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"When you were controlling the feeds, did you notice the parabolic? Hey, it's important. Parabolas are important. Here, look at this. In all the equations that describe motion and heat... in all the Feynman diagrams, what's the one variable that you can turn into negative and still get rational answers from?"
— Primer. (If this made sense to you, your name has the letters "MSc" or "PhD" after it somewhere.) * Time. If you know the premise of the movie, you may just assume that. If you've been avoiding spoilers and you know the reference, it's your first hint of the actual plot. Brilliant.
The public's been clamouring for some more intelligent television in the wake of Reality TV and Lowest Common Denominator Recycled Scripts. So, you go and write a series loaded with difficult quantum mechanics, quoting obscure 17th-century philosophers, with characters who are philosophical Magnificent Bastards who speak a dozen languages while conversing to each other by sending Shakespearean zen koans hidden into chess move patterns, and packed with allusions to ancient Sumerian religion. You make sure all your Techno Babble is scientifically plausible and go to great lengths to make sure all your ancient Roman soldiers are wearing exact replicas of period equipment. Now it's True Art, right?
So you sit back and watch the ratings — which plummet faster than a rocket-propelled brick in a nosedive. What went wrong? In trying to avert making the classic mistake that Viewers Are Morons, you went too far and ended up assuming that Viewers Are Geniuses instead. * Of course, if you're working in a medium that doesn't need an audience of millions to be profitable, you may not care. Remember that Tropes Are Tools and that some people like stories that require effort on their part to understand.
While a lot less common than its more insulting opposite (any show without the "mass-market appeal" that LCD stuff has will be Screwed By The Network without mercy), overestimating the audience can be more of a death knell than underestimating it, even without network sabotage.
There's also the trap of being so consumed with the complexities that you forget simpler things like plot and characterization.
The most successful way to do this may be to provide a Genius Bonus. If a writer gives the more intellectual content a small dose at a time, viewers can still enjoy the work at their level, but those who get the Easter Egg will enjoy its hidden depths.
See also What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic and Mind Screw. Not mutually exclusive with Did Not Do The Research or Critical Research Failure - just because a show is crammed with obscure knowledge doesn't mean that said knowledge is correct, even when it comes from the show to begin with. This can be the result of too many in jokes being included in a work.
Examples:
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Universal
- Almost every Mockumentary and April Fools Day hoax ever, to the extent that they practically constitute a subtrope. Surely viewers are smart enough to work out that there isn't actually an alien invasion going on right now, without having to say "THIS IS NOT REAL!" every 5 minutes, right? Wrong, as these examples show:
- Panorama's legendary "Spaghetti trees" April Fools bit had people actually calling the BBC and asking how they could grow Spaghetti trees of their own.
- Likewise, Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real apparently convinced several people that dragons really existed.
- And Flying Penguins, although this was perhaps Lampshaded by it being a publicity piece for their online TV-on-demand service
- Many people were disappointed after finding out The Guardian's travel supplement on "San Seriffe" was an April Fools hoax, even though the entire article was clearly one typography pun after another.
- More people these days would recognise that as a hoax, as the rise of computers and word processing software means more people are exposed to typographical terminology in their everyday lives. At the time, it was quite an obscure field of knowledge and would only be used by (for example) people in the newspaper industry.
- Not for nought was the paper usually mocked as being "the Grauniad".
- Obviously the journalists found it hilarious.
- As Daniel Handler found out when writing A Series Of Unfortunate Events, people will accept anything labeled as "based on a true story" as true, no matter how outlandish it is. Never mind that the series involves at various points a four-year old movie director, a bikini made of lettuce, eagles used as transportation, and a sawmill that pays people in chewing gum and coupons that will employ a baby to bite pieces of wood, people still criticise the movie (which is more obviously a comedy than the books) for disrespecting the memory of the (entirely fictional) Baudelaire children!
- A number of video game rumors got their start as April Fools' Day jokes in the video game magazine EGM.
- Equally defunct British games magazine CVG tended not to be much better.
- RTBF's Bye Bye Belgium, a mock news broadcast stating that Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) had unilaterally declared its independence. So many people initially believed the message that the broadcasters had to add a 'this is fiction' note at the bottom of the screen after half an hour. And even then spontaneous protests broke out. It caused a huge uproar. Ironically, the broadcast had been made to get Walloon and Flemish politicians to talk about the growing tensions between both sides of the country. It failed.
- It should be noted however that most countries in the world don't celebrate April 1st as April Fool's Day. So, when some of the stuff that was fabricated in the English-speaking world reaches the rest of the world, it can't be expected that people will instantly recognize it as such if at all. Made worse that sometimes there's a delay, so even if the viewer, target audience, or whoever is aware of the English-language fondness for April's Fools, they may not have the time reference because it'll be April 12th. Or September...
- "Genetically, paedophiles have more in common with crabs than they do with you or me."
- A boy managed to convince his entire ninth grade class that "dihydrogen-monoxide" was a deadly substance found in "chemical plants, household cleaning devices, and even our rivers and oceans!" It had killed hundreds of people a year! And everyone just started gasping and agreeing that they should ban water.
- Meanwhile, the chemistry students were ROFL.
- There is an entire site
 devoted to the dangers of dihydrogen-monoxide. I understand that a city council staffer came across it, and brought the issue to the attention of said city council, which took prompt action. Then they all found out what it was.
- Didn't Penn and Teller do this at a Greenpeace rally?
- Inquest Magazine is the source for the oft-persistent rumor that Magic The Gathering is getting a sixth color. It was, of course, an April Fool's joke. (Although the card Water Gun Balloon Game can put a 5/5 pink creature into play, so in a sense there is a sixth color already.)
- Without Warning, a modern(90s) update of Orson Welles' War Of The Worlds broadcast. It actually said on the screen about every five minutes, "This is not real". Still, people kept calling the affiliates and asking if it was real.
- Any show that involves multiple Chessmasters facing off against one another can suffer from this. The Wheel Of Time and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End both fall into this trap.
- Bilingual Bonus is usually a Genius Bonus, but overuse, often combined with having to "get" them in order to understand the plot, falls into this.
Advertising
- Byte Magazine used to run an ad every April advertising some form of "write-only memory", such as "erasable write-only memory" or "high-speed write-only memory". Every May they'd print some of the orders they had received.
- It predates Byte by several years. It started as a prank by an engineer at Signetics, who was sure that the bosses who had to scrutinize and approve all his work didn't know what they were doing. He set out to prove it by slipping a fake write-only memory spec in with some real specs. It was not only approved, the "Model 25120 Write Only Memory" chip made it into the company's price books and order requests started coming in. While their initial reaction seemed to be embarrassment, the company eventually embraced the idea and published the spec in the form of an April Fool's ad. With various graphs, schematics, and an important-looking company logo, it's still a great thing to print off and display on your workplace wall with various other (real) important documents. It'll be weeks or years before anyone calls you on it. More here, including the original ad.
Anime
- Partially averted by Death Note (which features multiple competing Chessmasters) by making every single side character into The Watson. The occasional monologue after a successful Xanatos Gambit helps, too.
- Ghost In The Shell is pretty hard on the brain. Ghost in the Shell 2 is harder on the brain than MGS2. Stand Alone Complex discusses sociology and memes, and if you understood it fully the first time, you either already had a PhD in sociology, or earned one in the process of puzzling it out.
- My Psychology professor used the Ghost In The Shell manga as readings for the effect of advances in technology on the identity of humans.
- While difficult enough at parts the comparatively lightweight anime series has a tendency to have characters spout plot points (often convoluted political situations) at an accelerated clip. It then rarely, if ever, repeats itself. Example: In 2nd Gig the full source of the title 'Individual Eleven' and its supposed contents are explained once. Despite coming in in multiple episodes before and after the explanation.
- It's really not difficult to understand if you've ever been a part of 4chan or know how Anonymous' groupthinking hivemind works from someplace else.
- Has a happened a few times in Jojos Bizarre Adventure.
- Serial Experiments Lain. The central theme revolves around highly technical aspects of computers and networking, and the series is a well-known member of the Anime Mind Screw Club.
- And don't forget the extended Jungian metaphors.
- "Hey, you got NeXTstep in my shoujo!"
- "Lain's computer hardware is so cool. How come we don't get designs like those?"
- Lain lacks a plot at all until you do the research. The first time through, I was enjoying it for the pretty flashing lights. The plot only emerges at all once you get to the point where you're looking at the patent file for Microwave Audio Induction and trying to figure out if on Schuuman Resonance frequencies it can be used to trigger individual action potentials (nb: schuuman resonance is actually a massive frequency range — the number given in the show of 7.83Hz is actually the median).
- While Neon Genesis Evangelion starts off looking like a fairly ordinary Humongous Mecha animé, it soon becomes a dark and convoluted psychoanalytical and philosophical allegory involving a lot of Freud Was Right, allusions to Jung, Schopenhauer, and possibly existentialism, Kabbalistic allusions (half of which were intentionally bogus), and reflections on the nature of humanity, what makes a human, the status of sentient AIs, etc. Some call it a Mind Screw, which isn't totally unfair. Some even consider it as a precursor of the superflat movement, a form of Japanese postmodernism in the visual arts.
- Many anime series produced by the Bee Train studio (most famously, Noir and Madlax) require so much reading between the lines and background cultural knowledge that most viewers refuse to believe that something worthy was there in the first place. As a result, the rather small fan community deliberately positions itself as "intelligent fans", actively shunning whom they refer to as "fanboys" and "haterz".
- Suzumiya Haruhi. What starts out as a healthy amount of Genius Bonuses later falls straight into this. There are as many throwaway references to astrophysics as there are to pop culture, a Time Travel incident reaches near-Primer levels of complexity, and one novel features an in-depth discussion of Euler's planar graph formula—which is necessary to resolve the current situation. There are diagrams.
- Thank god Baka-Tsuki gave explanations every time Kyon gave one of his countless references and comparisons to history, mythology and advanced scientific concepts in his narration, most of which you don't know anyway.
- Of course, for some people this is exactly the reason that the series is so interesting. The books are obviously written for people who have widely varied and very geeky interests.
- Ergo Proxy casually references Greek myth (Daedelus & Icarus, Theseus and the Minos maze), philosophy (Descartes, Nietszche, Turing, many others), film (Battleship Potemkin, Akira, Blade Runner), gnostic relgion, art (Michelangelo, Millais), history, and many other things, almost to the point of showing off to the audience how smart they are by cramming episodes with as many allusions as possible.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena. Good heavens. Everything from Japanese mythology to German literature to Jewish mysticism.
- Gantz. Most plot twists or shocking revelations aren't understood by everyone because the mangaka simply assumes that Viewers Are Geniuses and explains them with a single, textless panel or with a side glare and an explanation that is stopped mid-sentence. The fact that the manga is filled with non conventional sci-fi doesn't help.
- Gundam Seed, and Gundam Seed Destiny tend to not give you much needed information that your just expected to figure out. The most obvious is that we are never told that Lacus Clyne is using Obfuscating Stupidity when she first appeared making it look like the air head popstar turned into a brilliant leader out of nowhere. This is made worse in Gundam Seed Destiny where several events happen that escalate the war such as the attempted attack on Lacus, and a group dropping a colony on the Earth and we are never told who is behind either. It's suggested that Durandal was the one who made the attempt on Lacus' life but it's never stated that Durandal (who had the motive) was behind either events.
Comics
- Just about everything Neil Gaiman has ever done hits this trope in some way. The Sandman oozes cleverness and esoteric references. And if you try to watch Mirror Mask without a reasonable grounding in psychology, you will miss most of what is going on.
- A great many Far Side strips do this. One notable example is one where two shipwreck survivors are clinging to a shellfish-encrusted rock in the ocean, and one says "Don't worry, we'll have plenty to eat; the oysters go all the way to the top!". If you're a marine biologist, it's hilarious. Otherwise, you may be scratching your head for a good while before you get it.
- Here's a hint: Oysters live underwater.
- Another Far Side panel had a cow standing proudly next to his work bench of miscellaneous items. The caption, "Cow Tools." Gary Larson said that no other panel he had done has caused more controversy, because absolutely no one understood it. (He explained later that in taking an anthropology class he learned that it was believed that what separated humans from animals is the use of tools. That idea has fallen away because some birds have been known to use tools. He wondered what a cow's tools would be like. He said his first mistake was thinking this was funny.)
- In the same book, he said his second mistake was making one of the tools look like a saw, so fooling readers into thinking they could figure what the others were. Not a chance, of course, but many people were frustrated in the attempt.
- Yet another Far Side example. I saw an American comedian in some TV special (who I forget) going around showing peoplethis paticular Far Side comic and seeing them try to figure it out. The comic in question showed a Kangaroo on a street amongst some humans, and one of the humans is dead and has a Boomarang in his head, and the Kangaroo is thinking, That was meant for me!" The Americans aparantly had allot of trouble with it, but to me, an Australian, it was pretty obvious Boomarangs are an aboriginal hunting tool often used to hunt Kangaroos. Nowdays they're mostly hunted by white people with guns.
- Frazz. The author has actually stated that he believes his readers to be among the smartest in the world. Since he's the one getting the fan mail, we'll just have to take his word for it.
- Nearly every panel of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen features obscure references to English literature and/or comic art. The accompanying text-stories are, if anything, even worse/better.
- The stories themselves have been quite comprehensible, for the most part - until the ending of The Black Dossier jumped far off the scale.
- Dykes To Watch Out For is festooned with references to culture, history, and current events of all kinds.
- James Robinson's Starman is full of references to obscure things. Lampshade Hanging in one issue:
Jack: There's nothing wrong with being elite.
Or another example.
This one isn't about collectibles but it's the same kind of thing. I'm in a book store ... for new books. I've gone a little bit crazy and I'm about to spend a couple of hundred bucks. I murmur under my breath "money's too tight to mention".
Now the guy behind the register, he hears this. He looks at me, nodding his head knowingly like we're in some "club of cool" together. He says, "Yeah, Simply Red" like it's a password, and now we do the secret handshake.
And I'm thinking "Simply Red"? Lame English band. More soul at a polka convention. And the book store guy thinks he's on some kind of inside loop with that.
Sadie: Jack, that's the smuggest thing I ever heard. A guy tries to be nice and you stand there hating him just because he hasn't heard of the Valentine Brothers.
You're like my ex-boyfriend. He was that way about authors. He'd deliberately drop obscure quotes and references. He'd take over conversations at parties. But none of what he read was for the love of it. His knowledge was like a weapon.
Don't tell me you're like that. I don't want another jerk. I've had...
Hey, why are you smiling?
Jack: Because you've heard of the Valentine Brothers.
(Naturally, since Jack and Sadie both know that the Valentine Brothers are a soul duo who originally performed "Money's Too Tight To Mention" before Simply Red covered it, they have no reason to tell the readers this.)
- A lot of Grant Morrison's works consciously operate on higher levels but Final Crisis expects you to have a pretty robust knowledge of the entire 70+ year history of the DCU to understand it.
- To be fair, most DC Crossovers are like that; though Final Crisis takes the cake for being both poorly paced (jumping from one sequence to the next with no segue) and including obscure scientific or philosophical references many people have never heard of. But it's Grant Morrison, so he gets away with it. This time anyway...
- It's not just the continuity that hung up fans on Final Crisis - comic book nerds are very good at continuity. Morrison was also doing a lot of meta and philosophical weirdness about the nature of storytelling and the superhero genre in particular, which is a great way to annoy people who don't care about Barthes or Morrison's issues with William Moulton Marston and just want to see characters they love beat up characters they love to hate in heroic and impressive ways.
- The Phantom. Not all the time, but a lot of the stories told about past Phantoms are more enjoyable if you know your world history.
Film
- Donnie Darko
- The movie Primer was written by a math graduate who studied physics intensively to produce one of the most plausible Time Travel movies ever. In the words of one reviewer: "anybody who claims they fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar".
- Fortunately, you don't need to fully understand the movie to enjoy it; you only need to be able to follow the action as it unfolds. By the end, the characters themselves end up as bewildered as the audience.
- Hardly anyone understands all the vital plot points from The Descent first time 'round. Either they completely missed that Sarah went crazy or they didn't connect the dots and get that the crawlers were evolved from cavemen who stayed down in the cave or they would miss the subtext that Sarah possibly only imagined the crawlers or they would make a more simple mistake and forget the seemingly unimportant singular lines of dialogue which would explain things later on. To top it off, it's very difficult to tell who's who in the dark, and fans are still arguing over what the hell the ending means...
- Hopefully, the sequel will explain things.
- Spike Lee's 25th Hour has a deleted scene where a pair of gangsters explain the exact reasons why the protagonist has 24 hours of freedom. Pretty much every single review either couldn't figure out the reasons within the context of the film, or presumed said 24 hours were NOT Truth In Television (they were, at least at the time).
- Trading Places is for the most part a very accessible film, but make sure you have at least a cursory knowledge of how the commodities market works or you'll be completely lost at the climax.
- Videodrome. A good understanding of Marshall McLuhan's media theory is required to really get it.
- The poker game in the movie Casino Royale is quite difficult to follow for those who aren't very familiar with poker. Particularly weird compared to the rest of the movie.
- Which in and of itself is actually a case of Viewers Are Morons because in the novel they're playing Baccarat. The producers changed it to Poker because it was popular at the time and didn't think the audience would understand Baccarat.
- This may have worked out for the better. Baccarat's very much a game of chance played against the dealer (which some would argue would actually be MORE exciting). Poker has more of a psychological aspect and it's played against the other players.
Literature
- Authors who put non-English phrases or sentences into their English-language novels and, instead of leaving them as a Bilingual Bonus, make them central to understanding the plot.
- Agatha Christie sometimes does this in her Hercule Poirot novels, or else puts Bilingual Bonuses in places where they look like they might be important.
- Poe parodies this in his essay "How to write a Blackwood Article" and the "Blackwood Article" that follows.
- Authors using the Literary Agent Hypothesis sometimes have this happen whether it is their intent or not. For instance, some early reviewers of the first Flashman novel thought it was an actual memoir (despite the fact that the protagonist is a character from Victorian fiction). Oddly, one book, Dickens of the Mounted, is a Spiritual Successor/pastiche of the Flashman series and actually has a Lawyer Friendly Cameo from Flashman was also interpreted as being the actual memoirs of the protagonist (who was in this case actually a real person, the n'er-do-well son of Charles Dickens).
- You can read all the way through Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands just for the gripping conspiracy that invented the modern espionage novel or the beautifully verbose and poetic descriptions of the sea... but having extensive knowledge of sailing in small boats certainly helps.
- Most readers find Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles largely incomprehensible for the first 100 pages due to the untranslated Latin, Spanish, and French, the fact that most characters are referred to by multiple names, that much of the meaning comes from snippets of obscure medieval literary quotations that require knowledge of the (unprovided) full piece to understand, and the plot that assumes detailed knowledge of 16th century Scottish politics. There are two official guidebooks and multiple fan-made translations and literary-reference compilations to make up for this.
- Michael Crichton is notorious for this; many people who read Jurassic Park right after seeing the movie were overwhelmed with Crichton's stifling detail to anthropological and palaeontologic minutiae.
- Then in the second book there are extended sections of dialogue explaining how much of the exposition from the first book was wrong, many of them due to Science Marches On.
- Think Jurassic Park is bad? Just try reading (or watching) The Andromeda Strain. A lot of technobabble (accurate, though) involving genetic mutations, diseases, and molecular level sciences.
- Umberto Eco:
- Foucault's Pendulum is a Deconstruction of conspiracy theories that spans forty years or so, is told nonlinearly using flashbacks and a frame story, and references hundreds of names and concepts related to politics, history, science, religion, and occultism.
- The Name of The Rose includes monks arguing about classic Greek literature and philosophy, quarreling about medieval church dogma, and throwing untranslated Latin quotes at each other... yet all the discussions should be fully understood to get the whole book.
- T.S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land is either an example of this, or of True Art Is Incomprehensible. For example, it contains quotes from various famous sources, still in their original language. If you're not reading an annotated version, it will make no sense.
- The notes don't really help much; they have been described as "simply another riddle - and not a separate one". Eliot himself wrote in The Frontiers of Criticism that he started out just citing his quotations "with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism", before realising he had to come up with more material if the poem was going to be released as a book "with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day".
- It also doesn't help that even Eliot seems to admit that some of the references make no sense without the notes. One of the cards during the Tarot reading represents the Fisher King, but not only is this not indicated in any way, Eliot claims to have no idea why he associates the two (and this is coming from somebody whose favorite poet is Eliot).
- Ernest Hemingway's "theory of omission" or "the iceberg principle."
- Lampshaded in Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Casino Royale, when M complains to one of his underlings that the report the underling wrote has a French sentence without any translation.
- 'This is not the Berlitz School of Languages, Head of S. If you want to show off your knowledge of foreign jawbreakers, be good enough to provide a crib. Better still, write in English.'
- While they can still be enjoyed on a superficial level, William Gibson's novels (Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Idoru, etc.) rely on complex and multilayered metaphors, both pop culture and "learned" allusions, and a blurring of traditional concepts of "human," "life," "technology" and "reality", among others. On the other hand, Gibson admits in interviews that readers shouldn't look too deep into the technical aspects of computer science and cyberspace in his works, because he didn't even own a computer until well after he'd written Neuromancer, and was profoundly disappointed with it.
- However, he did do the research; he's known to keep track of "the invisible literature" - scientific research papers.
- Remember that this story is set in the future. Even extrapolating from the time that Gibson was writing, it states specifically that the Tessier-Ashpool clan had been in orbit for an unspecified but significant length of time; long enough for the clan's progenitors to establish the satellite and die of old age, as well as the next generation going into cryogenic freeze for a motal generation (Molly's lifespan at the time of the story), possibly having done so several times. The process of creating the Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis would require at least a full century, which in turn would allow solid-state (silent) desktop computers to become as common and inexpensive as their current real-world equivalents.
- Frank Herbert's Dune universe features wheels-within-wheels plots and dense mythology, although the poetic descriptions can make the book enjoyable even to those who fail to understand it.
- James Joyce's Ulysses requires intimate knowledge of the history of literature (especially English-language literature), geography of Dublin, history of Ireland and a genius ability at recognising allusions. Finnegans Wake requires ... surrendering the possibility of comprehension, which was perhaps the point.
- Given that the title is the Roman name for Odysseus, understanding Homer's Odyssey is incredibly significant to the book. It also helps if you're familiar with Shakespeare's Hamlet
- The first half of William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury is incomprehensible at first glance. Benjy, a 33 year-old with a profound mental disability, narrates the first section. He narrates all events in the present tense, even if it's a past memory. The second narrator is the incredibly intelligent and thoughtful Quentin Compson. The difficulty in his section stems from his narrative constantly shifting between what's actually happening, what he's thinking about, long sections of stream-of-consciousness narration without any punctuation, and even being able to tell what even really does happen at some points. Case in point: Did Quentin just fantasize about having sex with his sister, or did it really happen?
- Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels may suffer from this thanks to the rapid-fire Shout Out rate. How many of the ten-year-old target audience will get references to Shelley, Coleridge, and Orwell, among others?
- Stanislaw Lem's works are usually loaded with science and philosphy.
- Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels feature an extraordinary level of use of complex physics and biology concepts considering that the books are mainly intended for children. However, it also qualifies as a Parental Bonus since they're mostly just used as plot devices and so the reader doesn't really have to understand how everything works and just accept that it does work.
- The works of author Cormac McCarthy. Some can be thoroughly enjoyed without being well-versed in McCarthy's interests or history — such as All the Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men, and The Road — but it definitely helps to make sense of it all (especially with Blood Meridian and Suttree).
- His Border Trilogy (of which All the Pretty Horses is the first) has characters have whole conversations entirely in Spanish. There's a website where you can download a list of all of the translated dialogue, which you may need by your side during the reading.
- Ezra Pound. Try reading his "Cantos" without a way of translating Chinese, ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, and Basque. Yes, Basque!
- Even worse: Thomas Pynchon's Gravitys Rainbow. Even having the necessary knowledge in history, statistics, physics and linguistics to understand the background might not be enough to get through the Mind Screw it is.
- Idlewild by Nick Sagan and its sequels, several times. For instance, the character of Fantasia averts The Schizophrenia Conspiracy, but you're assumed to know what hebephrenic schizophrenia is.
- Essentially every book ever written by Neal Stephenson. At one point, one of his books stops in mid stream to launch an attempt to create a function correlating a character's ability to crack ciphers with time spent since last ejaculation, with differing values depending on the type of stimulation employed, or summarize the working principles of an Enigma machine by analogy with a broken bicycle. Whatever the actual material, it is always treated with an attention to detail bordering on the unnecessary. Which side of the border the reader is on tends to indicate whether they enjoy reading Stephenson.
- Charles Stross' Accelerando
- S.S.Van Dine was even worse than Arthur Conan Doyle. Philo Vance uses quotations not only from Latin, but also from French, German, and Italian. They usually are at least somewhat important, and they may be a paragraph, not just a sentence, long. He had one multi-paragraph footnote in German.
- Paradise Lost is filled to the brim with allegories, intended to be read by a medieval-era Upper Class Wit with an extensive library of contemporary and ancient works. Modern readers can substitute said library with Google and The Other Wiki.
- The description of the Xunca superweapon in Flinx Transcendent, the final book in Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series, is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone without at least a basic grasp of string theory.
- M. R. James's classic horror story "Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come to You, My Lad" lampshades this trope: everything goes pear-shaped because the protagonist doesn't realize that the apparently unintelligible inscription on the whistle is in Latin, just like the intelligible inscription on the other side. To be fair, there's no agreement about how to translate it, but the general gist is that anyone blowing the whistle will be in for a nasty shock.
- Most of the horror stories by M. R. James, for that matter. "Mr. Humphreys And His Inheritance" is the most blatant example by far, with a lot of religious, classical and antiquarian references thrown in and a few Latin phrases left untranslated - a succinct discussion of which produces enough materials for a full-blown literary article. A study guide is also helpful if the layman wishes to appreciate "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" fully.
- One can only really understand Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos after studying The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Shakespeare's The Tempest, and be familiar with The Time Machine, the complete works of Marcel Proust, Shakespeare's sonnets, and Hans Moravec's writings, and should know a decent amount about quantum physics, the Voynich manuscript, terraforming, transhumanism, and biosphere theory. Then it might make sense. No guarantees.
- It helps that there are characters who love talking about Proust and The Iliad while much of the rest can be taken as "awesome magic stuff".
- Hyperion does the same thing but this time with John Keats, Jack Vance, time travel, quantum mechanics (again), transhumanism (again), internet sociology.
- House of Leaves. The weird text alone is enough to confuse most people.
- Very little of the plot of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is actually stated outright. Douglas Adams expects readers to connect several clues by themselves, to remember minor details from early in the book that suddenly become major plot points towards the end, and to be familiar with the life and work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The ending, in which Dirk Gently saves humanity from being erased from existence, is completely incomprehensible unless you know the story of Kubla Khan and the person from Porlock.
- Any copy of the Divine Comedy that doesn't include extensive annotations becomes this within, quite literally, the first few stanzas.
- The Aubrey-Maturin novels contain masses of unexplained early-nineteenth-century detail and language. There are now several companion books. On nautical matters, at least, the author has explanations addressed to Stephen Maturin as The Watson; but pay attention, because most things are explained only once, and will come up again in later books.
- Basically Greg Egan's entire body of work is this trope in spades.
Live Action Television
- Alternative 3. A British documentary series decides to have a bit of fun for April Fool's day, and claim British scientists are being taken to a secret base on Mars to protect them from a terrible disaster. Twenty years later, the show is now a central part of a great many conspiracy theories by those who failed to get the joke.
- Carnivale had knights templar and tarot card mythology, obscure symbolism, cultural references from the 1930s, fabulous and expensive-looking recreations of the depression-era midwest, and refusal to provide helpful exposition to the audience. It got cancelled after two seasons.
- Doctor Who is generally pretty straight-forward, but the Seventh Doctor story "Ghost Light" is an involved meditation on the concept of evolution that probably requires two or three viewings to understand. It also uses literary and scientific allusions as a time-saving substitute for exposition.
- Firefly, Objects In Space. Most blatantly the opening, but the whole thing is a philosophical statement on existentialism. Whedon's DVD commentary might help the viewer to get the point (that objects have the meaning that people choose to give them).
- Ghostwatch, a BBC special Halloween show about celebrities conducting a séance which goes badly wrong. The show was later implicated in several suicides by people who believed that Michael Parkinson actually had been possessed by a poltergeist and was about to unleash his wrath upon Britain. It was done with much more care and attention to detail than the vast majority of the shows it was parodying, actually the buildup was done better than most Hollywood scary movies. Oh, and it was almost pure Nightmare Fuel.
- While most of the more obscure stuff in Lost falls under Genius Bonus, it does fall under this trope when it comes to the plot, which has become increasingly complicated as the show has gone on, with innumerable callbacks to previous episodes, making it extremely hard for new viewers to understand what the heck is going on. Not to mention flash forwards.
- And the fact that now The Island is skipping around in time. Literally. Lost requires the utmost of attention, or else the viewer will be utterly confused. In fact, it's not uncommon for a viewer to miss an episode and be completely... err.. lost.
- The 1980s TV Series Max Headroom, of all things, was short-lived largely for this reason.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 jokes about everything, from obscure songs most people have forgotten to classical history and famous works of art. Of course the fun of the show is that the riffs are so frequent, you can miss one or two and still get the jokes.
- Done by other, different-style riffers as well, such as "The Agony Booth". "Hey, it's The Death of Socrates! They told me there wouldn't be any French neoclassical paintings in this movie!"
- The riffs that revolve around these things are written so that they just sound funny even if you don't get the reference. ("It looks like a Frank Frazetta of Frank Zappa", "You look like Maude with a hellbeast", etc.)
- The Prisoner.
- In particular; the rest of the series, whilst surreal, is for the most part quite comprehensible, but the final episode goes completely mental.
- Commonly cited as a reason for the low ratings of The Wire, particularly with regard to its tendency not to spoon-feed information and its slow-burn pacing. Fortunately for fans of that series, it aired on HBO, where ratings for single episodes are somewhat less critical than they are for most networks.
- Australia's Playschool which was made to educate and entertain children between the ages of 1 to 6, once dicussed the concept of Time Travel with a story.
- Except this was actually a segment on 'Sleek Geeks', a 6 part series from 2008 that aired on the same channel as Playschool.
- "Yes Minister" is a British comedy series about a Politician, an Obstructive Bureaucrat, and a 3rd underling who answers to the second one. Even an adult who isn't well-acquainted with the detailed workings of British government, let alone a non-Brit trying to watch the series, would find himself pausing the video to look up things like "quangos" and "marginal constituencies" on That Other Wiki.
- To clarify for those who don't know the british political system, only the first is an elected official. The latter two are career civil servants. A LOT of play is made on the distinction.
- It is virtually impossible for a single viewer to correctly identify all of the references made in Gilmore Girls without looking them up. The cast would spend the majority of their readings just trying to figure out what the hell their characters were talking about, and eventually a book of "Gilmorisms" was distributed with the dvd sets to help aid curious fans.
- Dollhouse is possibly one of the smartest shows ever to air on primetime national TV. It has a convoluted plot, complex, multifaceted characters, and constant moral dilemmas that have no easy answer. It's not uncommon for a given episode's resolution to make the viewer feel like they're morally opposed to the way the plot unfolded, but can't think of an objectively better way to deal with the situation. It's basically a brilliant deconstruction of Grey And Gray Morality, and it is currently getting murdered at the ratings. The show just is not easy to watch.
- For many reasons, most of which have to do with the sexual/gender politics of the show.
- Some episodes of Red Dwarf, especially Series 5. Considering it's a comedy, a lot of people would probably just brush it off as Techno Babble.
Music
- In order to find the classical music parodies of P.D.Q. Bach (a fictional composer "rediscovered" by Peter Schickele) funny, apart from the occasional slapstick bits, the listener needs an encyclopedic knowledge of Baroque, Classical and Romantic music, as well as a grounding in music theory and scholarship. Conversely, listeners who only like classical and ignore popular music will miss many of the jazz, country and other non-classical elements Schickele sneaks in.
- The classical quotations are far more prevalent, and often the non-classical touches are no more than jazzy cadences. Even so, there are many pieces which mix both, like one of the fugues in "The Short-Tempered Clavier" which quotes both "You Are My Sunshine" and "Till Eulenspiegels Lustige Streiche."
- It's not just obscure music he makes jokes about. In "Iphigenia in Brooklyn", Orestes appears "chased by the Amenities". Cheap laughs...except that the Eumenides were actual Greek mythological beings more commonly known today as the Furies.
- In order to even BEGIN to understand what the death metal band Atheist plays, one would need a working knowledge of thrash metal, jazz, progressive rock, funk, and latin music. Try listening to Mother Man from Unquestionable Presence if you don't believe me.
- To say nothing of what Psyopus and Dysrhytmia do.
- Meshuggah is another good example. Enjoyment of their music almost requires knowledge of death/thrash metal, free jazz, progressive rock, polyrhythmic song structures, polymeters, and syncopes. Since 1993, they have produced exactly one song that relies on a consistent 4/4 timing, and are regarded as one of the most influential bands in the underground, despite having virtually nil in the way of mainstream recognition.
- Frank Zappa trampled this one into the dirt.
- Possibly Subverted by Iron Maiden , who often explain their literary and histroical references in the lyrics or even the title alone. (Examples: Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Alexander the Great, The Trooper)
- This Troper and many other Dream Theater fans need to listen to their songs at least 3 times through to catch all the little details. Deciphering Scenes From A Memory could prove as a real challenge to those unexperienced to reading inbetween the lines.
Professional Wrestling
- Vince Russo's entire run in WCW was based on the idea that Viewers Are Smarks; the whole thing was extremely hard to follow unless you already had a general idea of how the wrestling business works and the goings-on backstage. The problem was, even if you were able to figure out what was going on, it still wasn't very coherent or engaging.
Other
- Dennis Miller's short stint as a commentator on Monday Night Football drew ire from fans who found his dry, academic wit hard to understand. Indeed, pretty much anything Dennis Miller says qualifies.
- The Encyclopedia Britannica website actually began a feature where they attempted to explain his references every Tuesday.
- Wikipedia articles on even slightly technical topics tend towards assuming that the reader has at least a degree in the relevant field.
- And some of them are just complete gibberish, like this article - which I don't begin to understand. And I do have a degree in physics.
- The Firesign Theatre. Once described by Robin Williams as the audio equivalent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, and you're always looking for the little man who's coming out of the ass of a chicken.
- The MIT Mystery Hunt. According to The Other Wiki, puzzles have involved "arcane or esoteric topics like quantum computing, stereoisomers, ancient Greek, Klingon, Bach preludes, coinage of Africa, and Barbie dolls". And that's not even getting into the actual steps required to solve the puzzles.
Theater
- Anything ever produced by The Firesign Theatre. If you think you even got all of Nick Danger the first time, you are probably wrong.
- Tom Stoppard's play Hapgood initially flopped because so much of the plot exposition is contained within one character's metaphorical double-speak about Quantum Physics. The re-write makes the metaphors easier to understand even if you've never heard of quantum physics, and the plot significance is better signposted. Many people can treat it as a straightforward who's-the-defector spy mystery, missing the revelation (in the first act, in another rambling metaphorical monologue) of who the bad guy is and the idea that the rest of the play is about how they prove it, not about finding out.
- In fact, Tom Stoppard continually walks the line on this trope, and most of his (theatrical) work can be argued to be either refreshingly intelligent and stimulating, or purposefully obscure and elitist.
- Although he flips it around in Rock 'N Roll, which makes a lot more sense and has more emotional impact if the audience knows a good deal about '60s counterculture and rock music, specifically Pink Floyd.
- Bertolt Brecht is perhaps the only playwright in history who considers a piece with a character named Swiss Cheese to be Serious Business. If an audience is unfamiliar with his Verfremdungseffekt, they're likely to be lost from the first line onward.
- Many stage musicals with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim have this criticism levelled at them. Sondheim and his collaborators avoid pat sentimentality and create complex works of art - perhaps a setback when many audience members are expecting The Sound Of Music. Just a few examples:
- Company is an mediation on contemporary marriage. The show has no plot and reduces character empathy to an absolute minimum; instead, it explores different aspects of marriage through a series of non-linear vignettes and songs. There's an emotional and intellectual journey to be had, but it requires the audience to really invest themselves in the material and pay attention.
- Pacific Overtures is a historical pageant detailing the opening of Japan to the West in the late 1800's. Again, personal involvement is kept to a minimum, and the events are viewed through a purposefully biased Japanese perspective. The score includes a 9-minute mini-opera detailing American, British, Dutch, Russian and French trading treaties with Japan, and a 7-minute Taoist meditation about observation and memory in which nothing happens.
- Sunday In The Park With George, despite its minimalist, Britten-like score, can still be enjoyed as a classic tale of an artist (Georges Seurat) who alienates his lover for the sake of his art. Until the end of Act I, at which point the action fast-forwards a whole century to focus on contemporary instillation artist George, great-grandson of the original. Repeated viewings help tease out the direct, micro- and macrocosmic parallels between the two Acts to make the whole work serve as a treatise on art and posterity.
Video Games
- Metal Gear Solid 2 delves into meme theory so deeply that it is used to teach meme theory. Understanding this is hard. Very hard. It all makes sense, I promise, but don't try too hard, you will fry your brain.
- Persona 3 and 4 have a rather literal take on this in the form of various pop quizzes throughout the game. They tend to ask you random trivia facts about math, grammar, science, philosophy or Japanese history. Answering correctly gives you a permanent bonus to a particular out of combat stat. There is nothing in the game that tells you the answers, so you have to use your own real-world knowledge (or cheat). There are also midterms where you get a whole bunch of these in a row, but the midterms are composed entirely out of questions that they've already asked you so if you had been paying attention it should be simple to answer.
- Someone wasn't paying attention in class...
- To clarify, the game actually does give you many of the answers.
- Most of the comments made about Neon Genesis Evangelion also apply to Xenogears, especially on the psychiatry and Kabbalah sides (with the multiple personalities, paradoxical split selves (see Lacan and Grahf), and overlapping selves that have postmodern and poststructuralist resonances). The plot is also impossibly convoluted.
- Ditto with Xenosaga, Gears' spiritual prequel. It includes numerous references to Jungian psychology, Gnosticism, classic Christianity, Kabbalah, quantum mechanics, etc.
- At least Xenosaga had the courtesy to include a massive in-game database (which they removed in Episode 2...for some bloody reason). It's quite a good time sinker.
Western Animation
- Gargoyles, is an example of this in relative terms. It's targeted at kids but doesn't really make sense without some understanding of Shakespeare, Time Travel and the interplay of history and mythology.
- Interestingly, yet confusingly for Shakespeare fans, the series depicts Macbeth and Duncan closer to their historical counterparts than the Bard's play, leading many to erroneously think that They Just Didn't Care.
- A lot of cartoons in the 80s made jokes about old movies that kids would only be aware of from other cartoons that satirized them. Film Noir and Peter Lorre are fairly common for example. And this was LONG before Youtube or companies that rent DVDS through the internet. Videos we had, but what 80s kid is gonna sit through a Bogart movie?
- Boy howdy, Animaniacs. What kid, watching this show among the normal Animation Age Ghetto Saturday morning cartoons, was going to get the Whole Plot References to Les Miserables? Or The Seventh Seal? And that's not even getting started on all the Getting Crap Past The Radar.
- The Simpsons uses a lot of Pop Culture references/movie and literacy references in most of their episodes which would make sense if their viewers knew the source movie or book. So you'd have to watch a lot of movies/books to 'get' them.
- Family Guy is A LOT funnier if the viewer has good knowledge of culture from the 1960's up until today. Some jokes are more obvious, like the references to Indiana Jones and Star Wars, but many are more subtle, like the constant references to Dazed And Confused, to The Manson's Family's murder of Sharon Tate, to referencing song lyrics from I'm Too Sexy in dialogue.
- This Troper esspecially liked the Cutaway Gag reference to Der Struwwelpeter.
- American Dad, also by Family Guy creator Seth Mac Farlane, referenced this same practice in an episode. Klaus, bored as a fish in a fishbowl, has started to randomly talk about whatever was going on around him (and later, in a scene he was even in) like he was commenting on a DVD. Stan makes a reference about his daughter ending up as a "Squeeky Fromm", and Klaus makes the (real for the writers) comment that they weren't sure if they were being to obtuse in mentioning it, but felt that it was a smart joke and that's the kind of thing the fans go for.
- Futurama is more enjoyable if you have some familiarity with physics. They also have a background "alien language" (several actually) composed of symbols that is translatable if you want to go through the effort.
Web Comics
- DinosaurComics occasionally becomes this.
- Achewood. Full of obscure references to pop culture, music, history, and foreign languages.
- Among The Chosen states this as part of its author's writing style. The basic introduction to the story may be read here.
- Dresden Codak is very guilty of this, frequently covering subjects such as Jungian philosophy and transhumanism.
- I'm perhaps over-analysing, but tbe fact the jokes are obscure is perhaps the real joke. It pretty beyond unintentional when you act not only like if the viewers are geniuses, but like if the viewers are omniscients.
- It isn't as difficult as all that. A decent science fiction reader should get almost everything straight away.
- The Dungeons & Discourse comics in particular make a lot more sense if you have a decent knowledge of philosophy. A "Kierkeguardian" shouting "My existential dread won't affect them if they have no sense of self!" is highly amusing. Trust me.
- Some xkcd strips make jokes about rather obscure topics. Fortunately, the xkcd fanbase does include plenty of geniuses, and they post explanations on the forums.
- Lampshaded in the comic's disclaimer: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."
- This strip actually links to the appropriate wikipedia article.
- SOP for xkcd is generally that if you don't get Monday's strip, just wait a couple of days and you'll laugh at Wednesday's strip.
- Also, this comic has an obscure punchline. The joke is based on another joke.
- The last panel of this comic requires some knowledge of partcle physics.
- Be warned, It'll ruin your life
- As do Irregular Webcomic and Terror Island, but the more obscure topics are often explained in the annotations of both strips.
- Among The Chosen gets confusing in a hurry. The mil-speak, the Techno Babble, mythilogical references, and the tendency to mention important information exactly once all contributes to this.
- Freefall is a lot more understandable if you have a working knowledge on physics, cybernetics, mathematics and philosophy. Among other subjects.
Web Original
- Animated sci-fi/Urban Fantasy series Broken Saints has a sprawling, slow-starting, and enormous plot with numerous characters, deep religious/philosophical themes and motifs, references to obscure works, events, and cultures, and heaps upon heaps of Techno Babble. The creators are themselves of the opinion that these elements are why the series is more popular in Asia and South America more so than North America.
- The Whateley Universe. Think about an 'ad' for a movie made based on Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (which see)... as directed by noted conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone. Or a classroom discussion of Lucan's Pharsalia when one of the people in the room is actually the avatar of Juno.
- A lot of memes. Just try asking (most) anyone who knows about a particular Internet meme what it means, or how it came to be.
- A stunning number of people have absolutely no idea what "NEDM" stands for.
Fan Works
- Prinz von Sommerhoffnung, my goodness. What's supposed to be, if the author can be believed, a Mai-HiME AU novelisation slaps you with a questionably correct piece of translation-wordplay from the title on. The various character names, ostensibly attempts at Captain Ersatz-ing, run on translations, transliterations and wordplay that need some amount of bizarre lateral thinking to decipher; not to mention that Shout Outs both to modern and older works are handled in a roundabout way. Perhaps the worst part, though? The author knows his stuff is undecipherable, and seems well blasé about it.
- Aeon Natum Engel. The author admits he likes to write intricate plots. He's not lying. He makes offhand references to the end-plot of Neon Genesis Evangelion by quoting another book. There's foreshadowing in both Medieval and Ancient Latin, cross-referencing Roman generals across several periods of time. Part of the plot is revealed in flashbacks that don't bother with proper names. You might not actually want to know what is going on either...
Real Life
- Many proprietary software end-user license agreements work under the assumption that the person installing the software is either a trained lawyer or can afford to engage the services of one every time they decide to install a piece of software. Though this is probably reasonable when the customer is a large company with lawyers on staff, it's definitely not when you're just selling to ordinary people.
- That is the point of an EULA. You sign your life away, and they pad them so that nobody can actually read them.
- Completely averted by the (sadly uncommonly-used) WTFPL.
- Alternatively, they are working under the assumption that nobody reads the dratted things anyway. After the initial Google Chrome license fiasco, it was pretty obvious that a lot of companies that use them don't either.
- Diablo II: Lord of Destruction also had an easy-to-read EULA in the back of the manual. Only two pages long!
- It's not settled that the EULA's are enforceable, especially if they try to cram in something really lopsided. More here.
- In Sweden, the EUL As found in software that you buy as a boxed CD are probably not enforceable, because they are inside the box wrapped in plastic and therefore not available to read before the moment of purchase. (The customer must be able to know what he buys, so to speak.) However, this particular issue has never been tested in court. And besides, software publishers have started to work around it by printing the URL of the EULA on the box.
- Please keep in mind that they have to do this, because contracts have to be very precise. Sadly, legal precision is not conducive to easy understanding.
- A contract's precision need only match its purpose. Multiple pages of terms and conditions may be appropriate when buying a house, but not when buying a bus ticket. The argument here is that EULAs are far too complicated given their purpose. Not to mention that for all their complexity, their terms often are imprecise and even self-contradictory.
- Ignorantia juris non excusat. Which every government on Earth says you have to know what it means, which is "ignorance of the law does not excuse". You are required to know every single one of the thousands and thousands of laws, rules and regulations that apply to you. This includes the legalese of every contract you sign and every tax you have to declare.
- Pay attention and read every document you sign, as courts will not allow you to claim that it is "unfair" or that you had no idea about that clause hidden in the small print. Once you sign, you are legally agreeing to it all.
- As with the EULA example though, if it actually is unfair, there may be some room for argument.
- Mind you, this also applies during police interrogation. The reason you should always get a lawyer is because, frankly, you probably don't know what crimes you might accidentally claim to have committed otherwise.
- This video explains, at length, why you should never, ever, under any circumstance whatsoever talk to the police. The major reason being the "hearsay" law. You know that ubiquitous cop show Miranda line, "anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law" ? That's literal. Nothing you say to the police can be used for you. In short : don't talk to the police. Even - no, especially if you didn't do it.
- The only entities not required to pay attention to everything they sign? Businesses, of course. The people who base their entire career on making deals with and sales to other businesses can just send forms back and forth to each other, and it's assumed no one is actually reading them. Courts deal with any discrepancies that pop up— and not once has any judge said "YOU BOTH SHOULD HAVE READ THE DAMN FORMS." Instead, they simply classify the case as a "Battle of the Forms." Every single Contracts textbook has a section on it, and it's just accepted as a part of commerce.
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