Is Foreshadowing Omnipresent?

I am questioning this because their aversion have a trope page(Ass Pull).

It's a universal trope, but it's not necessarily omnipresent. Omnipresence is not required to have aversions listed, and Ass Pull is not an inversion of Foreshadowing.

(confused)The first paragraph of Ass Pull is "An Ass Pull is a moment when the writers pull something out of thin air in a less-than-graceful narrative development, violating the Law of Conservation of Detail by dropping a plot-critical detail in the middle, or near the end of their narrative without Foreshadowing or dropping a Chekhov's Gun earlier on."

That's not what inversion means.

You can foreshadow an Ass Pull. It just has to be something that doesn't seem plausible even with the foreshadowing. It probably makes it bad foreshadowing, but it doesn't make it not be foreshadowing.

And just because you don't foreshadow something doesn't mean it's an Ass Pull. It could be something perfectly plausible that makes sense, just not hinted at beforehand. I'd say most elements in fiction is introduced that way.

Both tropes are pretty hard to inverse, though. Not quite sure what that would be (postshadowing/hindsight?). However, the lack of something isn't the inverse of said something.

(continues confused)I not read nothing in the description of Ass Pull that mentions that this can be something hinted before- and the fourth paragraph mentions that "it's the opposite of Chekhov's Gun."

I'd usually be very careful about defining tropes in relation to other tropes, especially opposites. An opposite of something can take many forms. I mean, what's the opposite of a red triangle?

Other questions - how common can an aversion to a trope be before it can be listed? And considering that Ass Pull's own description refers to it as Chekhov's Gun's inverse, how common is Chekhov's Gun?

edited 1st Aug '14 5:58:02 PM by MagBas

You're overthinking this. Chekhov's Gun is an extremely common narrative device, but it's not omnipresent in the same sense as The Hero. Omnipresent means that it's so common as to not be noteworthy when it appears. There's a reason we don't list every example of The Hero.

If a story doesn't have a Chekhov's Gun, that fact is not interesting in and of itself. What is interesting is if it has The Reveal part of that trope, but not the setup. We call that an Ass Pull.

To reiterate, a Chekhov's Gun is a plot device that shows up early in the plot, but whose significance is not revealed until much later. If the device shows up later, but was never revealed in the first place, then it's an Ass Pull.

That's an inversion, which is different from an aversion. Aversions require omnipresence to be notable. Inversions do not.

edited 1st Aug '14 6:11:22 PM by Fighteer

Rare aversions are usually more notable than common aversions, unless a particular type of aversion is common enough to be a trope in itself, or if the trope it's an aversion to is universal or omnipresent.

The nature of fiction means that there is a story to tell, and the fundamental story arc of leading to a climax means that every step along the way "foreshadows" the climax. At least in theory. The Law of Conservation of Detail means that everything is important, so everything has the potential to foreshadow a later development. To the Genre Savvy so many innocuous things are evidence of things to come, which is why we have tropes like Spoiled by the Format and Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize.

Also, don't get too hung up on exact wording and how tropes are described. One is that we are not professionals writing an encyclopedia through peer review, so imprecise phrasing is a possibility. Another is that many tropes are much broader in definition and scope than how we catalog them, but for the sake of organization and good examples we have to set some boundaries. And some terms have an active life outside of this site. For a fun time, try establishing the definition of MacGuffin and what does or does not count as an example.

"Rare aversions are usually more notable than common aversions, unless a particular type of aversion is common enough to be a trope in itself, or if the trope it's an aversion to is universal or omnipresent."

The reason to the notability of aversions to omnipresent tropes is not because of their rarity?

Well, if a trope is omnipresent, then by definition an aversion would be rare in relation to the trope, but it might not be rare in terms of absolute numbers. It depends on how you define "rare". However the point was the reason for the notability was not because it's rare, but because it's an aversion to an omnipresent trope. The trope is simply so common that the lack of it is notable.

"The trope is simply so common that the lack of it is notable." You means Foreshadowing, any Omnipresent trope or why?

A trope in the general sense, along the lines of which I stated before. Basically, the more common a trope is, the more notable an aversion to it is.

About this... the lines in question are "Rare aversions are usually more notable than common aversions, unless a particular type of aversion is common enough to be a trope in itself, or if the trope it's an aversion to is universal or omnipresent.", sure? If i understood well, the "common enough to be a trope in itself" means that the aversion of a trope can be listed if said aversion is really common. Is this correct?

A "common aversion" is usually nothing at all. How do you trope the absence of something, except in comparison with something that is expected to be present?

By contrast, a "common inversion" should usually be made into its own trope.

edited 7th Aug '14 5:28:28 PM by Fighteer

The point is that if a particular aversion is common enough to be a trope it can be examined to see if it is a trope, or if it's just People Sit On Chairs. It doesn't mean it will be a trope. But if it is, it's notable because it's a trope, not because it's an aversion to something else, and should therefore be noted on its own page rather than as an aversion.

Either way, it's really a minor and very generalised detail in what was actually the point of that post.