Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
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. The other common variation involves a newspaper reporter sent to cover events.
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.
Specific variants:
See also: Mr Exposition, The Watson, Expospeak, Captain Obvious.
open/close all folders
Examples
Anime and 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!)
- 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 first season, Sailor Moon was fond of reminding us at the beginning of every episode that she uses her weird brooch to transform and fight evil, and that scared her, but it'll all turn out right in the end, hehe!
- 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.
Comics
Fan Works
Films
- 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.
Literature
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- J Michael Straczynski tended to write dialog like this frequently throughout the series ("Supplies have been hard to come by since we declared independence from Earth...") because for some reason he preferred As You Know speeches to Previously On narration. Deep Space Nine, on the other hand, was able to use Previously On fairly effectively.
- 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.
- 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.
- Which gave him the epiphany he needed to solve the case and cure her.
- House also frequently has characters explain even simple medical terms to other doctors so the watchers understand what the hell they're talking about, regardless of how out-of-character it would be for doctors not to know the terms.
- To be fair, House also repeatedly mocks his underlings for it. Also, he needs the exchange to function, as visible when he's deprived of a team.
- Played with in an episode where the team is being filmed. Chase begins to do this but the other characters call him out on it.
- Doctors sure better explain to patients just what in the name of Sam Hill is going on inside of them.
- 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.
- Nobody's mentioned CSI yet? The detectives are always explaining rudimentary forensics to one another.
- 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.
Theatre
- 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.
- 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 Kot OR 1 spends a few minutes telling you things your character would obviously know. 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.
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
Western Animation
|
|
