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Anthropologists posit that one of the turning points in human development was a growing ability to communicate. In fiction, one of the turning points in dramatic development was the ability not to communicate.
Sometimes the author wants the plot to go a certain direction, but for it to do so one or more characters have to misunderstand each other. Common enough in Real Life, so it should be no trouble to pull off in fiction, right? Well, there's a few problems... the misunderstanding is pretty easy to clear up, and the characters are pretty good speakers who are on good terms and speak frankly to each other without needlessly holding back.
So what's the author to do? They have the coolest plot twist or Climax Boss fight, but it absolutely hinges on these guys being, however briefly, unable to articulate their point.
To solve this problem the author gives the characters Poor Communication Kills, reducing their verbal skills to those of three-year-olds. Shy three-year-olds, with a stutter.
All the characters involved essentially get Character Derailment so that they can't tell their side of the story, or creates a false urgency because there's " No Time To Explain", or just plain making them act like a disgruntled loner and telling their friends to Figure It Out Yourself when cooperation (or at least non-interference) is infinitely preferable. No matter which reason, it seems that at least half of the people involved have simultaneously gotten hold of the Idiot Ball, if not everyone.
Or to cut through all the pretentious Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness above: Poor Communication Kills is when a misunderstanding is entirely implausible and against the characters' previously exhibited communication skills, personality and relationship, and any normal person could clear up the misunderstanding in less than 30 seconds and solve the plot.
Though similar, this trope does not include things like Selective Obliviousness, Youre Just Jealous, or Sarcastic Confession as those are failures to listen rather than speak; though honestly authors can nerf even that ability when they need the Reasonable Authority Figure to become a useless adult.
Compare Right Hand Versus Left Hand.
Contrast: Just Eat Gilligan, Amnesia Danger.
Common ways to NOT get the point across:
Examples:
- In Heroes episodes 2.09 and 2.10; Mohinder utterly failed to tell Overprotective Dad Noah that he didn't need Claire, just a pint of blood to save a life and stop a plague rather than kidnap her. Instead he made it seem like he had done a Face Heel Turn and was going after this Overprotective Dad's daughter and bringing about the season's Tear Jerker episode.
- Peter and Hiro ended up in a fight because neither was all too keen on examining why each was doing what they're doing by defending and attacking Adam respectively. And these are people who can stop time! Hiro and Peter could have had talked it out while sipping tea in Tokyo and come back with the whole thing handily resolved, were it not for "With great power goes all intelligence".
- The Writer's Strike is probably the reason they had to speed through that. If the season was allowed to take its natural course they might have done all that (well, maybe not the sipping tea in Tokyo part).
- The Fullmetal Alchemist manga completely averts this, even lampshading it at one point ("we should pool our information"). Despite fighting a massive government conspiracy that includes most of the upper government and a shapeshifting spy, the many characters are able to intelligently keep each other in the know the vast majority of the time, and do so carefully enough to not get caught or break suspension of disbelief. Their extreme competence reaches a crowning moment of awesome in issue 83 when a critical piece of information is relayed across the world and past many of the secondary characters, giving them 6 months for their Chessmasters to get to work on making some Xanatos Gambits.
- In Gakuen Tengoku, Oshino's inability to articulate the fact that he's a new teacher got him his ass beat.
- Jeff in Coupling's entire personality comes from this trope.
- In this
 Order Of The Stick strip, Thog is questioned by a prison guard, and gives an honest and accurate account that confirms Elan's attempt to explain that he was framed by his Evil Twin brother Nale. However, Thog's statement is chock-full of homophones (and far more elaborate than his usual speech), rendering it comprehensible (with a bit of effort) to the reader but total gibberish to the guard.
- Elan's aforementioned attempt to explain just digs him into deeper trouble, but that isn't an example of this trope — for him, it's perfectly in character to go off on ill-considered tangents.
- Fans (and detractors) of Lost have commented on the characters' apparent inability to ask the right questions. In particular, they've had Juliet among them since her Heel Face Turn, but have not asked her any questions about the intentions or nature of the Others. This tendency was lampshaded in the season 4 episode "Cabin Fever," as Christian says to Locke, "So why don't you ask the one question that does matter?"
- Dracula, where the excessively gentlemanly heroes deliberately choose not to tell Mina Harker about their vampire hunt so as not to distress her, thus making her the perfect target. Ironically, once the damage is done and they must let her in on it, she copes rather better than her husband did.
- Everything bad that ever happened to Bertie Wooster.
- As the Kangaroo Court episode shows, Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender does not have a future as a defense attorney. More specifically, he was put on trial for "crimes" his past life had committed, and when his friends Katara and Sokka coach him with various innocence proving facts, he sort of... spazzes out.
- About half of everything bad that happens in Tales of Symphonia or Tales of the Abyss could be averted if not for the characters' almost pathological inability to communicate their intentions/information to one another. Made especially egregious by the fact that in most cases the characters go out of their way to overexplain things.
- Every....single...protagonist in Robert Jordan's The Wheel Of Time series appears to suffer from this. Seriously.
- Luckily, the antagonists have the exact same problem, and while the protagonists have a long-term scheme and may be able to at least put aside their differences, the antagonists are busy squabbling over who gets to be The Dragon.
- Unluckily, the Big Bad can (and does) give concrete orders that will be carried out. The side of good has... about 50 chronic arguments? At least?
- In Neverwinter Nights 2, Shadra Jerro wouldn't had had to die if she could have gotten her Grandfather line out before her grandfather Amnon Jerro blasted her for releasing the demons and devils that gave him his extra powers (and minor demon army).
- Also, a lot of people wouldn't have had to die if Ammon Jerro had just returned to Neverwinter and tried convincing people that the King of Shadows was becoming a threat again. It is not entirely unlikely they would have taken him seriously - since he originally died fighting him. Instead he launches his own search for the Shards to remake the Silver Sword of Gith, and on his way settles a few old scores - leaving quite a few dead bodies - many of whom were on the PC's side.
- Furthermore, while trying to get Neverwinter's support is a questionable idea, simply stopping to talk to the hero one of the many times they crossed paths would've prevented a LOT of unnecessary bloodshed. To make it worse, when they do finally team up, Ammon keeps blaming the hero for everything that's happened. It takes influence and the right words in an optional scene to finally get him to admit to some guilt over his deeds.
- The climax of the Firefly episode "The Message" has the intrepid crew under siege and almost certainly about to die at the hands of an overzealous cop hunting down Mal and Zoey's friend, Tracey. Shepherd Book hatches a plan: the first part is surrendering to the cop and telling him they're going to turn Tracey over to him. Tracey, upon hearing this, becomes understandably upset, but it's not until after he's flipped out for several seconds, threatened the crew with a gun, held Kaylee hostage, and finally been mortally wounded by Mal that they inform him that the rest of the plan was to threaten and blackmail the cop into leaving without actually giving him what he came for. Tracey, rather than angrily demanding why they didn't tell him that in the first place, feels bad for screwing up the plan before dying moments later. Although, to be fair, Tracey didn't really give them a chance to explain before becoming violent.
- Also mitigated in that Mal and Zoe were Tracey's superior officers in the military, accustomed to giving orders to him without a need for explanation. Given Mal's attitude about his Nakama, he may also have thought it obvious that Tracey would understand their plan, or at least their loyalty.
- Partially into the second third of Final Fantasy V, the party passes through a town of werewolves led by Kelgar, a wolf who once fought Exdeath alongside Galuf. As Galuf explains that the other three party members came from the "other half" of the world, Kelgar jumps to the conclusion that they work for Exdeath and were responsible for his release. Without giving Galuf a chance to deny this (never mind that he was the one who introduced them in the first place), he challenges main character Bartz to a fight to the death, which ends with the wolf bedridden for the rest of his life. Any possible explanation of how he reached his conclusion would be appreciated, especially considering that the two halves have never been at war at any point, and that the player is meant to acknowledge that Kelgar is a hero.
- There is a (false) urban legend about Napoleon standing over a mass of prisoners. His men asked what to do, and Napoleon coughed, said something about it, and all the prisoners were killed. Apparently, the words "Ma sacrée toux!" (My damned cough!) sound a lot like "Massacrez tout!" (Kill them all!) Oops.
- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni takes a very... er... literal angle on this due to the fact that most arcs are One Side Of The Story, and that the series in general contains proliferations of Cryptic Conversations and characters who Can Not Spit It Out. In fact, the latter point becomes a major Aesop of the series.
- Near the end of the second season of Justice League Unlimited, the Watchtower's energy cannon is hacked into and used to blow up the headquarters of the Government Conspiracy, also destroying a good portion of a small town, for the sake of making the League look bad. The League goes out to help the survivors, and a man asks The Flash why they're helping when they shot at them in the first place. Instead of saying "Our satellite was hijacked by an enemy," Flash stutters out, "We didn't... I..."
- Shakespeare seemed to be fond of this trope. The most famous example is probably Romeo And Juliet, where Juliet fakes her own death, causing Romeo to kill Paris and commit suicide. Upon discovering this, Juliet also kills herself.
- In the newspaper comic, 9 Chickweed Lane, Official Couple Amos and Edda have broken up mostly because she wouldn't tell him what was upsetting her (his dreamy ramblings about the concert violinist they'd watched) and it never occurs to him A) to ask what was wrong or B) the answer might be him.
- In Girl Genius, much bloodshed could be avoided if certain main characters (most notably Agatha Heterodyne and Baron Klaus Wulfenbach and his son Gilgamesh) simply sat down and talked to each other. Instead, distrust and misunderstandings lead to characters fighting each other and working at cross-purposes when they could be allies, while the real enemy gets away. Happened especially during the Sturmhalten story arc. Tarvek deliberately sabotaging Agatha's holographic message to the Baron about Lucrezia being the Other and having taken over her body didn't help either. Instead, the edited message made it sounds like she was accusing the Baron of being the Other. And Dimo apparently forgot his previous conviction that the Baron should be informed ASAP about the Geisterdamen with the Hive Engines leaving Sturmhalten through underground tunnels. Various characters have pieces of the puzzle, but crucial information is not relayed. If only they shared this information, they could easily resolve their problems.
- Objection- if only they shared this information, Baron Wulfenbach would dissect Agatha, seeing as how she's possessed by the Other and all that's holding her back is a single flimsy amulet. As Gilgamesh said, let's be fair: He does have cause.
- On top of that, every last one of them is either a Mad Scientist or a creation thereof, both classifications of individual not normally known for their ability to think on a level we usually call "normal", let alone communicate on it.
- The root of it is probably that the Big Bad is very good at sowing deception and hostility within groups. Something, probably the Big Bad, causing Barry to mistrust the Baron, resulting in the problems caused in the earlier chapters, while the problems caused in later chapters were most definitely due to the Big Bad's moles and hidden supporters along with seceretly mind controlling first Agatha and now the Baron
- A literal example in Survival Of The Fittest Simon Wood mistakes Darnell Butler for a player of the game (not altogether unreasonable, as he is holding a bloodied sword) and attacks, obstentatiously to buy his girlfriend time to escape. Before Darnell can get the chance to explain, he has accidentally killed Simon.
- Gilbert And Sullivan were also fond of this trope, but the they actually hang a lampshade on it in the Act I finale of The Mikado, when Katisha tries to tell the people of Titipu that Nanki Poo is the son of the Lord High Executioner, only to have the chorus interrupt her every time she opens her mouth.
- A real life example of this trope occurred during the Crimean War, during the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalized in the famous Tennyson poem. Poor communication, mutual jealousy and just plain incompetence among the British commanders led to the slaughter of hundreds of brave soldiers, sadly enough. Incidents like this led critics to later describe the Crimea as a "war of lions, led by donkeys."
- In The Ruins, poor communication literally kills, as the Mayan-speaking locals are unable to effectively warn the main characters away from the titular ruins. Why they don't speak Spanish is not explained.
- One Detective Conan case had an injured American tourist recuperating in a Japanese household and falling in love with a young woman. Because of a mouth injury, at first he could only communicate by writing out Japanese phrases phonetically. As he was leaving, the young woman asked if he loved her, and he wrote down the word "shine"... which happens to be Japanese for "die". The woman committed suicide after he left, and when he came back he ended up murdering most of the family in revenge. What An Idiot.
- Truth In Television - The anime industry in the US and UK. Unless it partains to them being awesome, most companies will say absolutely nothing in regards to thier shows and often any issue that happens will hit fans square in the chops where there was a perfectly decent about of time for someone, say, ADV to say that they had lost the rights to something.
- This was also one of the contributing factors to the end of Anime Central (the UK TV Channel).
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