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alt title(s): As You Know Bob 
Homer: Well, here we are at the Brad Goodman lecture. Lisa: We know, Dad. Homer: I just thought I'd remind everybody. After all, we did agree to attend this self-help seminar. Bart: What an odd thing to say... — The Simpsons, "Bart's Inner Child"
A form of exposition where one character explains to another something that they both know, but the audience doesn't. It has been described as a "pernicious form of infodump through dialogue".
"As you know, Simon, Jennifer has never been the same since the tragic codfish incident."
"As you know, Jennifer, my Death Ray depends on codfish balls."
In discussions of science fiction this is often As You Know, Bob (abbreviated AYKB), or occasionally, "Tell me, Professor [about this marvelous invention we all use every day and have no reason to be talking about except to inform the audience]". Poul Anderson referred to this as an "idiot lecture", in the sense that either the lecturer must be an idiot, or the lecturer must think the lecturee is an idiot. Nevertheless Anderson used the device often at the beginning of short stories, usually to establish historical details. Other common variations involve a newspaper reporter sent to cover events, or conversation between two supporting characters — hence another name, "maid and butler dialogue".
Terry Pratchett refers to the fantasy fiction version as the "As you know, your father, the king..." speech.
This is also a common feature of pilot episodes, where characters' backgrounds and relationships need to be established for the first time. Likewise, when new characters are introduced or the writers believe a reminder is in order, characters will explicitly refer to each other by name during a regular conversation, when this is rarely done in real life: "Say, Alice, how are you enjoying your coffee?" "Why, it's delicious, Bob, thanks for asking. How are you coming along, Carol?"
This is also quite common on medical drama shows like ER, Scrubs, and Greys Anatomy, where common medical phenomena and simple procedures must be explained to the unfamiliar audience. In most cases, this is achieved by explaining the disease or procedure to an intern or non-professional character.
On some shows, characters will As You Know in order to provide information that was already provided in a previous episode (that viewers might have missed) or even earlier in the show (for those who just tuned in), to the great annoyance of dedicated fans. (e.g. Just Tuned In: "Remember, Bob, you only have 20 minutes to defuse the bomb..." or Previous Episode: "Jane is really mad at you for running over her dog last week, isn't she?")
Solitary characters prefer to use "Here I am..." instead.
Although writers try to avoid this by using The Watson, using this trope is not always a bad thing. Not explaining anything sometimes results in the audience being too busy trying to figure out what's going on to enjoy the show.
It may be a failure to use actions and props to show the audience what is happening. Kings are addressed as "Your Majesty". The class bully beats up the new kid. A Batman Cold Open can be used to showcase unfamiliar technology.
Specific variants:
See also: Mr Exposition, The Watson, Expospeak, Captain Obvious. A subtrope of Show Dont Tell
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Examples
Anime & Manga
- 80s anime series The Mysterious Cities of Gold employed this trope regularly. This was mostly because, unlike many other 80s cartoons, it featured an on-going storyline that frequently built upon events from previous episodes. Of course, children couldn't be expected to watch a show that patiently so cue many long conversations with characters telling each other "Yes, you may remember the golden condor we discovered underneath the Inca ruins," etc., etc.
- The anime version of Witchblade tends to occasionally fall back on this.
- Team Aqua and Team Magma meet for the first time onscreen in Pokémon Advanced, and not only speak in an As You Know, but also make an Introdump at the start of that dialog.
- Early chapters of the Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch manga have Lucia constantly being reminded she's a princess, a mermaid, forbidden to date humans, can't go into water in public, and various things she already knows. Then again, she's always been a bit headstrong about these limitations anyway. The anime got rid of this by tacking on a prologue on every episode explaining the whole situation.
- Inverted in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Explanations were scarce at the best of times. (Not to mention the ending!)
- Although the Bridge Bunnies often make some sort of explanation of what is going on, especially in The End of Evangelion, where they manage to survive long enough to narrate the end of the world.
- In episode 112 of Bleach, Urahara and Isshin Kurosaki have an extended conversation telling each other things they both already know about the two new sets of bad guys on the plot horizon, for the benefit of both the audience and some other characters standing off to the side. What is most inexplicable is that they don't just tell the other characters instead of talking to each other, which would have made the scene make sense!
- In the manga, no one else was in that scene, and it seems like they didn't want to change that aspect of it.
- Used rather neatly in Naruto with the explanation that the main character is an idiot who never paid attention in school. Things frequently have to be explained to him several times in gradually simpler terms. This is usually done during training segments, so it has a natural feel to it.
- Kiddy Grade uses this trope right off the bat in the first episode to set up the show's premise.
- Averted in Cowboy Bebop where Faye is shocked by some objects getting trapped in hyperspace, this confuses the other characters as everyone in the time period should know how hyperspace works. Hyperspace travel is then explained to her as if she was a child.
- In Episode 14 of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Striker S, Fate quizzes her adopted children Erio and Caro on history as a way of providing the viewer with exposition on the origins of the TSAB.
- In the first chapter Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Sakura and Shaolan tell each other how they first met and for how long they've been friends, obviously to fill in the reader on their backstory.
Comics
Fan Works
- Obligatory Yugioh The Abridged Series reference, at the beginning of a scene in Episode 21:
Yugi: Your brother's been kidnapped?
Mokuba: Yes, that is exactly what I just finished telling you.
- Episode 42 takes the lampshading to new extremes:
Mai: I can't believe Joey is dueling Marik!
Yugi: Yep, that sure is the current situation.
- Repeatedly lampshaded in the online Harry Potter musical parody A Very Potter Musical. Their first scene together features Quirrell doing an Expospeak of their plan for the audience, to which Voldemort replies "Yesss, no one must know any of that." Whenever Quirrell delivers some bit of exposition to Voldemort, Voldemort replies, "I know, Quirrel! I hear everything you hear!"
Films — Live Action
- This was also going to be spoofed in the original script of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, in which the film's Mr Exposition (appropriately named Basil Exposition) tells the main character: "You're Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, and you're with Agent Mrs. Kensington. The year is 1967, and you're talking on a picture phone." Austin then replies: "We know all that, Exposition."
- Parodied and lampshaded in the movie Spaceballs, when Colonel Sandurz unnecessarily explains the evil plan to Dark Helmet, who turns to the camera and asks, "Everybody got that?"
- According to Mel Brooks, filmmakers are obliged to provide the audience with a Minimum amount of plot. That was it.
- Sort of done in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie. In one story, a hitman lectures an elderly billionaire on how addictive the pharmaceutical that made him rich was. The strange thing with this was that, while the billionaire should have known this already, it seems bizarre that the hitman, even having looked into his client's past, would have researched such a trivial and tangential detail.
- There's a hilarious scene in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie where the two comic relief pirates, watching the main characters duke it out in an epic battle over the Mac Guffin, wonder exactly how they got into this situation and briefly recap the whole movie up to that point for the benefit of anyone still watching.
- Extra points for the fact that they couldn't have possibly known everything they recapped.
- Early in North by Northwest, the Professor presides over a meeting of national security types and explains the situation, so that we in the audience can be ahead of Roger Thornhill, who is still clueless at this point. He explains what's going on (that Roger Thorhill's been mistaken for secret agent George Kaplan, that there is no such person as George Kaplan, and that the real secret agent is someone else entirely) in exacting and repetitive detail — to an assembly consisting of the only people in the world who already know all this. Clumsy, awkward, excruciating.
- Flawless example in the movie Dragonfly: a speaker at a funeral says of the deceased, "From her colleagues at the university to her young patients here in Chicago Memorial’s pediatric oncology ward, she will be sorely missed" — speaking to the deceased's family, her colleagues from the university and her associates from the pediatric oncology ward, none of whom needed to be informed what city they were in, what hospital she was associated with, or what field of medicine she specialized in.
- As The X Files first movie had to introduce Mulder and Scully for cinemagoers who hadn't watched the series, so Mulder spills his backstory/woes to a bartender while Scully falls into this, telling Mulder about the last few years.
- At the beginning of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Rufus brings several famous musicians from across history to his classroom. If the audience already knows who the musician is, he just introduces them by name, if they don't (ie, they're from after 1991), he explains what they did, which is somewhat jarring.
- Played with in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Galloway recaps the events of the first movie over a secure video link. Or not so secure, since Soundwave is linked to the satellite and monitoring most broadcasts on Earth. He now knows exactly where the NEST base and the last Allspark piece is.
- The movie adaptation of Red Sonja starts out with the title character laying barely conscious in a field as some kind of spirit grants her the power to get her revenge, but first explains Sonja's own backstory to her in great detail. As the Nostalgia Critic review of it points out, it's especially awkward because it presumably all happened to her moments before the movie started, and involves her being raped and having her family killed off, which are things you'd think she wouldn't need to be reminded about.
Close Films — Live Action
Literature
- Within the first chapter of the original Shannara book a character tells shares, quite literally, "As you know, [Entire history of the world]".
- Isaac Asimov's I, Robot and Foundation were rife with it, as a result of the serialized format in which the stories originally appeared. As it was possible that a magazine buyer reading one of the stories had not read the previous ones, Asimov felt it necessary to re-summarize the Three Laws of Robotics, or the Seldon Plan, through Expospeak in the early parts of each story.
- The fact that one character needed Seldon's plan explained to him actually served as a plot point in one Foundation story — his lack of knowledge revealed that he wasn't who he claimed to be.
- Somewhat justified in Foundation because the stories happen centuries apart, and Seldon actually misled everyone more often than not, leading to a lot of skepticism regarding the Plan.
- Asimov has also written that the Three Laws are actually a cheap timey wimey way of explaining more complicated terms... which is really Truth in Print. An atom is like a solar system... except it ain't. Repeat it enough and people will stop asking why.
- Used to the point of being beaten to death by David Weber. Every single Honor Harrington book has this at least once, maybe twice. It's particularly painful, because most of these recaps appear to be at the end of a meeting that just talked about the recapped stuff.
- The Assassins of Tamurin: S.D. Towers fills the reader in on the entire Backstory of the Empire of Durdane by devoting most of a chapter to covering a History class.
- Robert A Heinlein's novel Methuseleh's Children opens with a meeting of Howard Foundation members where one character goes on for several pages, detailing the history of the foundation, its goals, and his plans for the future. While very interesting (to the reader), the entire monologue is framed as an As You Know. As the characters are all extremely long-lived and therefore very patient, they don't mind too much.
- Novelist Harry Turtledove has a tendency to fall into this trap in his multi-volume alternative history epics (such as the Worldwar and Timeline-191 series); he will often recap complicated alternative histories and the plots of two, three or more previous novels in the series by having characters engage in conversations or think to themselves about things that they would already know.
- In the novel Frankenstein, the title character receives a letter from his sister which basically tells him his own life story in nauseating detail. The phrase "You will recall..." pops up a few times.
- James Hogan rather neatly avoids this trope while still managing to do huge Infodumps in his Ganymede series, by managing things so that there's always someone present who justifiably needs the infodump, whether it's a biologist getting briefed on extremely advanced physics, a physicist being brought up to speed on political matters, or a businessman being briefed on the fine points of biochemistry. It helps that Hogan's got a huge multi-disciplinary team to work with, and even better, the main character is a man who's biggest talent is his ability to cross-correlate information from many areas without being a specialist in any of them himself.
- No one's caught Brave New World yet? There is an obscenely long lecture describing the way people are modified and replicated at the very head of the book, from a professor of the subject to collegiate students who must already know all this. Aldous Huxley: Good thinker, good writer, clumsy panda at exposition. Even better is that this lecture takes up the first couple of chapters, and once it's over we never see or hear from any of the characters in it again.
- Well, we do see Mustapha Mond later.
- As to the clumsy exposition, see also Anvils That Needed To Be Dropped for an excuse. Whether it's a sufficient excuse is an exercise for the troper.
- Whenever has students already knowing something stopped them from having to take the relevant classes / lisenting to it again and again?
- It's justified in this case: the "professor" is actually a very high-ranking member of their society, and they take it as a great honor to be able to hear this stuff explained right from his mouth. People in real life do go to see very notable people tell them things that they already know, often because those notable people are far better than average at explaining them. And it's also worth mentioning that the lecturer takes questions from the students—so he presumably tells at least one of them something he doesn't know.
- While we're on the subject of early 20th century dystopian sci-fi, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We averts this: the novel, written as a journal, is addressed to an alien readership; therefore, it's natural that the narrator explains some of the most basic facts of his everyday world.
- But in 1984, Orwell uses the very clever trick of getting the basic facts explained to us by the secret book of the Fraternity, which works as a subversive primer to the endoctrinated population. Of course, we learn later on that the Fraternity and the Inner Party are the same, so everything in the book could be wrong too...
- Subverted in Cowboy Feng's Spacebar and Grille: "Don't tell me what I already know."
- In Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, the character Jan Rodricks explains the theory of relativity to his sister in a very long letter, which she should already know, seeing as how this was a highly scientifically advanced society, almost to the point of dystopia.
- Averted in Dan Simmons' Hyperion and its sequel where almost no technology is ever explained unless there is a very good reason for the character to need the information explained. Most prominently, characters use various sorts of "EMVs" as transport but exactly what EMV stands for is never stated (though it's made clear that they are Electro Magnetic Vehicles).
- In Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's Hunters of Dune, the old couple Daniel and Marty do this a lot in the last chapters (when it is revealed that they are really Omnius and Erasmus),
- This is lampshaded in King Harald's Saga, by Snorri Sturluson, making this Older Than Print. "'I will believe in the banner's magic power,' said Svein, 'only when you have fought three battles against your nephew King Magnus and won all three of them.' Harald retorted angrily, 'I am well aware of my kinship with Magnus without needing you to remind me of it...'"
- Harry Potter. At the very beginning of the first one, Dumbledore and McGonagal have a discussion about things each one of them knows in detail. Of special mention are the specifics of the war they have just been fighting, the introduction of the villain's name, which has a vague justification, and telling Dumbledore he's noble, just to establish him as a good guy in the books.
- Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell has an unending supply of footnotes stuffed with as-you-know facts about the world of British magic, as well as strange anecdotes, discussions of magical theories and other "as you might already know but may well find interesting" divergences from the main story.
- Averted to an almost pathological degree in Catch 22, where characters will often refer to major events like the Loyalty Oath Crusade or the Great Big Siege of Bologna Noodle Incident style for half the book before you get the slightest hint what they're talking about. It doesn't help that the scenes aren't in chronological order.
- It's the kind of book you might have to read a few times to understand. Luckily, it is good enough to be worth the effort.
- Dune is as appallingly loaded with As You Know as any book ever written. The chapter where the villain first appears consists entirely of As You Know dialogue, complete with having the villain introduce himself to his chief henchman: "Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?"
- Lampshaded in a Redwall book where an important
tribal customplot point is explained to the son of the recently deceased chieftain. For the record, there's a sword with a wavy edge (the sea) and a straight one (the land). The chieftain throws the sword, and whichever side lands up determines the way they travel (he clips a weight to one side, but the rest of the tribe don't know that).
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who ran into this problem when Romana (another Time Lord who actually was cleverer than the Doctor) travelled with the Doctor. In this case, however, the sheer quality of the two actresses who played Romana meant that few really noticed — plus Romana was meant to be a bit naďve.
- Ironically, part of the original intention of the companion was to have an Audience Surrogate, so it would be less of an "As You Know…" and more of a "Did You Know…"
- A particularly bizarre Doctor Who example occurs in the final episode of "The Armageddon Factor", where two incidental characters As You Know a recap of the Doctor's current predicament for the audience's benefit — despite the fact that the Doctor is across the star system and out of contact, and has been for some time: there's no way they could have known the events they relate.
- Another extremely blatant example is in the serial "Resurrection of the Daleks", when the character rescuing Davros from cyrogenic suspension explains the plot of "Destiny of the Daleks" to him. This doesn't even start As You Know; Davros reacts as if the events that led to him being placed in cryogenic suspension are entirely new to him. To be fair, it was implied that the prolonged period of cryogenic suspension had given Davros partial amnesia, so he needed the recap.
- Spoofed on the series 'Allo 'Allo!, in this case, as with the show in general, it was meant to mock the format of wartime dramas of the day. However, as the show was later aired on other networks with episodes out of order, the utterly tongue-in-cheek recaps became somewhat necessary.
- This Troper watched the series end to end on DVD, and he still sometimes needed the exposition to keep the ridiculously complicated plot straight.
- Even the characters themselves occasionally got confused by what was going on after it was explained to them by another character. The constant shell game with the real and forged copies of the Fallen Madonna (With the Big Boobies) was a particular offender at this.
- Babylon 5 had a painfully straight instance of this in its pilot.
- 24: Nearly every episode starts with CTU in a room having a meeting in which they recap the last episode. Lampshaded with Chloe O'Brien, who As You Knows constantly and tactlessly, to the great annoyance of her co-workers.
- Used straightly, if a little awkwardly, in the first episode of Angel. Since Angel is a spinoff of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, new viewers would not be aware of Angel's intricate backstory. It was worked in by a new character, Doyle, showing off how much he knew about Angel by reciting Angel's life story. It was also played with at the start of the episode, when Angel starts pouring out his life story to a man in a bar, as he's pretending to be drunk while stalking some vampires.
- Angel lampshades the first one by pointing out to Doyle that yeah, he knows, he was there.
- Smallville: Chloe stops Clark from leaving so that she can remind him of the very reason that he's leaving, which both he and the audience are well aware of, just so that she can spill a secret to one of Lex's henchmen, secretly listening. This isn't surprising as Chloe is saddled with about 90% of the show's exposition in every episode anyway, so it was only a matter of time before she got sloppy.
- She does it again, even worse, with the guy who can become invisible. When they have figured out he's evil and Clark needs to stop him and all, Chloe thinks he might have figured Clark's Achilles Heel since he can become invisible, so she asks him and he is there and finds out. Quite infuriating because she asked "Are you sure he doesn't know you feel bad around meteor rocks?" instead of the safer "Are you sure he doesn't know your weakness?". And made double infuriating by the fact that she had about 2 seasons or so calling them "Kryptonite", and only went back to "meteor rocks" for that one scene.
- House almost always explains to either his team or to Wilson or to the patients just what and how they were dying. It's perhaps justified by House having an obsession with this, and in one episode, he gets in a bad mood when a dying patient doesn't want to hear what she's dying of. This gives him the epiphany he needed to solve the case and cure her.
- On Law and Order (and presumably other Law Procedural media), lawyers summarize court opinions to each other. Sometimes a lawyer or judge will explain an opinion to the person who cited it.
- Pretty much the entire franchise does it, SVU the most painful at it, almost always using it in an As You Know\Idiot Ball\Writer On Board combo.
- Somewhat justified - lawyers have to be able to distinguish the case's meaning from the facts, and then apply it to their particular situation. And they have to be able to challenge arguments that the case they just cited shouldn't apply.
- Nobody's mentioned CSI yet? The detectives are always explaining rudimentary forensics to one another.
- Lampshaded in the season 10 episode 'Working Stiffs' - Hodges explains what a machine (D.I.V.A) does while Langston is using it; after Hodges finishes, Langston says, 'I know how it works - I'm doing it.' Hodges retorts, 'Yes, but it was a lucid and an entertaining explanation of the process.'
- This is particular bad on the spinoffs, where characters have a tendency to explain a scientific concept to each other right after the other character suggests it.
- In the soap opera-ish series The L Word this duty often falls to the annoying gossipy character Alice, who, coincidentally, is a blogger, journalist, and TV personality. She knows everyone else in the show, they tell her what is happening and she occasionally recaps everyone else's life.
- An episode of Stargate Atlantis uses it so blatantly (starting by emphasising the phrase "as you know") it seems rather like a soliloquy. The fourth wall goes back up as soon as the infodump's finished.
- In one last-season episode of Boston Legal, there's a casual mention of "Finlay-Crevette, a law firm you know well". Justified in that Paul's talking to Denny, who has Alzheimer's and may well have forgotten.
- At the beginning of the pilot episode of The Big Bang Theory, the theoretical physicist with a master's degree, two Ph.D.s, and an IQ of 187 is explaining the Double Slit Experiment to the experimental physicist with a Ph.D and an an IQ of 173.
- On Oz, they did this frequently as they went from one storyline to another.
- Fringe gets away with this pretty well by giving all the As You Know lines to Cloud Cuckoo Lander Walter Bishop. After a few months, everyone else just accepts it and stops trying to remind him that they already know this stuff.
- Mercilessly parodied in Brass whenever one of the characters needs to remind viewers of the plot.
- Used in the season 2 finale of Veronica Mars, in which the Big Bad and Veronica take a 5 minute timeout before he tries to kill her, for them to confirm yes, she knows everything. Veronica Mars is smarter than me, so I was thankful and disbelief-suspending, for the explanation
Theater
- Spoofed as early as Plautus's The Braggart Soldier (2nd century BC): Palaestrio insists on explaining the plan to Acroteleutium again; she repeatedly protests that she's not an idiot and not only does she understand the plan, she actually devised much of it. Similarly, the exposition in The Brothers Menaechmus is presented in such a ludicrous manner (essentially, "Tell me, Menaechmus, what have we been doing for the last six years?") that it's obviously a big wink to the audience.
Video Games
- In the Babylon 5: I've Found Her game tutorial this was deftly lampshaded: engineer filling in (instead of instructor) explained controls to presumably experienced pilot as introduction to new craft, with implications of Newtonian dynamics smuggled in as reminder about consequences of said craft's propulsion superiority.
- In a (deeply failed) attempt to reduce this in Metal Gear Solid 2, Kojima came up with the idea of making the player character a character who didn't know, allowing the other characters to tell the player things that the main character would already know. For the segment where the main character was the one receiving the exposition, it was compensated for by the fact that the person giving the Info Dump was a compulsive nag. The whole thing failed miserably, however — partly because everyone hated the new guy, and partly because Kojima infodumps are so turgid that As You Know actually makes them more accessible.
- Used by Force Commander Indrick Boreale in Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm. "As you know, most of our Battle Brothers...." He reminds his Space Marines of the reinforcements waiting in orbit to be used against enemy forces invading their stronghold. However, due to the weird timing and accent, it ends up sounding hilarious. (see here: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Indrick_Boreale)
- This trope is used to explain the Zero Gravity mechanic to the player character in Dead Space. It's especially weird however, because the player would have already dealt with zero gravity by that point and the character himself has operated in that kind of environment for a good few years!
- Where you are given the As You Know sequence is the first time the player encounters Zero-G, so it's justified in that part. Second, Isaac is being told what that is because that's the first time he's been in the Ishimura, and Hammond doesn't know that Isaac knew all of that (he's a systems engineer).
- Hammond probably does know, given that the first thing he says in this explanation is "as you know". It seems especially clumsy when you consider that prior to this the game was fairly up-front about just having tutorial text pop up on screen (best example: Isaac's RIG projecting text and an audio recording telling him how to stomp). Useful for players, absolutely silly in terms of story and immersion.
- Half-Life 2. Some of the info dump comes from people who are not in their right minds and who tend to babble.
- Also subverted in the fact that you, without hunting down the clues yourself, never really find out how the world reached the state it's in.
- Slightly awkwardly averted in the Ace Attorney games. The first case in each game requires the player to get a quick introduction to the gameplay details. This makes perfect sense in the first game, but requires some hoop-jumping to be plausible in subsequent games, considering they star the same main character who is obviously a seasoned laywer at that point. The second game featured a convenient bout of amnesia, whereas the third one was actually a flashback to the second case of Mia Fey, Phoenix's mentor (strangely enough, when you actually get to play her first case she doesn't get any As You Know assistance). The fourth game introduced a new protagonist, Apollo Justice- but you can actually skip the tutorial here.
- Fridge Logic makes the tutorial in the first game out to be rather nonsensical as well — though it's Phoenix's first time trying a case, how on earth did he graduate law school in the first place if he doesn't even know what a cross-examination is?
- Done to death in Infinite Undiscovery. Every other scene, someone is stopping to explain to the main character something that the rest of the cast takes for common knowledge. This Troper is starting to wonder if Capell is even from that world.
- Shuji Ikutsuki does verbatum in Persona 3. "As you know, I can't summon a persona." Of course, he's Mr Exposition. At least, in the beginning part of the game.
- Used in Knights of the Old Republic 1 and played with in 2. The first NPC you meet in KotOR 1 spends a few minutes telling you things your character would obviously know unless the Jedi mind-wipe only just cleared up. In 2, however, in many cases it is avoided as your character can respond in ways that imply you know the information, given that they have a real history with a lot of the events mentioned.
- Also, in the first game, there are limits to what the first NPC will tell you before even he starts to think it's stupid. Specifically, he'll react to your not recognising the name of the ship you're on (which the player can only guess at that point and so may well ask about).
- In Phantasy Star II, the first person you meet hits you with a triple whammy: "Good morning, <player>. How are you? Almost two years have passed since you started working for me, the Commander of Mota. As you know, Algo has been brought up by Mother Brain..."
- Fallen into in the unskibbable tutorial in Final Fantasy XII, which seems perfectly plausible until you realize that while you as the player really need the information on basic controls, your current character is a soldier in the middle of battle who really should not have to be told how to attack enemies, open gates, and run away from battle. The military cannot have been that desperate.
- Paper Mario as well as Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga occasionally did this during the tutorials with characters asking if they needed to explain things and otherwise say things like "Oh sorry, of course you know how to do that! Silly me!"
- Subverted in Final Fantasy VII, where you, as Cloud, give the tutorial other characters and random strangers so that you as the the player can learn, even though Cloud obviously knows all this stuff.
- Rather egregious in Quest For Glory III, which literally begins with an "As you know..." where the events of the second game are related to the main character, who actually caused all of them to happen. Either he has Swiss cheese memory, or Aziza does.
Web Animation
- Parodied somewhat in Red Vs Blue, where the exposition is for another character's benefit rather than the audience. Church, Tucker and Tex are held at gunpoint by Wyomming. Church uses his radio to try surreptitiously tells Caboose what's going on, but none of the other characters present know he's doing this and can only wonder why he's suddenly become "the narrator".
- Parodied in the Homestar Runner cartoon "A Decemberween Pageant". It opens with Homestar talking to Marzipan about how the night of the titular pageant has arrived "After all the weeks and weeks of rehearsing and practicing and memorizing lines," when Marzipan tells him "Homestar, I don't think those are your lines." A Reveal Shot shows Homestar and Marzipan are standing on the stage, and Homestar has been delivering his exposition in the middle of the performance.
Web Comics
- Spoofed/lampshaded repeatedly in the webcomic The Order of the Stick. At one point, Elan compliments Roy for working the exposition into his angry tirade so smoothly.
- Elan cries at good exposition.
- Spoofed in Killroy and Tina here with a fourth wall lampshading.
- Lampshaded in Starslip Crisis:
Admiral: I know what it is! There was no reason for you to say that out loud!
- In Darths and Droids, the character playing R2-D2 gives an awesome recap in this strip.
- Jokes about recaps are one of the most common running themes on Sluggy Freelance: an As You Know is never played straight. Some jokes played on the concept include:
- "Quit recapping and keep your eyes on the road!"
- The ancient Greek island of Wrekappe, home of the primeval festival that eventually became America's Thanksgiving, is inhabited by the Recappers, warriors dressed as pilgrims who will recap at the slightest opportunity.
- Correction: the island has sunk. The Recappers uphold its legacy.
- "But Sweral, you quit your recapping habit years ago!"
- A footnote in Intragalactic lampshades this here.
"... this is more or less the equivalent of a customs inspector lecturing people on what an orange is."
- Played for drama and done very well in this Goblins strip.
- Lampshaded in one of Dinosaur Comics' many Alternate Reality panels;
"Wow, personal jetpacks are so compact, efficient, safe and easy to control!"
"Uh, obviously I already know that, we live in the same universe! Duhhh..."
- As you know, Irregular Webcomic hangs a lampshade on its use of tropes, and then gives us a Shout Out in the Alt Text. And they've done it again.
- Lampshaded in this Antihero for Hire: "I'm just making sure we're on the same page."
- Played For Laughs in a Precocious strip, aptly titled "Relive those memories".
Western Animation
- An episode of Duckman also Lampshades this practice. A character from an earlier episode returns, and Charles/Mambo (siamese twins who have one body with two heads) tell Duckman it's that woman he used to date, who used to be hideous but became gorgeous through plastic surgery and left him. Duckman responds to the effect of "Don't you think I know that?", to which the twins respond with something like "Of course you know that, but we can't expect the audience to have seen every previous episode of this obscure late-night show running on the USA Network."
- Another example: To suggest how ordinary his life is, Duckman describes the ironically ridiculous premise of the show to Cornfed in one sentence: "I'm just another duck detective, who works with a pig and lives with the twin sister of his dead wife, has three sons on two bodies, and a comatose mother-in-law whose got so much gas she's fire hazard."
- Subverted in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, where Flash, in Lex's body, asks for an As You Know recap from Dr. Polaris over the "Big Plan". Polaris, on the other hand, is angry that "Luthor" couldn't remember the plan he announced to them that morning.
- In Kim Possible, Drakken is very fond of this trope. It is lampshaded by Shego in the episode "Clean Slate".
Drakken: Shego, at last! Pure nanotronium is mine! The smallest, most powerful energy source known to m— Shego: Are you for real? I was with you. I know what it is, Dr. Exposition.
- Spoofed on the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. In the episode "Super Rocksteady and Mighty Be-Bop", Shredder is setting up a mind-control device while talking to Krang via communicator, and remarks that he needs to get away before the device goes off so he doesn't fall under its influence.
Krang: Why are you explaining this to me? I invented it! Shredder: I wasn't explaining it to you...( he points to the audience) I was explaining it to them!
- Avatar the Last Airbender features Sokka bumbling through an explanation of his battle plan, finally getting so nervous that he just starts recapping the entire series, getting to the sixth episode before his father steps in.
- Lampshaded in a recent episode of The Simpsons (which was a 24 parody), where Lisa begins some exposition...
Lisa: Principal Skinner, as we both know but you may need reminding, the Bake Sale represents 90% of the school's annual revenue...
- Spoofed outright in another episode in which Homer needlessly recounts step-by-step his purchase of an ice cream cone with no plot significance whatsoever, to his family, who were there.
- "I hope nothing unsavory happens during my visit. As you know, I am the president of the United States. "
- Spoofed in an episode of Freakazoid, during a conversation that came with captions indicating which of the statements were "IMPORTANT" or "NOT IMPORTANT". The As You Know conversation eventually degraded into spewing frivolous things like "I'm wearing blue socks" (captioned with "NOT IMPORTANT") and "You know, if you mix baking soda and vinegar together, you can make a little volcano." ("NOT IMPORTANT... BUT INTERESTING")
- This comes up rather often in Code Lyoko Season 1, since the series starts as One We Prepared Earlier. Jérémie is usually the one stuck with frequently reminding his friends about information that they would already know — like the basic properties of the world of Lyoko, the monsters' stats, the fact that they couldn't let anyone die before a Return to the Past (this one quickly crumbling under Fridge Logic) or that their main goal was to materialize Aelita.
- On American Dad Francine is talking to her sister while Stan eavesdrops and calls her "sis", then remarks how strange it is for her to call her that, then mentions her age and where they grew up for no reason.
- Sealab2021 has a similar Double Subversion:
Captain: You know what that means Stormy? (Stormy nods)
Someone else: But I don't know, Captain, what does it mean?
- The Fairly Oddparents makes fun of this trope whenever a character comes back and some exposition is needed for any viewers who aren't up to date. Rather than simply say the character's name, Mr. or Ms. Exposition also has to spout out a long-winded explanation of who they are. The most blatant example is when they explained to the audience that Mark was an alien and now living on Earth disguised as a human, even going so far as to have Timmy place a device in front of the fourth wall that lets the viewer see Mark under his disguise.
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