies.....it's the way it's done!

There's a term for this--"the stupid character" or something like that, because they can't figure out something really obvious or else it would give away part of the plot too early. I can't remember what the term is.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

According to TVropes.org, there's the "Naive Newcomer", the guy who gets the premise explained to him, "The Rick" who gets the plot points explained to him, "Basil Exposition" who does the explaining, and "Captain Obvious", who explains what doesn't need explaining.

There's also "Genre Blindness"; i.e., the people seem to have never seen the type of movie they're in and are unaware they're acting out stupid cliches.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

You're right, there is, but I can only remember the inverse one. "Chewing the cabbage" means explaining something that all the characters would know but the audience wouldn't.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Minor typo - that's tvtropes.org That can be a pretty interesting and amusing site.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

But before you click, let me warn you that it will suck up your free time like a supermassive black hole.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

I suppose "TV ropes" would be an entirely different website.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

As in the infamous "Your father, the king, . . ."

Having a character who needs to have those things explained that the audience needs to know is a way to avoid the chewing of cabbages.

Another would be to have characters imply knowledge without stating it and have the audience learn what they need that way, but that would leave some audience members hopelessly confused when they don't catch it.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

The video game Knights of the Old Republic 2 had a very nice way of reducing the time spent "chewing the cabbage". much of the exposition was in the form of your own dialogue choices, many of which lead to the exact same response from the NPC.

This site raises a very good example of what I mean (note: some not safe for work language, although it isn't especially gratuitous.)

As a quick irrelevant tangent, KotOR and KotOR2 have the distinction of being one of the only game series out there whose protagonists have never been 'under 20', or even '20-somethings'. It's hard to gauge the protagonists' ages, but the chronology of the Jedi Exile appears to place him/her in his/her mid 40s, possibly early 50s. The protagonist of the first KotOR appears to have similar mileage on his/her odometer, and might be as old as 65-70 by the time KotOR2's story wraps up.

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[Dr. Horrible]___________________________[Penny]
Listen close to everybody's heart________And you believe there's good in everybody's heart
And hear that breaking sound_____________Keep it safe and sound
Hopes and dreams are shattering apart____With hope you can do your part
And crashing to the ground_______________To turn a life around

Whereas Star Wars games do not interest me, other games of that sort do, and the mechanics of exposition through dialogue options sound rather fascinating.

Of course, you can get away with including clunky lines like, "The king, your father," or "John Jenkins - you know, your best friend at school whose sister you briefly (and disastrously) dated," so long as you have non-clunky options which the player can choose instead.

Still, one of my favourite dialogue things is when you are asked, "What makes you think we're wizards?" and one of the options is, "Because it says 'Wizard' when I move my mouse pointer over you."

You can also show the character getting a letter explaining an event she's invited to and reading it, so you don't have to later explain where she is or why.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

Still, it doesn't need to be clunky. A good enough writer can work in exposition without it looking like exposition. The best writers work it into the story so well the reader/viewer is unaware that it's anything but the natural progression of the story; that is, until someone asks them what the movie was about and they try to explain it!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Some character will sell Girl Scout cookies, but they won't say "Girl Scout" they'll say some really unwitty parody name.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

... hero falls in love with some girl... they turn out to be related.

A single handgun trumps a half dozen machine guns if you're the good guy and you have a 2 inch wide telephone pole to hide behind.

You can be carrying a pistol, but if the bad guy wants to fight with a sword, that's what you fight him with. Oh wait, forgot Indiana Jones

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Or unless you're Sean Connery in "Untouchables."


"Just like a WOP! Bringing a knife to a gunfight."

The phrase "where it all began" when used in commercials or trailers. For instance, I just saw a commercial which implied that the game Final Fantasy VII was "where it all began."

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Or "Now, the fate of (insert place here) depends on them".

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx