The Producer Thinks of Everything

"I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up."

— George R. R. Martin

This trope concerns where the production team has clearly Shown Their Work in regards to the entire show, but more so than just that.

If your TV show has plenty of Chekhov's Gun, Chekhov's Gunman, Chekhov's Armory, a Batman Gambit or two, Arc Words, Myth Arcs, and the Early-Bird Cameo, chances are your show is in the hands of a production team that goes above and beyond the call of duty to create a truly memorable and deeply detailed experience. Not to be confused with an actual plan or the Myth Arc itself. Other signs of the producers foreseeing everything would include introducing plot points far before they become important, possible sneak peeks of characters in the Pilot Episode, and a generally close attention to detail that you wouldn't find on just any show. This is about not only careful planning but also anticipating and routing around troubles such as Real Life Writes the Plot and Executive Meddling.

Producers and the creative talent behind the show are the key here. This trope does NOT concern the in-universe or in-story examples of characters planning things out to a ridiculous degree.

Often overlaps with Doing It for the Art. Compare Developer's Foresight for when a creator of interactive media puts in creative edge cases for obscure scenarios, and contrast Truth in Television Indy Ploys and Writing by the Seat of Your Pants for when they have almost no idea where things may lead to, leading to The Chris Carter Effect.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In the 2003 Astro Boy anime, since the main character has always had different names in Japanese and English, the first episode has him derive his name from a nearby sign that helpfully includes both "Atom" (his Japanese name) and "Astro" (his English name).
• Hiromu Arakawa leaves no plot thread hanging and no character wasted in Fullmetal Alchemist. Here are some examples of the details she puts into the work.
  • The "transmutation marks" that appear when performing alchemy aren't there just for show; several alchemists are able to notice these markings and deduce what's been hidden.
  • Fu uses an assortment of explosive weaponry as part of his arsenal, and they noticeably explode with in colorful clouds. His flash bombs come in handy when fighting Pride, and when he makes his entrance on the Promised Day, the colorful clouds serve as Five-Second Foreshadowing for his entrance.
  • The transmutation and damage done to the statue of Leto in Liore in the beginning? Still unchanged when Hohenheim and Al revisit the location later in episode 42.
  • Yoki is the bona fide Butt-Monkey of the series, but the time he spent as the chief of a mining town comes in handy when Ed and co. have to travel through mining tunnels during a freezing storm.
  • Equivalent Exchange is never broken, and characters will explain when an action they're doing isn't violating the law. It's not human transmutation to make meat look like a corpse. Ed has to thin out Al's armor in order to repair the parts of him that are destroyed.
  • Al's "hair" (the plume of the helmet of his armor) has to be cut off when Ed uses it to entangle Buccaneer's chainsaw arm. Al is never shown with the full plume afterwards, despite his character design being unchanged up to that point.
  • Greed generates his Ultimate Shield from his body. As his body has similar composition to a human's, it must be carbon-based, and Ed figures out how to transmute it into something softer. Later in the series, when Ed replaces his automail arm with a carbon-fiber model, he is able to transmute it into Greed's Ultimate Shield, which comes in handy against Pride.
  • Plenty of characters use an adversary's Logical Weakness to beat them, such as alchemists' dependence on transmutation circles, homunculi's human-based chemistry, King Bradley's blind spot, and Pride literally being a Living Shadow.
  • Al's body beyond the Gate of Truth has atrophied and become disheveled due to it not being used in the real world. Additionally, the arm Ed gets back after Al sacrifices himself is pale and has longer nails from disuse.
  • Gluttony was created to emulate the Gate of Truth. The eye inside his belly looks nearly identical to the real one, except that his eye's iris is slit, while the real one's iris is round. Additionally, Gluttony and Truth share the same mouth design.
  • It's not spelled out until the end, but Truth is always shaped like the person who opens the gate. Truth does tell those who visit him that "I am you".
  • When Truth speaks, it's with an overlapping masculine and feminine voice. We find out towards the end that the combination of a masculine and feminine being is considered a "perfect being".
  • Every person who enters the Gate of Truth has a unique pattern on the gate, representing the knowledge the user has. Father's gate is blank.
  • Ed nearly receives frostbite when he marches into the Grim Up North with automail rubbing against his skin.
  • Automail can work as a replacement for limbs, but it requires functional nerves to get them to move. In addition, they malfunction under stress and require regular maintenance, so they aren't perfect-and-better replacements.
  • Roy doesn't have a weakness to water like users of fire from other works. After all, water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, which can be transmuted into highly-flammable hydrogen and oxygen gas. While there are several scenes with characters telling him to back off when he gets wet, due to his gloves being unable to spark, he also gets to show off his ability to transmute water into gas during his fight with Lust.
  • Why does Wrath age and why can't he regenerate like the rest of the homunculi? As explained in his backstory, the souls within his Philosopher's Stone fought in him until only one remained. In contrast, the other homunculi kept all of their souls and burn them in order to keep living.
  • This also explains why Greedling is still able to regenerate, despite having been made in a similar way. Ling accepted Greed willingly instead of trying to fight him, so Greed's Philosopher's Stone retained all of its souls.
  • The first character in the first anime opening theme isn't Edward. The audience doesn't get to find out his identity and significance until almost 2/3 of the way through the show, in episode 40. Any viewers who had come into Brotherhood after having read a significant amount of the manga will immediately recognize him as a younger Hohenheim, who strongly resembles Ed, but isn't completely identical.
  • The anime manages to work in foreshadowing from the first episode—which would otherwise just be Filler—into a later episode, when Ed realizes what McDougal meant in his actions. In particular, "the shape that this country's in" turns out to be meant very literally.
  • The fourth anime ending theme shows two hands reaching for and holding each other, and that's not generic symbolism. The larger hand is Hohenheim's, and the smaller one is Alphonse's.
  • Ed never forgets being unable to fix the tragedy of Nina. He wistfully mentions the events to Truth at the end when explaining how he was never more than "just a human".
  • All of Mustang's living subordinates—even the ones put out of commission early on—return to help him on the Promised Day.
  • Izumi has a soft spot for children; she takes pity on Ed and Al after learning that they have no mother, and she warmly lauds the miracle of life after listening to Al giddily explain when Winry delivered a baby. Izumi had lost a baby twice; first due to a miscarriage, and second with attempting human transmutation. She understands firsthand just how precious a child's life is.
  • Rewatch Bonus: A lot of the things that Selim says in the first half of the series take on a whole new meaning after it's revealed that he's Pride all along, such as him talking about his wanting to see his father or his interest in Ed.
  • Rule of Symbolism: When Roy is talking about how all his loyal men (and woman) have been taken away, while going over the chess pieces representing them, the bishop in the panel is tipped onto its side.
• Naoki Urasawa. The man is simply a genius at constructing insanely complex stories with little filler, where characters often appear quite a while before their importance is revealed and every question posed will be answered.
• One Piece: Though not without some continuity mistakes, it had generally done a great job introducing plot points that were hinted years in advance. Examples include just about every single element, from Laboon to the Arlong Pirates' Sun Tattoo, to the one panel in chapter 18 of Buggy's flashback coming back later with great importance. All of this shows that Oda is the master of this trope and that he has rightfully earned the meme: Oda NEVER Forgets.
• Jun Mochizuki of PandoraHearts: the scene of Alice strangling Oz from the first chapter that seemed to just be there to add a touch of horror to the mood? It will make sense in seventy chapters.

• Smile Pretty Cure!: In the first ending's Cure Peace variation, Cure Peace trips and face-plants. When she's next seen, her face is red afterwards. This is the only time this happens.
• Summer Time Rendering: Considering that Shinpei is the only one who remembers things between loops, it would be pretty boring and repetitive to see him trying to convince others about it and the threat of Shadows. Luckily, the author wrote the story in such a way that characters are quick to accept whatever he tells them and often admit to already be suspicious of something. Furthermore, Shadow Ushio awakens the power to impart memories on others, and by the sixth loop, she uses this to quickly bring up the recurring cast to speed and on their side. As the loop starts later and later, the "catch everyone up to speed" part of the loop also gets shorter as there is often simply less information to impart.
• Undead Unluck: Yoshifumi Tozuka pays remarkable attention to detail regarding the story's internal consistency.
  • UMA Spoil bends down to taunt Fuuko during the last stage of their fight. Fuuko is able to use this to determine how Spoil's "spoil field" works and its range. Tozuka later apologizes for invoking Space Is Noisy during Spoil's fight with Victor.
  • If the Earth and Moon were the only celestial objects prior to UMA Galaxy being released, how was Fuuko calling down meteors before that? Juiz reveals that these are fragments of previous Earths that were destroyed by God.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V has so much foreshadowing, including rewatch bonuses, hindsight, early cameos, and every item in the Chekhov's Armory that it has it's own page about it.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS in comparison to ARC-V, which had two main avenues of plot to be set up; the conflict defining the series, and the connections between Yuya, Yuzu/Zuzu and their counterparts. In SEVENS practically every single detail is relevant in the future and many elements are set up far ahead of when they actually come into play. Some examples:
  • In the fourteen episode, "Romin's Kitchen", the basic premise is that Romin is trying to apologise to Luke for being a spy by cooking him curry rice, his favourite food, while in a subplot Yuga is tracking down Kaizo after he ran off in the Duel Bicycle after Romin praised him. The most immediate consequence of the episode is that Kaizo is acting differently after Dueling three Goha Corporation Drones, which is explored in the very next episode. However the three Drones he Dueled connected together by stacking themselves in a horizontal line, which is exactly how Maximum Monsters in Maximum Mode are depicted as "connecting" when they are introduced at the climax of the arc, the speed at which the Drones are Dueling is revisited when Kaizo and Sebastian later communicate at superhuman speed so Finger Chikako can't hear them and discover their plan. Even the curry becomes relevant later on; not only does Romin's cousin Roa continue to guilt-trip her over accidentally filling his house with curry, but Romin much later cooks some to try and calm down Yuga and Yuo after the latter defeated the former, fearing Yuga had gone so off the deep end after his loss they would need them to make up, and Gakuto and Luke treat said curry as a potential WMD that is left aboard the Goha Siblings' spaceship...and is later detonated and crashes the ship. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • Nanaho Nanahoshi, a Duelist from the Dueling Insects club who wears a ladybug hat and who first appeared in Episode 28, in Episode 53 Yuga is established as having a fear of ladybugs, and then in episode 70 her name is finally revealed and she meets Yuga properly, scaring him out of his wits.
• World Trigger: Ashihara has evidently been planning this story out in the long term. Characters who only recently have been given a name will make appearances as seeming nobodies very early in the story, and abilities and plot details are set up well in advance. Strategies in particular are very nicely foreshadowed and set up by being intuitive extensions of established Trion mechanics. If a character demonstrates a new tactic seemingly out of the blue, you can flip a few pages back and see that they were preparing for it before it even came into play.

Comic Books

• Comic writer John Barber is famous for this; the man remembers everything, and has practically built his career on Arc Welding and crafting complex, gripping stories out of even the tiniest details. His run on IDW's Transformers (co-written with James Roberts, another writer known for this) is full of this, managing to take years upon years of uneven and confused writing and weave it all into a comprehensible story.
• Mega Man (Archie Comics) was written by Ian Flynn, who had gone over the series' entire history to create an impressively rich universe, introducing characters from the future games before they make a proper debut (Mega Man X makes an appearance at one point) and integrating obscure spin-offs into canon (such as Super Adventure Rockman, a poorly received FMV game released only in Japan). So it's a bummer the comic was abruptly cut short after Mega Man 3 arc, leaving lots of Early-Bird Cameo left hanging.
• Denis Bajram, the author of Universal War One, wrote the whole plot of his six-volume story beforehand; as a result, there is no inconsistency, despite the time-travel plot and the three nested time loops. It is one of the very few examples of use of time-travel in fiction that doesn't break its own rules nor leave any plot hole.

Film — Animated

• How to Train Your Dragon: It's incredibly hard to notice (whoever first discovered this must have eagle eyes) but Toothless has scars from the thing Hiccup used to shoot him down. Hiccup also has a slight scar on his chin, but how he got it was not known until the second film. It's revealed that he got it when he was accidentally scratched by Cloudjumper as a baby, and it's also how Valka is able to recognize him after twenty years. More here.

Film — Live-Action

• Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith contains one scene that was filmed during the prior movie Attack of the Clones, that of Owen and Beru receiving Luke from Obi-Wan. It would have been too expensive to get the actors and crew back out to the Tunisian desert for just one scene, and it was something they knew they needed to set up the original trilogy.
• Unfriended features a video of a girl's suicide posted on YouTube as the kickstart to the plot. Typing in the video's URL into a real web browser takes the user to a "this video has been removed" screen, citing real-life abuse and crime.

Literature

• Catch-22 is one of the best examples of this. The book doesn't follow a linear progression of time. Instead, the narration jumps forward and backward constantly, which can be very confusing to the reader, especially since there is not even a single date mentioned. Ever. The only way to tell when an event described happened is by how many missions the protagonist had flown at the time. Despite the convoluted narration format and the fact that the book features over 20 important characters, there isn't a single Plot Hole in the story. Joseph Heller, the book's writer, famously kept a detailed graph◊ to keep track of the timeline and each character's actions while writing the book, which he started in 1953; it was first published in 1961.
• The Cosmere has clearly been planned out decades in advance, and Brandon Sanderson rivals Eiichiro Oda in never forgetting plot points, as he's spoken many times of writing entire novels just because something in them is going to be significant later and needs to be set up beforehand. The character of Hoid is practically an avatar of this.
  • An excellent example is the eipgraphs in The Way of Kings, the first book in a planned 10 book cycle. Some of them collect "Death Rattles", an in-universe phenomenon where sometimes the dying will become possessed by an unknown force and utter a prophecy with their last breaths. Major events in every released novel in the series have been found to have been predicted, once they happened and fans knew what to look for. In order to have done that, Sanderson had to have known the major plot beats of the entire series while he was writing the very first book in it, and to not have deviated from those plans since then.
• The Dresden Files is well known for its huge number of Call Backs, Chekhov's Guns, Gunmen, foreshadowings and a well-plotted Myth Arc. Word of God is that the author began plotting the entire series after writing the first two chapters of Storm Front and, while allowing for new characters and some minor alterations (as a Wham Episode Changes was originally meant to be book 10 but was later pushed up to book 12), he is still following the original planning.
• Harry Potter quickly gained a reputation for this, with its fans obsessively poring over every minor character or object introduced trying to find out what importance they had.
  • When presented with the mystery of who stole one of Voldemort's Horcruxes and left a note with the initials RAB, many fans dismissed a character with those initials who had been mentioned all of twice in books one through six as "too obvious". Said character was indeed RAB.
  • In Order of the Phoenix, Rowling gave the kid that Dudley was bullying the last name "Evans", which is the maiden name of Lily Potter and Petunia Dursley. She had no intentions to make him a secret relative of Harry's, but don't tell that to the fanbase, who went crazy with absurd rumors regarding this kid as soon as he was revealed.
• Warrior Cats, because the author Victoria Holmes plans out each Myth Arc before she writes it, you can find future plot twists foreshadowed many books before they appeared, throwaway lines loaded with guns of the Chekhov variety and many Chekhov's Gunmen hidden among the background characters. Just to name one example, in Sunset Brambleclaw thinks that because of the lush summer, even the normally slim Leafpool is looking quite plump. Six books later in Sunrise, it's revealed that Leafpool was pregnant in Sunset. And this is one of the minor examples.

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development has this in spades. It mostly crops up in foreshadowing, where innocuous jokes and unimportant details will turn out to be set-ups for much larger plot arcs further down the line. At the very least, one should keep an ear open for lines of dialogue repeated verbatim in different contexts seasons apart.
• J. Michael Straczynski had all five seasons of Babylon 5 planned out before the show even entered production, and while some details here and there had to be changed, it still showed. He even worked out a way to replace every major character in the show before filming began. Which was good, given how many times it happened.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The season 4 episode "Restless" contains much foreshadowing for the seasons to come. Season 3 has Faith count down the days leading to Buffy's death two years before it happened. Joss Whedon also arranged for every season finale of the show to provide some kind of closure, just in case the show wasn't renewed. Willow's famous line "I think I'm kind of gay" from Season 3 is actually not an example - as Willow entering a lesbian relationship became a Throw It In! during Season 4 and the other line was just a fun coincidence.
  • In the pilot, Cordelia mentions that she wants to move to LA, which she would later do in order to join Angel. Joss joked in the DVD commentary "this is because I'm a genius and nothing I do is ever by accident" before admitting that he hadn't even conceived of the spinoff at the time, let alone Cordelia's involvement in it.
• Daniel Knauf planned six seasons in advance for Carnivàle. Unfortunately, studio interference led to a less challenging second season and cancellation soon after.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation of all shows, can do this when the writers actually work really hard on a story. The biggest example of this would be Rick's storyline leading up to the shooting.
• Doctor Who:
  • In one of the most interesting cases, the musical cue for the Silence briefly plays during Amy's introduction in "The Eleventh Hour", a season before they become a threat.
  • In a mid-Series 2 episode, a briefly seen newspaper has a reference to the final enemy of Series 3.
• Derren Brown is quite the chessmaster. The Experiments episode The Guilt Trip shows how far he'd go to pull off his con by even building a fake police station in the nearby village just in case the mark decides to hightail there alone to confess to a murder he was framed for when the original plan was to have the mark confess on site.
• In the Firefly episode "War Stories" (and later, Serenity) we learn that River was being turned into a living weapon by the Academy. We don't see her true ninja-osity until the movie, apparently. Apparently is the key word, because in "Ariel," while she is handcuffed by the Alliance guards, if one looks closely, one can see that she's quietly trying to slip out of her restraints when no one is looking.
• Fringe. There's a visual clue in every episode as to what the next episode will be about... and it's always so subtle or obscure that you never notice it on your first viewing. Then there's the Observer making appearances in every episode (and in other Fox shows, like American Idol!), the mysterious glyphs before commercial breaks forming an alphabetical cipher that spells out words, seemingly random text in the background turning out to be important clues... even Olivia's dark-colored clothing and Walter's seemingly-random food cravings are significant...
• The opening credits of Game of Thrones. Not only are there stunning Clock Punk castles rising up from a map, breathtaking music, and the backstory told by metaphor, but the areas given detail change per episode in accordance with what areas are the main focus of the episode. They even put the house sigils in front of the actor's name, respective to their character.
• The creators of How I Met Your Mother plan their use of flashbacks ahead of time.
  • During the second season (filmed in 2006), they revealed that they'd shot some footage to be used as a flashback for the series finale.
  • As of season 7's ending, the creators also revealed they had been planning on Barney and Robin eventually getting married since the episode where they break up in season 5, THREE years ago. Everything we see of Barney and Robin in the following episodes/seasons (5-8) is getting them back around to the point of dating again and eventually marrying. Basically, they are the definition of "endgame". The creators have also revealed, as of S8, that they planned for Ted and the Mother to meet at a train station since very early in the series.
• In Modern Family, where each season corresponds to an actual year in the lives of the three families, the characters have actual birthdays that are celebrated at the same time every season.
• Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij planned out five seasons of The OA, which is why it was deliberately slow-paced, but it was cancelled after two. Given the surreal series finale, it definitely would have gone in some strange directions had it continued.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • The second episode makes an offhand reference to Emma staying in Tallahassee for a while - a full season before it's revealed that Emma lived there with Henry's father.
  • David Anders signed on after being told his character was really Dr. Frankenstein, which wasn't revealed until early Season 2. Meghan Ory was likewise told that Red would turn out to be the wolf long before it actually happened on the show.
  • Maid Marian appears briefly in Robin Hood's debut episode in Season 2 only from far away. She doesn't appear again until a surprise twist in the Season 3 finale. She's played by the same actress, meaning eagle-eyed viewers could have guessed the twist simply by re-watching the episode "Lacey".
  • In an early episode of Season 2, Regina says of her old spell book "I don't care if it turns me green" - which it turns out was Foreshadowing for the antagonist of the second half of Season 3 the Wicked Witch of the West, who is also Regina's half-sister.
• The production team on QI correctly guessing which joke answers the panelists would give and setting them as the forfeit.
  Stephen Fry: Now, tell me about the Great Disappointment.
  Jo Brand: Have you been talking to my husband?
  (klaxon)
  —
  Stephen: Name a poisonous snake.
  Jimmy Carr: Piers Morgan.
  (klaxon)
  —
  Stephen: What has large teeth and only one facial expression?
  Bill Bailey: Janet Street-Porter.
  (klaxon)
  Bill Bailey: I took a fall, but it was Worth It.
• Star Trek: DS9
  • The idea of the Dominion was introduced in a Ferengi episode (DS9 for 'joke episode'). The Dominion turn out to be the main villain after the next season until the end of the show. In the extras, the producers even say they did this intentionally.
  • Damar was introduced in Season 4 as one of Dukat's officers who had barely more lines than an extra, which, according to the DS9 Companion, confused actor Casey Biggs until the producers reassured him that they had "big plans" for his character. It took an entire season and a half more before he even rose to the level of "supporting character," but he ended up being crucial to the overarching plotlines of the last two seasons.
• This Is Us:
  • Towards the end of the second season, the show began incorporating flash forwards to show the Pearson family in the early 2030s, gradually revealing where each character is as Rebecca's body begins to shutdown due to Alzheimer's.
  • According to showrunner Dan Fogelman, roughly three quarters of the series finale was shot during the third season.
• As the main description on HBO's The Wire, "all the pieces matter" accurately explains David Simon's plotting of the series well in advance. Multiple plot points are set up a season (or multiple seasons) in advance, and are foreshadowed so subtly that it requires a second viewing to catch all the instances. Barksdale soldier Bodie's death is telegraphed right from the third episode of the series. A key witness in Clay Davis' trial in the final season is a chauffeur who was (initially thought of as) a bit character in a first-season episode. Omar's death is foreshadowed more than two seasons before it actually happens via the character of Kenard.

Professional Wrestling

• CHIKARA's Mike Quackenbush. The DVD cover art for Aniversario: Never Compromise showed various CHIKARA wrestlers tied to crosses. Hallowicked was shown with a grey and red mask, as opposed to the black and orange or black and green masks he usually wore at the time. After he turned rudo at Tomorrow Never Dies due to Delirious using the Eye of Tyr on him, he switched to a white and red design, suggesting that this was meant as a sign of things to come.
• In May 2019, Bray Wyatt tweeted out a challenge to fans: back in 2015, he had recorded 8 consecutive backstage promos, each of them having a sentence that "didn't belong" that was supposed to form a secret message. The message was eventually revealed to be a cryptic, ominous poem that would end up foreshadowing The Fiend (of note is the phrase "Let me in!") — a new persona who would debut a few months later in SummerSlam 2019.

Theatre

• In the stage version of Dreamgirls, Effie's child with Curtis is traditionally a girl named Magic (as is the case in The Movie). But if for some reason only a little boy is available to play the part, his name will be Ronald.

Video Games

• Level-5's games' plots in general usually have a Chekhov's Armory, with a couple of the subtler details not boomeranging back until the sequel, or even the sequel's sequel. Interviews with CEO Hino Akihiro have confirmed that they do plan out entire trilogies at a time, and it's not just Writing by the Seat of Your Pants. Some specifics:
  • From the very beginning of the Professor Layton series, the title professor always wears the same hat, refuses to take it off, and will go to ridiculous lengths to do so. The reason for this is revealed in the ending of the third game.
  • Likewise, Don Paolo establishes himself in the first game as the self-proclaimed archnemesis of Professor Layton, who has no clue what he ever did to upset Don Paolo. How this came to be is also revealed two games later. (And it's even related to how he got his hat!)
  • The first Inazuma Eleven game introduces a finishing technique named "Emperor Penguin No. 2" halfway through the game, which is likely to leave the player wondering if there's a "No. 1" anywhere. What Emperor Penguin No. 1 is, and even the reason why nobody dared so much as mention it previously, is finally revealed halfway through the second game.
  • In another case similar to Professor Layton's hat, from Kidou's first appearance in the very first chapter of the first Inazuma Eleven game, he is always wearing a pair of blue-rimmed goggles, except he is consistently shown without them in flashbacks to his childhood. The reason for this is explained in the third game.
• A teaser trailer for Team Fortress 2's Engineer Update showed in the background robotic Heavy and Demoman heads. Robots wouldn't be added to the game until the Mann vs Machine update over two years later. This wasn't the only hint they dropped either.
• Due to the the games taking place in the same world and characters from previous arcs actually showing up and take part in the plot, the Trails Series is an example of this as the Sky games introduce The Empire in the north whose stories are fleshed out in the Cold Steel games and places like Crossbell which is also fleshed out by the Zero/Azure duology. It finally culminates in The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie where characters from the three arcs get some closure and foreshadow the future Calvard arc. If nothing else, there's a lot of consistency going on with the series with numerous call backs and nods from previous games.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater, with its irreverent comedy and nonsense plot, feels like a webcomic that was improvised on every page, and evidently many parts of it were. But it has Brick Jokes that were set up long before the payoff, culminating in a finale that called back to a throwaway line done ten years earlier.
• Era of Errors has a storyline that's been in production for EIGHT YEARS before the webcomic even started, with the author having thousands of pages of storyline/notes/character sheets/backstory written, including most of the entire series storyline.
• Girl Genius is playing the long game. A few major plot point examples:
  • The story kicks off in 2002 with a strange image appearing out of nowhere. It still hasn't been resolved, but hints have been dropped to the Myth Arc from time to time, with a big one involving the figure in the image being revealed in 2015.
  • Fans noticed that Zeetha's backstory lines up oddly well with Bangladesh Dupree's. It pays off 14 years later, when Bang finds out and makes the connection.
  • Zeetha's heritage has been hinted at almost as long. While fans have long figured it out (she's Baron Wulfenbach's daughter and Gil's twin sister), it still hasn't been directly addressed in the story.
• The Order of the Stick is all over this trope, and is one of the causes for the frequent delays.
• Sluggy Freelance has call-backs to events that occurred long before, the most drastic being the fact that Pete had been dropping hints about Oasis being a pyrokinetic from her very first appearance, nearly a decade before The Reveal. The forums have a lot of speculation as to how much Pete Abrams plans out in advance and how much is just stuff he throws in to foster this image (a character that first appeared rather suddenly during the Oceans Unmoving arc getting his arrival in Timeless Space explained four years later, for example, seems more like a throwaway Continuity Nod.)

Web Original

• In DasBoSchitt's "Giant Man Is Not Afraid", at 0:21 a visible link to a YouTube video is shown, which, if typed in, will send you to the same YouTube video the Heavy is watching later in the video.
• The Shadow of Greed might qualify. Ask Ironeye about it.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender is an example of this. Sure, some episodes were more filler than others but the creators had the whole series planned out beforehand. For example, in "The Northern Air Temple" characters meet an eccentric mechanist. His workshop is scattered with blueprints and other minor details — one of which is plans for a giant drill that doesn't show up until a season later.
  • Throughout the series, there are pictures, references, and statues of the mythical Lion Turtle, even so far back as the original Pilot Episode. This becomes rather important when the Lion Turtle appears in the finale.
  • An online video interview with the makers talks about how once the ball got rolling, they ended up creating the entire plot rapidly, and when they made their proposal to the Nick execs, it lasted several hours, compared to most show's several minutes. They were granted funding for a test pilot after being told by the execs they had made more than enough of a case.
  • In The Legend of Korra, it came as a rather big shock to most fans when it was revealed the Equalists would be using Mini-Mecha to fight. Most fans, but not all- because a few keen eyes noticed that for a few seconds in the first episode, you could see low-quality blueprints. What's more impressive; that the creators bothered to put such a small detail in, or that the fanbase managed to catch it?
  • A far more brilliant example than the previous example occurs in The Legend of Korra, and it spans the entire franchise. In the ATLA finale, the Lion Turtles and energybending were established as ancient animals and bending arts, respectively, were shown in the present day. With the two-part "Beginnings", episodes that came five years after the ATLA finale, The Legend of Korra reveals the former details to be absolutely true. Not only that, but the origin of humans being able to use the elements is also revealed; just as the Lion Turtle was able to give Aang an ability, so too were the ancient Lion Turtles, who gave the different elements to humanity! If that weren't enough, the creators realized that the sources of bending were already elaborated upon in ATLA, and to reconcile the sources of bending and the ability to bend, they have Wan doing the Dancing Dragon alongside a dragon, the source that taught how to firebend as established in the previous series. Finally, the idea of the Avatar being connected to both the human world and the spirit world makes a lot more sense with the revelation that the Avatar is the combination of a human and Raava. The Avatar cycle is the way it is because that is the order in which Wan learned the elements. Truly, these episodes were crafted by people who truly love and care for the franchise.
• Bojack Horseman has a lot of small details in dialogue and backgrounds that foreshadow character actions later.
  • In the first episode, there's a throwaway line that Bojack let Todd stay at his mansion because he thought he was a troubled gay teen. When flashbacks reveal that Herb left Horsin' Around because he was outed as gay and was fired, it becomes obvious that Bojack let Todd of all people stay because of guilt.
  • Episode four has a background gag where a man orders a steak, which is then served by an anthro cow. We wouldn't learn where genuine animal meat comes from until much later in season two.
• Futurama first appeared to be a pretty entertaining animated show where nothing ever changes, with the only long-term story arc focusing on the fairly mundane possibility of Fry and Leela hooking up. Cut to where we find out how Fry ended up getting frozen (we can even see the perpetrator's SHADOW in the pilot episode), Bender being buried in the desert, the crew being the crash-landed ship in Roswell, finding out why Fry is the way is he is, and others. This show was surprisingly well laid out from the beginning, not a lot felt like it was made up as they went along.
• Steven Universe was planned out far in advance — according to interviews, a one-month preproduction writing session lead to the creation of a large timeline covering pre-series events and the cementing of major plot details such as the Season 5 reveal. Rewatch the first season with knowledge of what's to come and you'll discover a truly shocking amount of Foreshadowing and Chekhov's Guns. One of the most notable examples of this comes in the form of an entire character: the Conspiracy Theorist Ronaldo, who not only has many of his theories proven correct as the series goes on, but also has some of his more innocuous lines serve as foreshadowing. His ramblings at the end of "Keep Beach City Weird" summarize the yet-to-be-explained Backstory of the show's setting, and in turn, the inciting incident for its Myth Arc. He even screams out the collective name of the show's Big Bads, who aren't even "officially" mentioned until the end of the following season. The sheer level of detail that the creators manage to squeeze into every episode is pretty amazing, especially given that said episodes are usually only 11-minutes long.

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