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This caption seems to change every other week. But seriously, that's because the situation is so ridiculous. She does not get knocked over until next panel.
"It certainly seems like Spider-Man. He's jumping around and he won't stop talking."
"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
"When your martial arts skills are developed to the Chuck Norris level, you can spit out gigantic chunks of expository dialog in mere seconds without breaking a sweat."
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 exposit 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, Wall Of Text. Talk To The Fist is this trope's feared enemy, and Killed Mid Sentence is the biggest subversion/aversion. Contrast Distracting Disambiguation, where there is some amount of cooperation on the enemies' part that enables this. See also Exposition Beam, which bypasses this.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Abused in Transformers Super God Masterforce when Ranger is introduced — Ginrai is able to give him a tutorial on transformation while Ranger is falling from a cliff.
- Frequent in Naruto. The worst offender is Lee, who can kick his opponent into the air, jump after him and deliver a 30 seconds exposition before performing a finisher.
- Naruto is a rather bad offender of this as well. He'll somehow manage to spout of a speech while dodging/delivering attacks. When he finishes his speech, he'll usually use clones or Rasengan to finish off his opponent (or both).
- 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.
- To be fair, a good part of it happens while Light is thinking about all the plans he made over the past few months, which would take no in-universe time.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Averted 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.
- Happens all the time in Eyeshield 21. Football players and spectators can have entire conversations in the middle of plays that last five seconds.
- Poked fun at in manga Kotaro Makari Tooru, where in a martial arts tournament one of the contenders launches a mid air attack, whereupon the surprised announcer proceeds to exclaim his shock, admiration, expectations, exposition of the move, and prediction in the same panel. A little pop-up head in the corner of the panel quips, "How much time does he have to say this much anyway?"
- Averted often and brutally in Blame!, where most characters jump straight into the action without so much as a grunt.
- Subverted in the final episode Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, where Tsubaki's Pre-Ass Kicking
One Liner Speech is long enough for Sousuke to calmly find his bag, take out his gun, load it with rubber bullets, carefully aim for his head, and shoot him.
- To Aru Majutsu No Index. Probably a side effect of having been adapted from light novels, but that does nothing to excuse the fact that several minutes of conversation happen while a character is running across a room no more than twenty feet wide. To it's credit, this sort of thing becomes less common as it goes along, though.
- In Ichigo's second fight with Grimmjow in Bleach, his hollow mask stays active for around 11 seconds, but the fight lasts for five minutes in the anime. Even if you do assume that the characters are moving at superhuman speed and can take more actions in 11 seconds than most people can, the dialogue that both characters say would easily take longer than 11 seconds combined.
- Subversions are fairly common in Bleach- near the end of the Soul Society arc, the just-revealed Big Bad is attacked in the middle of the twenty-minute explanation of his Xanatos Roulette. Being a Bad Ass, he just shrugs it off, sends his attacker reeling, and goes on talking. In a later episode, D-Roy attacks Rukia in the middle of some exposition, and then again in the middle of her introductory speech. Given the result, maybe D-Roy should have just let her talk...
- D-Roy's case is rather odd, in that he interrupts Rukia by attacking (and this is commented upon), but only after letting her talk for nearly 5 minutes straight.
- Like the Bleach example above, in the climax of One Piece's Arabasta arc, the Straw Hats are able to call out to each other while executing an improvised plan over the course of less than a minute, which lasts three minues in the anime, and their dialogue also would have taken up the entire alloted time.
- Parasyte! uses this to highlight an increase in the main character's reaction time. We see a punch fly at his head, he pauses to muse on the source of his newfound strength for a couple of paragraphs, and then parries the attack without difficulty.
- Dragon Ball of course, where every villain has the urgent need to talk a lot. It usually is necessary to talk about evil plans or the like.
- Taken to insanity during Goku's fight with Freeza. Freeza destroys the core and gives the planet five minutes until implosion. Twenty episodes (approximately three hours of screentime for each of the scenes that are playing out simultaneously), and over three hundred lines of dialog for the two fighters later the planet finally collapses.
- Lampshaded snarkily in the dub. With ten episodes to go, Frieza has a line to the effect that the planet s "a tough one... it'll probably last another two minutes."
- Not exactly talking but, in [[Pokemon]] anime, flashing your Pokedex at an unknown pokemon causes all other activities to cease. Even if said pokemon is hellbent on the protagonist's destruction, it will politely wait until said protagonists know exactly what they're facing up against.
- Averted in a later chapter of Hayate the Combat Butler. During a Flashback chapter that explained the first meeting between Nagi and Tama (in the African jungle, by the way), Nagi had to save the then-baby Tama from a group of wild animals ready to pounce on and eat it... and also Nagi and Jenny, as well. Her resolution to protect Tama, complete with her saying as much, was interrupted by said animals closing the distance with them. Jenny even pointed out that they caught up while she was talking.
- Code Geass often abuses this, especially with pilots talking during supposedly-fast-paced Knightmare battles (taken to a ridiculous extreme with Urabe's sacrifice in R2 episode 2), and with Lelouch making his dramatic fauxlosophic speeches as his opponents just stand there pointing guns at him.
- Current state of the plot in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. They've been in the middle of the final battle with the Big Bad for a dozen chapters now, each of which seems to cover about two seconds and eight pages of exposition.
Comic Books
Film
- 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 free fall.
- Quentin Tarantino's speech in the final act of Four Rooms was to be one minute. He even has a buddy time it. It's actually one minute and twenty-eight seconds of talking.
- Averted brutally in The Dark Knight. Rachel's attempt at an inspiring consolatory speech is violently interrupted when she gets blown up.
- In Ferris Buellers Day Off, narrating is a free action for Ferris.
Literature
Live Action TV
- 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 of them is—" and is promptly KO'd with a punch to the face.
- 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.
- Double subverted in an episode of Mahou Sentai Magiranger, where an enemy monster attempts to fire on the heroic mecha as it's going through the motions invoking its final attack. We discover that the graphics superimposed over the motions actually function as an energy shield, and divert the attack.
- Subverted in the first Power Rangers movie, where the Rangers finish morphing only to discover their opponents have vanished, and then have to track them back down.
- And again in Power Rangers Dino Thunder, when the Red Ranger is attacked by the MOTW while he's doing all the action poses that normally accompany transformation.
- In Charmed whenever using the Power of Three the demons always remain motionless or nearly so, awaiting their destruction for no obvious reason, during sometimes-long rhymes.
- Averted when they first defeated The Source, where the destruction chant was so ridiculously long that they did have to find a way to bind it while they spoke.
Tabletop Games
- The trope name comes from Dungeons And Dragons, in which most talking requires neither time nor effort, so requests to "stop talking and get fighting" weren't necessary...in the game world. In the real world...
- 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&D's rules. See this strip. On the other hand, it has itself been guilty of this.
- Averted once, when Vaarsuvius being "particularly verbose" in discussing a dragon actually caused the time they had before the dragon attacked to go from two rounds to one, while in that time learning the spell necessary to defeat it.
- 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.
- Made particularly ridiculous when, because all stats are randomized, you have a character whose average talking speed is faster than their maximum talking speed. Yes, those are both stats.
- Mutants and Masterminds has a mechanic called "Monologuing" in which you trick the villain into talking on and on for several rounds, thereby giving your characters a chance to escape. Beyond using this trick however, the villain can monologue as much as he wants as talking is a free action, and Monologuing is a full round action.
Video Games
- 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.
- 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 MGS4 (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...
- Don't forget the original Metal Gear Solid (or MGS as a whole), wherein several codec conversations are allowed to take place right in the middle of combat. Mostly forgivable, except for when Snake is fighting Psycho Mantis, The codec call being made to tell Snake to use controller slot 2 takes well beyond enough time for Psycho Mantis to slaughter Snake mercilessly...though this IS fourth-wall breaking anyway, so...
- Subverted in SSB Brawl, where Snake's codec transmissions on Shadow Moses Island have absolutely no effect on the fight...quite the opposite, in fact: If he's killed mid-convo, the character on the other line notices immediately. "SNAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!!"
- 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.
- But overall, let' just say that the MGS series has an implicit MST 3 K mantra.
- 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... but this eats a turn, at least in some of the games.
- In No More Heroes, in the rank 10 fight against Death Metal, Travis begins to monologue on what it would be like to live in his opponent's mansion, talking about what his servants would do and how he would spend his days in leasure. Clearly for Travis, swinging a Beam Katana around for close to five minutes straight doesn't even make him breathe that hard.
- 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. Sometimes the characters will chat before they attack, and then they get the "combat chatter" on top of that.
- Using the actual Talk command, however, uses that units' turn.
- And in the case of important dialogue, the villain really is stopping to chat with the protagonist. Throwaway chatter is along the lines of "Villain X! What you've done can't be forgiven! Let's go!", and as for attack animations... it wouldn't be Super Robot without liberal Calling Your Attacks and Invocation.
- 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.
- 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" available, including "Talk" — which use up a turn.
- But you DO get a nice battle-specific stat boost when you use the "TALK" commands, so it's usually worth it.
- 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 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 monologuing
- It's also subverted by the prinnies at the beginning of Disgaea 2, where they're A-OK with scoring a cheap critical hit while Rozalin is busy with an Internal Monologue
- 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.
- This clearly takes place outside normal time, as the scenes are invariably set in the white "memory-space". Just how they figure to what actually happened is never explained, though.
- 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.
- 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.
- In Call Of Juarez, characters you've just duelled with get last words, despite having just been shot in the head at extremely short range.
- Gawn, from Wild ARMs 4, having already defied physics to shoot down 11 missiles in mid-air and punching the last one with his bare hands, decides to twist up the flow of time too. In the one second or less it takes for the last missile that he had just punched to explode, Gawn manages to give the protagonists an entire speech on reaching for the future. Of course, everyone else has to move in slow motion while it happens. You don't believe me, do you? There is proof.
- Spoofed in Days Of Ruin, despite the rapidly dropping altitude of the plane the scene is set on no one except an unnamed IDS agent (who is panicking at her oncoming doom, and even asks if anyone else cares) cares, every other character is casually talking to the Big Bads Tyke Bomb convincing her to Heel Face Turn and allow them to make it out alive
- Played straight in the separately translated EU version Dark Conflict, where the IDS agent does nothing but read the altitude.
- The Tales Series of RPGs loves this; typically there will be cutscene exposition before a plot-important fight and then the characters will banter during it, apparently not even needing to breathe.
- Tales Of Vesperia takes a jab at this trope when Yuri and Flynn work together to defend a village of refugees from monsters. Yuri can't concentrate if he isn't talking and Flynn can't concentrate when someone is talking.
- In Dragon Quest VII, you can talk to your party members before each round of combat by just choosing 'Talk' instead of picking everyone's next actions. However, if you try talking three times, the enemy stops waiting and gets a free round of hits. (Surprisingly, Maribel does not chew you out if you choose to start the next round by 'Talk'ing again...)
- In Fallout 3, if you manage to Mezmerize an enemy during combat, you can run right up and talk to them, rifle their pockets, take their weapons, and slap a slave collar on, all while their allies patiently wait for your conversation to end.
- All The Elder Scrolls games will pause indefinitely whenever the Player Character enters dialogue, even in combat (though to be fair, very few non-scripted NP Cs will engage in dialog while fighting). This leads to such oddities as a soldier filling you in on the next stage of an attack plan while a fireball sent from the walls is patiently hovering mid-air not far from his head.
- Diablo II: In the cinematic between Act II and Act III, Tyrael somehow finds the time to deliver a ten-second monologue to Marius while ostensibly in battle with two Prime Evils.
Webcomics
Web Original
Western Animation
- In Danny Phantom, in the midst of heated battle, foes often seem to just stop and let Danny finish his superheroic, corny jokes.
- A subversion of this appears as well. Danny apparently has no qualms about attacking Technus during his usual lengthy monologues.
- 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.
- 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.
- The all-time winner of this trope is the So Bad Its Good Marvel Superheroes cartoon from 1966. These barely-animated six-minute gems were often directly adapted from '60s Marvel Comics scripts — in their full-blown long-winded Stan Lee glory. It often included such moments as Captain America giving an inspiring speech as he leaps across the screen — with the leap dragged out to fill the full length of the speech. Watch a few of these, and you'll see just how damned silly this trope can get in a medium where time actually, you know, happens.
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