Talking Is A Free Action - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Don't even bother to read it.

It certainly seems like Spider-Man. He's jumping around and he won't stop talking.

Elektra, Ultimate Spider-Man

If the GM wants to be realistic, he should allow only one sentence of communication per second... (a turn) but it is usually more fun when you ignore this limitation!

GURPS 4e Basic Set: Campaigns

Time in comics is rather flexible. Each panel shows a single event, but is usually accompanied by a length of dialog, which must take some time to say. This disparity is usually accepted if it isn't taken to extremes.

But often, characters will Info Dump when it's most needed: at the story's climax, where both the intricacies of the plot and the intensity of action hit their highest.

While the Heroes Outrun The Fireball, Mr Exposition might explain why the Evil Overlord's death caused the explosion. The Action Girl can deliver impressive lectures on why the monster's Achilles Heel will work, while still engaging in Waif Fu. The Super Hero can quip to his heart's content and explain his abilities while dueling one insignificant mobster, or deliver a Kirk Summation during the course of a single Finishing Move. Sometimes even apparent mere mortals can give a lecture on what is happening when it would be a much better idea to simply run like hell.

Without stopping to breathe, apparently.

This has become less common in the era of Decompressed Comics, possibly because it was taken to silly degrees at times, but has never really gone away.

This is mostly found in comics and Web Comics, as it compares time to talk with time to do. If a comic is translated to a medium where time is a factor, then this can become obvious.

Anime versions of Manga, for example, sometimes end up having Midstrike Monologues, where it almost seems like Time Stands Still for the purpose of attacks, but not for the hero to deliver an In The Name Of The Moon speech.

Another variant can occur in roleplaying Video games, where battle can stop for dialogue scenes, either for Character Development or rules description. Sometimes this is with enemies present, but refusing to attack. Maybe they're caught up in the romance or wonder of the moment. Or maybe they realise they're doomed cannon fodder and think it best to savour their last moments of life.

Compare Inaction Sequence, Comic Book Time, Webcomic Time, Expolabel.

Examples:

The trope name comes from Dungeons And Dragons, in which talking requires neither time nor effort, so requests to "stop talking and get fighting" weren't necessary.
- To be fair, Dungeons And Dragons actually does place guidelines and limitations on just how much talking you can do without time or effort... but these are usually ignored by players and DMs in all but the most drastic cases, and sometimes even then; it's generally more fun that way.
- D&D Webcomic the Order Of The Stick has parodied this on several occasions, as it has most aspects of D&Ds rules. See this strip. On the other hand, it has itself been guilty of this.
Spider-Man has a reputation for having panels over half-full of him talking.
- In fact, some gamers even refer to this phenomenon as "Marvelling", referencing ol' Web-Head himself. One of the reasons Spider-Man came off as more emo in the films is because they couldn't logically work any of his usual in-battle joking into live-action fight scenes.
Subverted in X-Men The Last Stand, when Beast attempts reciting a Churchill quotatation in mid-combat, but gives up halfway in order to deliver a roundhouse kick to a random opponent.
The Super Hero roleplaying game Villains And Vigilantes, first published in the early 1980s, explicitly defines speech as a "free action" and allows characters unlimited dialogue in combat because it is appropriate to the genre.
- The better-known Champions game that followed it, and its generic outgrowth HERO System after that, followed suit and is the most explicit example of encouraging people to use this trope for genre reasons in the present day.
Parodied in this series of Fetus-X strips.
In Final Fantasy Tactics, story fights are often interrupted with dialogue -- sometimes including extraordinarily long and detailed monologues.
- In fact, several Final Fantasy games have dialogue scenes for character development or rules description during battle screens, with enemies present, but refusing to attack.
  - And in another Square product, Chrono Cross, the enemies are refusing to attack since they're the ones giving the rules and game information; apparently the heroes just stand there and listen.
  - Because it's helpful!
- Sometimes averted Final Fantasy X: some battles have "Special Commands" aviable, including "Talk" - which use up a turn.
- Both averted - in the same way as above - and played straight in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2; Sometimes main characters go into lengthy monologues mid-battle, and other times you have to use your turn to talk. It seems mostly dependant on if you're talking to yourself or not.
In the same vein, Disgaea 2 has a truly remarkable example of this; the party bursts into the middle of a fight, where the brother of one of the main characters is in the middle of a suicidal assault on the Big Bad's bodyguard. Apparently, however, Mook Chivalry prevents them from attacking while brother and sister share a lengthy retrospect, debate the value of life, make plans for the future, and learn new super-moves from their combined powers. Of course, it IS a turn-based game, and the characters are almost universally Genre Savvy, so maybe they were just aware that the enemy couldn't move untill someone hit the 'End Turn' button...
- Then again, the trope is outright subverted in the first Disgaea, in which Etna takes out two out of three Power Ranger knockoffs in the middle of their intro speech, before all their colors combine. This does earn her a stern lecture, though. Later, Laharl gets a scolding from Flonne too when he suggests that they should attack while The Rival is busy monologing
  - It's also lampshaded in the tutorial, where Etna notices that the monsters apparently have the courtesy to wait for their asses to be beat.
Assassination targets in Assassins Creed have the uncanny ability to freeze gameplay in order to deliver cryptic, rambling speeches. This despite their having invariably been stabbed through the neck by a two-foot spike immediately prior.
Parodied and justified in a scene in the DC Comics mini-series DC One Million where a Badass Normal hero from the far future delivers, in the space of a single flying kick, an implausibly large infodump about the fact that he's delivering an implausibly large infodump in the space of a single flying kick:
"You see... this is a martial arts move developed by a telepathic octopus species inhabiting the oceans of Durla; the attack's telepathic as well as physical, and by the time you realize this sentence seems way too long..."
"...it'll all be over."
Parodied in an issue of Deadpool. Wolverine gives a long speech during a single leap, making Kitty Pryde wonder how that's even possible. Evil scientist Doctor Bong then puts forward the hypothesis that time stretches during fight scenes as a side effect of whatever temporal anomaly is behind the sliding timescale.
The Law of Ueki does this quite often, both with the standard talking and occasionally with flashbacks. Apparently it takes less time to revisit all your motivations for becoming a fighter (taking five minutes of screen time) than it does for a fist to cross a foot or two. At one point Ueki pole vaults onto someone, and they manage a four line dialogue explaining his move before he even gets close to landing.
Chris Claremont. Just...Chris Claremont. Need we say anymore?◊
- Oddly enough, though this wasn't written by Chris Claremont, it does accurately reflect his style.
Film example: At the climax of the film Point Break, Keanu Reeves's and Patrick Swayze's characters fall out of an airplane at four-thousand feet and have a ninety-second shouting match which, as Myth Busters demonstrated, is about three times as long as it would take to actually fall that distance. And that's not getting into the problems with being able to hear someone in freefall.
Subverted repeatedly in Black Lagoon where anyone stupid enough to try to hold a speech in the middle of a fight is shot by Revy. If they survive the first shot, then they're often taunted for their stupidity.
Inui of Prince Of Tennis defeats his opponents by memorizing the percent chances of any particular action occuring during a game. This can end in him rattling off a list of percentages in the middle of his through-swing.
Gantz. To excess. Then again, everything in Gantz is a free action, and nothing happens unless directly caused by such a free action, in what can only be described as the anime equivalent of event-driven programming. This is vitally necessary, as the show's protagonists are perhaps the single most hesitant gaggle of mooks in all of anime.
- Also subverted, when a Gantz Hunter stalls an otherwise unstoppable enemy with an existential conversation while the rest of his team sets up an ambush.
Demonstrated greatly in this 8-Bit Theater, where Fighter has a full flashback, gets an idea, and draws both swords before hitting opponents Black Mage threw him at that were apparently at most fifteen feet away. In the flash version it's even more obvious, and even funnier.
For the sake of flavour, virtually all of the Super Robot Wars games have the characters, whether hero or villain, delivering a couple of lines of dialogue (well, actually monologue) with every attack. This is especially amusing in the case of unmanned drone enemies, who actually go "beep beep beep" in place of their dialogue.
Sakura Taisen displays a similar behavior to Super Robot Wars. In Sakura Taisen 4, there are even occasions where several minute long cut scenes occur between turns.
Fire Emblem sometimes has dialogue or monologue delivered before attacking particularly important characters.
- It also has Support conversations, in which two compatible characters can start gabbing in the middle of battle to raise their stats using The Power Of Friendship.
In a similar vein, Power Rangers and Super Sentai all have lengthy morphing, zord summoning and weapon invocation scenes. The giant-sized monsters never seem able to step on the Rangers in the minute or so it takes them to summon and assemble their Megazord.
- Subverted at least once in Voltron, where the monster interrupts the transformation process (though not in mid-animation).
Girl Genius doesn't seem to be immune to this either
The Eye of Argon:
"All that you hear is less than I hear! I heard footsteps coming towards us. Silence yourself that we may find out whom we are being brought into contact with. I doubt that any would have thought as yet of searching this passage for us. The advantage of surprize will be upon our side." Grignr warned.
The final volume of the Death Note manga features an entire chapter of infodumping which supposedly takes less than 30 seconds. Even more blatant in the anime, in which the monologuing takes a good nine minutes of screentime to deliver but still is portrayed to be confined to a less than 30 second timeframe. In one case, time even appears to stop while said infodumping takes place.
Taken to ridiculous extremes in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure. The lengthy situational analyses in the manga (often spoken out loud, often in the time it takes a bullet to travel less than a dozen feet) are egregious enough, but the anime managed to extend nine seconds (the canonical duration of Dio's time-freezing ability, as explicitly stated in both manga and anime) into nearly a minute of gloating.
- This is also evident in the PS2 game Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Whirlwhind. Here we see Bucciarati, who has no time-slowing powers, thinking really, really fast.
- The video example is because Bucciarati has just been hit with Giorno's power which normally is to give life to nonliving things. When it is used on someone living in causes an overflow of life meaning it really does speed up the brains thinking powers greatly. As a side note the reason it becomes Giorno's advantage is because the brain cannot handle the sudden speedup and causes the affected person in real life to not function correctly
Mobile Suit Gundam saga just loves doing this, especially during epic battles.
Spoofed/lampshaded in an issue of Keith Giffen's Justice League, where General Glory is falling from a height and spends several paragraphs describing the improbable maneuver he is performing as he performs it. It prompts one of the other characters to ponder how he can say so much so quickly.
This Silver-age comic.
The Doctor from Doctor Who often lapses into long mocking speeches that get his enemies stunned by his sheer audacity. Subverted in "The Idiot's Lantern", when he starts: "Hold on a minute! There are three important, brilliant, and complicated reasons why you should listen to me. One--" and is promptly KO'd with a punch to the face.
Similarly in Danny Phantom, in the midst of heated battle, foes often seem to just stop and let Danny finish his superheroic, corny jokes.
In The Simpsons, this occurs whenever the family is watching a Coincidental Broadcast: They all briefly stop to have a conversation regarding the report, spew pop culture reference jokes, bring up past adventures related to it, etc. then when they finally get back to watching, the report is exactly where they left off, almost as if the world stopped just for their conversation. Naturally, its been Lampshaded a few times.
Subverted in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures.
- And again. Owch.
Body Harvest actually says that when you get blurbs from the girl in your lander, your receiver injects a drug into you that speeds up your perception hundredsfold for a fraction of a second, gives you the transmission, and then dispenses another drug to bring you back down to normal speed.
The Spectacular Spider Man, though a very talky series by nature, has a notable subversion. When a net is launched at Spider-Man from behind, he takes the time to say "Woah! My Spider Sense is tingli--!" only to be caught in the net before he can finish. Afterwards, his sense is shown, but never announced again.
In many, many Fighting Games with "super" special attacks, when a character executes one the battle will freeze for a split-second while they give a battle cry.
Hunter X Hunter has fun with this trope. In one of the more recent chapters, one of the character thinks several paragraphs worth of stuff, then realizes that he's thought entirely too much in so short a timeframe. He then realizes that the reason this is happening is because one's perception of time slows greatly in the seconds before one is about to die. Zoom out to reveal the guy he's fighting, all set to beat the shit outta the first guy.
Excuse me, does anyone remember Metal Gear Solid 2?! The codec conversations, even if they are purely an act of thought on the part of Raiden, are pretty unbelievable. Particularly infamous is the three-minute argument over weapon naming conventions with the AI construct the Patriots built to rule the world that occurs during the final boss battle. And this is just after a twelve-minute long Infodump from the same guys, while Solidus Snake just stands there, waiting to deliver his shocking revelation. I Am Not Making This Up.
- Considering the fact that Solidus had established a well-known proclivity for every person that he faces knowing exactly what's going on...hmm. Actually, still pretty ridiculous.
- Used again in MGS 4 (naturally) when, during the final cutscene after the credits have already started to roll, Snake meets up with the supposedly deceased Big Boss, who isn't quite dead yet. About five or so minutes into the cutscene, Big Boss reveals that Snake has just infected him with a new variant of FOXDIE, which, it has been established, kills people in about five minutes or so as they suffer a fatal heart attack. Big Boss then explains everything, while suffering a heart attack, for about 20 or 30 minutes. Granted, he's super-tough, considering he's Big freaking Boss, but still...
In Darths And Droids the players have a long, complex discussion, while insisting their characters are holding their breath.
Mocked in Real Bout High School. After Ryoko effortlessly takes out a powerful hood, his friends get angry. The leader is calmed by his Dragon, who wishes to test his sword skills against hers. Well, that's the sentiment he was trying to express. He got as far as "She's good. I'll g-" before she smashed his face in with her wooden sword.
In Achaea, talking is one of the few actions that doesn't require balance (which is lost when most actions are used, and takes a few seconds to come back). Even emoting requires balance, which can result in the rather odd circumstance of the character apparently having the composure to recite entire paragraphs, but not being able to blink. Talking is also instant, although this effect is limited by the time the player spends typing it out.
Averted in Fullmetal Alchemist, where during a big fight scence, the Big Bad suddenly walks up to Anti-Hero/Anti-Villain Scar and politely asks him why he can still use his powers, with a bemused look on his face. Scar replies by immediately attacking him.
Happens all the time in Kinnikuman and Ultimate Muscle. One of the most blatant examples is the match between the newly-returned Ramenman and Motorman in the Throne arc. Although one of the shorter fights in the arc, it still goes on for a solid 9 or so minutes during the anime... even though they clearly state in the next episode that the fight only last 37 seconds.

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