Ok. So its something im sorta frustrated with in movie and film plots. Its where the characters seem to intentionally not tell other characters things for apparently no reason. So its like a fair amount of the plot would not exist if the characters would just mention relevant things. This is usually in fantasy types like in particular I am seeing it with the magicians and school spirits. I mean maybe behavior like this is common outside my experience but its weird to me.
no, this is a huge trope throughout the entertainment industry… in my opinion it has little to do with the genre.
another fun game to play is ‘would this movie happen if they could pickup a cellphone and talked to x character’. many pre-cell movie scripts rely entirely on moving information from one person to another in the longest way possible
thing is I have not noticed it before. Has it always been common or is it something more common nowadays?
its always been pretty common, but its more frustrating today because communication is so easy to achieve. trivial even. we all are more or less able to communicate with almost anyone else at almost any time. theres simply no excuse anymore.
theres also just shitty writing. the ‘im going to keep this a secret so theres a plot’ trope. the recent series Evil did a great job of portraying a close team of ‘professionals’ who constantly fail to tell each other important bits of information the entire series. its beyond frustrating.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PoorCommunicationKills
Thanks although some of the examples are not so bad. Like the lost one sounds like an assumption but like in the school spirit one they never discuss the dead friends experience as a ghost and even worse at one point he asks her what she is looking at (it was other ghosts) and she is like. oh nothing. I mean I can’t for the life of me see why it would be like well you only see me but there are other ghosts. sorry that is a bit of a spoiler but its a pretty inconsequential aspect to the whole thing.
It’s always been a common sign of sloppy writing. At the very least, a writer should create a situation that believably prevents the passage of information. Not just people being too stupid and emotionally blocked to tell each other. That goes for “I love you, and I’m sorry” and also for “the murderer is…”
My guess is that a part of the popularity of the trope comes from shows used to needing to return to the status quo at the end of the episode, plus needing ways to create conflict/drama without actually making their characters bad or evil. “It was all just a big misunderstanding!” type plots do those well, even if they end up making watching frustrating because it turns into 23 minutes of watching people fail to do the one simple thing that would resolve everything.
Honestly im finding all the characters are not really heroes anymore with most doing various honestly unforgivable things that all the characters sorta shrug their shoulders over and go. deep down we are good.