Sano: And my new special attack Magnetic Screw Choqa Zanbil didn't work at all.
Teammate: Yes, it was an amazing attack.
Subtitles: ((Please imagine the attack for yourselves))
Something big is about to go down. Everyone knows it. The
Big Bad is about to get schooled by the
Old Master. A horde of mooks are about to be mowed down in an awesome fashion. Whatever it is, this will no doubt be one of the most awesome moments you will ever see.
Except you won't.
All you'll get (if you're lucky) is the characters talking about how awesome the scene was to behold.
Just like
the expectation of something scary is more frightening than the actual scare, so is the expectation of an awesome scene. Except you never see the awesome scene, and are forced to imagine how it went down.
Compare
Anticlimax. Not to be confused with
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, where the awesome thing in question never actually happened at all.
Examples are sorted in the following sub-pages:
This trope used to be called "Missed Moment of Awesome". If you
want to find a trope for a time when a character's Awesome Moment fails to reach its expected level of epicness, try
Negated Moment of Awesome. Stories or events that don't turn out as cool as you expected might belong in either
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot (a YMMV trope) or
What Could Have Been (a Trivia trope).
Examples:
Webcomics
Web Original
- Whateley Universe: in the combat finals for the end of fall 2006 term at Whateley Academy, the authors have showed us over a dozen combat finals ranging from awesome to hysterical to embarrassing. But every character keeps talking about Chaka's unbelievably awesome combat final against three superpowered opponents, in a disaster scenario with a tornado and earthquakes. It wasn't shown, and Word Of God says it never will be.
- The Cinema Snob's main complaint about Super Hornio Brothers.
- The Homestar Runner cartoon "Welcome Back" had Strong Bad talking about checking an e-mail mid-air. Unfortunately, he pulled the "mash stop when you think you're mashing record and mash record when you think you're mashing stop" routine, so all we get is footage of Strong Bad in an airplane talking about how excited he is, and then footage of Strong Bad talking about how incredible the whole thing was, mentioning that they met various celebrities and apparently encountered a narwal.
- Of course, this being Strong Bad, he might have exaggerated it.
- The final episode of Red vs. Blue Season 9 has Caboose recounting their daring rescue operation. None of it is shown due to the perspective of the narrator.
Sports
- The year is 1968. The New York Jets are beating the Oakland Raiders 32 to 29 with 65 seconds left in a critical late-season game. Fans across the country are on the edge of their seats. And NBC cuts the game off to start showing Heidi, a children's movie. And then Oakland scores two touchdowns in the time left, beating the Jets 43 to 32. Executives tried to preempt this, but they couldn't reach operations. No one on the East coast got to see Oakland's comeback. People were rather put out. This has been ranked as the fifth worst television blunder of all time and it will never happen again.
- In 2007, Bitter rivals Buffalo and Ottawa were meeting in the NHL playoffs. The game, went into overtime as both goalies were red hot that day. But oops! the game was on NBC, which still hadn't learned its lesson. Overtime was shunted to Versus, an upstart cable channel which few providers carried, in favor of an hour of pre-race coverage of The Preakness Stakes.
- 2010, July, a hot summer afternoon. England's first match in the World Cup. Expectations are high. All around the country fans gather in pubs, homes and at parties. Three minutes of tense action goes by. The crowd are on the edge of their seats, England has the ball and are soaring upfield as if unopposed. Sky TV cuts out. Two minutes later it cuts back in to the action. The score? 1-0.
Real Life
- During the Evo 2010 Super Street Fighter IV grand final match, the online stream, being watched by over 27,000 people at the time, went out. During the final moments of the match.
