Inaction Sequence - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Not So Fast

"Over the next several years, the talk will increase and the animation will slowly decrease, desensitizing the audience until the ultimate goal is achieved... Viewers will watch a program consisting only of a still frame of Lou Ferrigno, while a voice-over reads the dictionary. It will be mankind's most successful television program ever."

— Kid Radd

"For you card drawing fans, this duel is on fire. For you action fans, well, we are still selling hotdogs."

— Dante, XC Forums

A fair bit of anime is adapted from manga, its print cousin. There are good things and bad about this.

The trouble is that the narrative style of manga derives from literature, where the amount of space you spend on something is proportional to how important it is, while the narrative style of Anime, like all of television, derives (even after all the tricks of time compression and such are considered) from how long things actually take.

So you start out with, say, a 30 page comic book, and you want to turn it into a 30 minute show. This can be a problem if there's a fight scene: a comic book might devote an entire issue to a single fight, which only takes up about five minutes on-screen. And translating a monthly publication to a weekly series makes matters even worse. And it's a dangerous gamble when shows get ahead of the source material.

In addition, the Anime industry works on budgets that would make American producers cringe, and are expected to turn popular manga into long running series, and one of the biggest costs comes from animating dynamic action sequences.

As a result, characters in anime derived from manga tend to talk a lot.

A whole lot.

At totally inappropriate times.

Often, you'll have heroes spend entire episodes taunting each other mid-battle, explaining their last move in excruciating detail, calling their attacks, building up their Battle Aura, gathering their composure for the next attack, adopting a silly pose, reflecting on all the things they stand to lose if they don't win this one, or just being randomly philosophical.

This is a very distinctive anime variety of Padding. See also Overtook The Manga, Sounding It Out, Talking Is A Free Action. Talk To The Fist is when someone whacks or shoots a character in the middle of delivering one of these speeches. See Crocker Tea Break for a break in the action for the sake of comedy, rather than stalling.

Examples

Anime

The all-time king of this sort of time-filler is Dragonball (or in some circles "drag on ball"), where a single fight scene can last upwards of five episodes before the first punch is thrown. To their credit, they did sometimes engage in Lampshade Hanging, such as when Goku tries to emulate the silly pose of his opponent, and points out that it looks cool, but offers no tactical advantage. As the joke goes: "How many Dragonball Z characters does it take to change a light bulb? One, but it takes him six episodes to do it."
- DBZ's spending large amounts of time talking about doing things before actually doing them was lampshaded by Super Buu of all people, who gets increasingly pissed that everyone is just sitting around talking and waiting when he wants to fight.
  "ALL YOU PEOPLE DO IS TAAAAAAAAAAALK!" (goes into a homicidal rage)
- Much less egregious in the remake, Dragonball Kai, though it still has its share of monologues. Considering that the series is a quarter-done and is already thirty episodes ahead of where Dragonball Z was at the same point, the amount of pointless chattering removed is truly amazing.
This trope describes half or more of the screen time of Bleach, in which Ichigo and his friends invade the Soul Reaper citadel in agonizingly slow motion. One on one duels with the Soul Reaper officers often take up most of two and three episodes to complete, most of the time occupied in taunts, threats, warnings, and detailed explanations of each character's strengths and invincible spiritual powers.
- Not to mention cutting to a flashback just before the climax of the fight, in order to explain the bad guy's entire life story. Although, those flashbacks happened in the manga as well, just with slightly less detail.
A slightly more mainstream offender is Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is a show about a card game. Most duels of any importance are stretched out to three or four episodes, because every single turn involves at least one player shouting "Not so fast!" and revealing an unexpected countermeasure, prompting several minutes worth of explanation as to how the countermeasure works. It seems that skill in this game is dependent on the fact that no player, however skilled, has any idea how any of the cards work except for their own. The phrase "You see, my card has another special ability..." is uttered at least twice in nearly every episode. With almost equal frequency, a character will place the duel on hold in order to tell their entire life story to their opponent. Blofeld would have been proud.
- Incidentally, the average two-episode duel lasts for about six rounds, and no more than ten. This would take all of about five minutes to play in real life, without the endless exposition.
- Oddly, this is averted in most backup or filler duels where not only do the duels take place at a rather fast pace, but they also end up actually being marginally more epic due to the pacing of the duel. An example is the duel where Rebecca is pit against the Chinese duelist. She uses a classic hurt and heal strategy that maintained a very consistent beat that puts the other duels in the series to shame. And she did it all in one episode.
- This is given a Lampshade Hanging in The Movie which was told its entire story in 80 minutes, shorter then most large duels. When Yugi plays a very common card and explains its effect, Kaiba yells at him to shut up, insulted that Yugi thinks he needs it explained it to him.
- Its Oddly Named Sequel Yu-Gi-Oh GX started as an anime, so it isn't as bad about this; most duels on that show only last about half an episode. In an ironic turn-around, both players will start out with only a fraction of the standard Hit Points as in a real-life game (except when playing a triangle or tag duel), in order for the duels to not take up so much time. (Nevertheless, Edo/Aster is apparently aware of this trope in the dub: "Is he gonna duel or stand there and ponder his purpose in life?")
Naruto, as you might expect from the vast differences in the speed of the production of the anime and manga, uses this often. Frequently during a fight (especially the Chunin Exam arc), after someone uses a special technique of any kind, another character will spend the next 10-20 seconds explaining it before the attack is even done. The Land of the Waves arc, in all seriousness, flashed back to something that had happened literally five minutes ago.
- It gets particularly bad with the first one or two story arcs of Shippuden where they went from covering about 1.5 chapters per episode, to about 1 chapter per episode, necessitating multiple stretches without even any dialogue. Luckily, when they actually started to pad it out with a lengthy filler arc, they came back to more regular levels (or at least adding new scenes instead of nothing).
The anime Gantz gets ludicrous with this trope later on. One might suspect the protagonist body count to have been significantly less had they just shut up and shot the bloody aliens more.
- The Abridged Series parodied this when Kato and another character start a long winded philosophy discussion rather than saving Nishi. Who is beaten to death.
- The talking instead of fighting is ludicrous from the get-go and only gets worse. The first few battles probably would've been over in seconds if someone was willing to just shoot instead of angsting over taking the life of something that just tore a teammate limb from limb. One would think they would get used to it later, but no such luck. The sad and ironic part is that the above-mentioned scene in the Abridged series isn't that far off from what actually happened in the real anime...
Death Note is, for the most part, people thinking very, very hard. The anime is faithful to this, making it one of the talkiest anime ever. The "solution" was to make it also the most incredibly-overblown anime ever.
Katekyo Hitman Reborn! does this fairly frequently, to the extent of making the battle for the sky ring — which is supposedly a bit over half an hour — take up eight episodes.
Gao Gai Gar does this on occasion, with the action stopping for a short time while the narrator described what was going on, such as describing the effects of somebody's new attack, though the inaction is never long enough that it keeps the Monster of the Week from being flattened this episode.
The One Piece anime usually avoids this, generally preferring to add more scenes instead of dragging out the existing one. However, there is one glaringly ridiculous instance of this trope: during the fight against Enel, Luffy has a brief flashback of something that happened less than ten seconds before. The purpose of the flashback is explained a minute later by Nami anyway.
- The worst example of this in the One Piece anime was episode 377, which covered a single chapter that had no extended action sequences or was particularly dialogue heavy. The first full ten minutes were a recap of the previous episode and the rest of the episode was full of pans and zooms. However, the events being covered were very dramatic, and the artwork was movie-quality, so it's a bit more forgivable.
The matches between big-name teams in Slam Dunk suffer from this too. Not only in the anime, where a single 40-minute match takes up around five 24-minute episodes (in average, being generous) to have a result, but also in the manga, in which they take mostly three whole volumes from start to finish. While other things that usually would take much longer (such as Sakuragi spending one whole week improving on his shooting) are said and done in a single issue.
Ninin Ga Shinobuden parodies this, with Onsokumaru into a long series of flashbacks from the previous week of his life... to explain something that occurred five minutes earlier. All of the ninja wonder why he wasted their time.
Transformers Armada manages to have inaction sequences all over the place, and not just where actual action is taking place - there are often long pauses between dialogue for no apparent reason.
The final episode of The Sacred Blacksmith has the black-cloaked man wait for a minute while Cecilly gives Luke a motivational speech, and then another two minutes while Luke and Lisa use magic to forge a sword to fight him. It's not as drastic as most other examples here, except that neither Luke nor Cecilly had a weapon at that point, and he seemed to have no compunction against killing them while they were unarmed.

Film

Even though it predated all of these examples, the scene in Monty Python And The Holy Grail where Lancelot charges Swamp Castle provides a perfect, if accidental, parody.
- Funny in that the viewer fully expects the gag to last even longer than it already had, and when Lancelot finally does reach the gate, the camera angle shows him very suddenly and abruptly assaulting the guards, killing one of them, and then entering the castle. Inaction Sequence, meet Superaction Sequence!
In Star Trek II, when Khan gives Kirk 60 seconds to hand over the data on the Genesis Device, it is the longest 60 seconds in the history of film, while the good guys explain to each other in great detail how they're going to trick Khan. In fairness, since Kirk does actively stall him, and Khan really wants that data, it could be argued that Khan did grant them more than the one minute he said he would.
- Except for what he says when he appears to be looking at a watch, implying he really was timing it (not that it matters because of what's coming):
  Khan: Time's up!
  Kirk: Here it comes...
- And then there's Star Trek The Motion Picture. Leave The Camera Running scenes comprise about half of it. It may be the only serious competitor against Dragonball Z in terms of "how much time is spent watching absolutely nothing happen?"
In The Fast And The Furious, near the beginning, there is quite possibly the longest quarter-mile race in the world.

Literature

In The Iliad, Glaucus and Diomedes, two enemy soldiers in the middle of a full-scale battle, stop to chat about their respective heritages. That's right, folks: this is Older Than Dirt.

Live Action TV

After the first three or so, your average episode of Stargate Universe would be about half as long, if even that, if not for conversations we've heard before being rehashed.

Video Games

Several CODEC sequences in the Metal Gear Solid series. The most absurd is the final CODEC call in Metal Gear Solid 2 where your fake CO and fake girlfriend spend 5 minutes lecturing you on meme theory while the final boss stands 10 feet away with his sword ready.
- Not to mention all the sequences of Raiden meeting someone face-to-face, only to have them say "Wait, let's use our Codec instead".
- They do it in Codec because Time Stands Still when you're on the Codec screen. Maybe you've forgotten that they're injecting Postmodernism through where the fourth wall was supposed to be?
One peculiar example of this is in Deus Ex, where the game continues on exactly like normal in the background while there's a cutscene going on or you're chatting with someone… Except that nobody can attack anyone else. This means that if you happen to start a conversation where potential hostiles are on patrol (or, even funnier, while evading hot pursuit) then enemies will draw their weapons, run up right next to you, and silently stand around waiting until the conversation is over to open fire.
This also happens in Oblivion and Fallout 3. You can engage some enemies, and then talk to an NPC and time essentially pauses, until you leave the conversation.