7-Second Riddles is a YouTube channel devoted to riddles and brain-teasers. Beginning in 2018, the channel uploads multiple videos daily, all featuring a variety of riddles.
The typical format of each riddle is as follows:
- The audience will be introduced to a character or characters.
- Something will happen, such as a scandalous act, a murder, or a kidnapping.
- The audience will be presented with the riddle in the context of the character's plight. For example, in a murder scenario, the audience will need to look for clues and determine which character is the culprit.
Other times, the audience will be tasked with identifying which character of multiple fulfills the criteria of the search—such as being an alien in disguise, a maniac, or wealthy—based on subtle clues in the picture. There are several other variants of riddles and formats, but they all resolve around the audience having to solve puzzles on the spot, either with logic, clues, or general knowledge.
You can find the channel here
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Tropes that appear in 7-Second Riddles:
- Accidental Murder: The solution to a riddle involving a man's girlfriend dying while at his proposal dinner involved the man putting the ring in her food, causing her to accidentally choke to death.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Robots tend to end up becoming dangerous and rogue, especially in the scenario that gives them free-will. Puzzles will involve finding ways to stop them from killing everyone.
- Alien Abduction: Multiple riddles involve children being abducted by aliens. When their parents go to save them, they must then figure out which kid is theirs since by that point, their kid has been imperfectly cloned. To the alien's credit, they always willingly agree to hand the kid back as long as their experiments are done.
- Anti-Interference Lock Up: One riddle involves a girl locking her sister in the bathroom to take her place as the lead singer of her band for the night.
- Area 51: A character ends up going there as part of the 2019 event and discovers it's not only filled with aliens but other monsters as well—and some human guards. The aliens are actually super chill and welcome him with open arms since it turns out the site is actually a secret alien settlement.
- Audience Participation: Of a sort; some riddles never actually have definitive answers and are instead deferred to the commenters, who can then theorize amongst themselves as to what the "correct" answer is. On at least on occasion, a riddle's answer was chosen from the comments section.
- Ax-Crazy: Quite a few characters in this universe seem to commit murders for the sake of it. An entire subset of them revolves around determining which characters are actually maniacs—the clues range from things like having bloodstains in their room, to having body parts in the vicinity, to carrying weapons or other suspicious objects.
- Buried Alive: One riddle involves a woman getting buried alive by some angry Mafiosi; the riddle is how she can get herself freed before she suffocates to death.
- Casts No Shadow: Vampires are depicted as being shadow-less in addition to reflection-less, making them easy to spot.
- Chainsaw Good: Ax-Crazy Serial Killer characters are often depicted as holding giant, bloody chainsaws.
- Clean Food, Poisoned Fork: The solution to one murder puzzle was that the victim's ice-cream spoon was poisoned; it was the only time she was eating food the others with her didn't directly touch, as they each had their own ice-cream.
- Conjoined Twins: Used as the solution to a riddle involving a woman who can't go to jail for killing her brother-in-law. The judge couldn't sentence her because she and her sister were conjoined, and he would've had to jail the sister along with her.
- Death of a Child: While kids are more likely to just be knocked unconscious or otherwise spared than adults are, there's still plenty of riddles featuring kids being found dead or murdered. One riddle even murders two of them—a kid is killed off by their bully, and then the bully themself is killed for revenge.
- Dissonant Serenity: The art style often features the characters with unchanging expressions, usually big smiles. This becomes pretty creepy when the riddle is about murder, as all the suspects will look unnaturally happy about the situation.
- Easy Amnesia: One riddle involved a butler who killed his master but somehow passed a Lie Detector test when claiming he didn't commit the murder. The solution was that he'd hit his head afterward, conveniently forgetting he committed a murder.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: A cheating husband in one riddle is caught when he claims to be in London but sends a picture with the Statue of Liberty visible in the background, proving him to be in New York.
- Evil Twin: One murders his brother over inheritance and gets away with it by stealing his brother's identity and pretending he was the dead one, not his brother.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The videos all involve riddles, and you get seven seconds to solve each one before they supply the solution.
- Failed a Spot Check: Many crime-based riddles involve the culprits lying about impossible scenarios and claiming things that fly against what they should know to be true, like the time of day something happened or where it took place. In other instances, they'll send pictures of themselves claiming to be in one location but miss an obvious detail in the picture that proves them a liar: for example, a palm-tree in the background of a supposedly cold area.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: In the 7-Second Riddles universe, ordinary humans live alongside all sorts of monsters and other strange creatures, from ghosts, to vampires, to aliens, and everything in-between. Many riddles either involve escaping from these monsters or solving a riddle based around understanding the monsters and their stereotypical traits—such as that silver can harm werewolves or that sunlight kills vampires. It's just accepted in these riddles that these monsters exist and we need to deal with them somehow.
- Four Is Death: There's a mirror rumored to kill people if they look in it at 4:44. However, this is subverted; it actually kills people at 7:16, when the mirror image of the clock reads 4:44.
- Frame-Up: A common plot in the riddles involves characters faking a crime. The riddle part is determining the evidence that proves the crime never happened and that whoever was being framed for the crime is innocent.
- Fresh Clue: A common theme is that culprits will set food out on a table after committing a murder, only to claim the food was there for hours. They're always caught because the food is too fresh or cold for the story to be true.
- From Bad to Worse: The multiple-part riddles often play out like this. A character will get stuck in a bad situation and need to escape, but things keep escalating after each step; what starts out as fleeing a kidnapping scenario can end up with a building on fire and zombies on the loose.
- Great Escape:
- One riddle involved the wrongfully accused protagonist escaping The Alcatraz by crawling through the vent in their cell.
- There was a puzzle involving two cops trying to decipher a coded message they intercepted from some of the prisoners. Their failure to crack the code in time allowed the prisoners to plan an escape.
- Hiccup Hijinks: Downplayed; one riddle is about a man looking to get water for his hiccups, only for the bartender to instead scare them off. With a gun.
- Hostile Hitchhiker: Of the "Hostile To Hitchhikers" variant; there's a riddle involving a hitchhiker that got murdered by a man who gave him a ride.
- Human Disguise: A common scenario involves finding aliens in disguise as humans. They will inevitably give themselves away somehow, simply by doing things humans cannot—like glowing, sporting Extra Eyes, or displaying some sort of superpower.
- An Ice Person: A literal Ice Queen shows up as the villain of one riddle. She lives in an Ice Palace, wants to turn the protagonist into an ice sculpture, and captures them when they're wandering through the snow.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Cannibals are a common occurrence in riddles, most often as a potential obstacle or threat standing in the protagonist's way. Occasionally, the audience will be tasked with finding said cannibal, which often involves them using bones or body-parts in some way.
- Imperiled in Pregnancy: Several riddles involve pregnant women being put in danger, either because of stupidity making them do dangerous things or for the audience to solve riddles surrounding the circumstances. Either way, if a pregnant woman is involved, she'll most likely be in trouble.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: A lot of riddle culprits end up being caught because they referenced details they shouldn't have known about—such as the contents of a stolen purse, or the fact that the victim's house was empty.
- Knights and Knaves: At least one puzzle followed this plotline, involving the riddle's protagonist having to escape a cave where two guards stood at the exits—one liar, one truth teller.
- Knight in Shining Armor: Often show up to save the Princess Classic from their predicament, sometimes by fighting a dragon, other times by solving puzzles.
- Locked in the Dungeon: One common plot involves characters being locked up in dungeons or basements and having to escape with one of the means provided by the riddle. Usually, this means picking from one of several doors and determining which one is safest.
- Madness Mantra: After a traumatizing avalanche and a week's wait in the snow, one of the survivors went mad and began to repeat, "Ate...Ate...Ate...," because they ate the eighth member.
- Mad Scientist: A recurring antagonist-type, sometimes attempting to experiment on the protagonist, other times working with dangerous AI or generally acting as an obstacle.
- Magic Brakes: A busdriver's brakes stop working, and he ends up driving the bus and all its riders off of a cliff, with enough momentum to go uphill.
- Offing the Offspring: One riddle involves a mother murdering her daughter, then using Crocodile Tears the next morning while setting the table... for only three family members, hinting that she already knew her daughter wasn't going to be there for breakfast.
- Pity the Kidnapper: Subverted. One of the potential solutions for a riddle involves annoying a kidnapper into freeing you, but it's the wrong answer; the correct answer is to try and befriend the kidnapper to make it harder for them to hurt you.
- Potty Emergency: A woman driving home from the supermarket realizes she suddenly needs to use the bathroom. During a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Read the Fine Print: A student who fails to do so ends up as part of an experiment to turn him and others into a Hive Mind.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: A monster under a kid's bed is shown with bright red eyes while holding a knife and smiling evilly.
- Replaced with Replica: One riddle is about a precious diamond being stolen and swapped with a fake one, allowing the culprit to escape with the real diamond hidden in their drink bottle.
- Riddle Me This: The plot of some riddles involves a character being forced by another to solve a puzzle and dying if they get it wrong.
- Running Gag: Characters having to choose one of three trap-hiding doors to escape a kidnapping situation, with one of the doors usually leading to a raging fire.
- Shout-Out:
- One riddle featured characters named David, Phoebe, Chandler, Ross, and Joey.
- There was one riddle focusing on a young boy at a magical school. Of course, his name was Harry.
- The choices in one "Who Is Dumber?" riddle involves two blob people, one that ate expired medicine and the other who sold both their kidneys.
- One riddle is about A woman named Scully and a man named Mulder.
- The setting of one riddle is the Star Wars planet Hoth.
- Sdrawkcab Name: An invading alien attempts to disguise himself as a person named "Neil A."
- Seadog Peg Leg: A pirate, as well as his Pirate Parrot, both have peg-legs. He uses his peg-leg to stop a leaking boat.
- Solar-Powered Magnifying Glass: A few riddles involve characters surviving a deserted island by making fire with their glasses, or in one case, with a camera lens.
- Suicide Pact: In one riddle, a husband and wife both agreed to jump off a building. However, the wife didn't jump, and the husband brought a parachute. The riddle was to determine which of the two spouses was betraying the other for insurance money. note
- Super Serum: Some riddles will involve the audience finding pills that grant them temporary super-powers. The riddle involves figuring out which pill would help them deal with their situation.
- Suspiciously Prescient Planning:
- One riddle concerns a girl who was found murdered when her family woke up the next morning. It's then revealed that the mother was the one who killed her; the clue is that she was only setting 3 plates at the table, just enough for her, her husband, and her son. If she hadn't known her daughter was dead, she would've set an extra plate for her.
- A husband and wife agreed to jump off a building together, only for them both to survive: the wife didn't jump in the end while the husband brought a parachute. One of them is revealed to have betrayed the other for insurance money, and the riddle involves determining which one it is. Since the husband obviously planned his survival ahead of time by secretly bringing the parachute to the top of the building, he's clearly the culprit.
- Too Dumb to Live: The "Who Is Dumber?" riddles involve characters putting themselves or others in life-threatening danger out of obliviousness or stupidity. The audience is tasked with figuring out who is the dumber one by comparing the scenarios.
- Trapped in TV Land: A girl gets pulled into a nightmarish horror-movie world by a Monster Clown, but is able to escape by solving his riddle.
- Uninvited to the Party: Two Alpha Bitchs don't get invited to a girl's party while everyone else does, so they decide to swipe invitations and crash it in the chances of ruining it.
- "X" Marks the Spot: A kid finds a treasure map and follows it to a spot in the garden. It's subverted, because he doesn't find anything when he digs—his steps aren't as big as the person who made the map, so someone else finds the treasure instead.
- Zombie Apocalypse: A viral outbreak at a hospital causes some of the doctors to get infected, making a bad situation all the worse as people are already locked inside and panicking.
