Call Back versus Continuity Nod

I would like to raise some a concern regarding the use of Call-Back and Continuity Nod.

First off their current definition on here:

• Call-Back: A plot-relevant reference to an earlier event in the story
• Continuity Nod: A non-plot-relevant reference to an earlier event in the story

Firstly, our definition of Call-Back is not as it's being used in the industry which defines it simply as an internal allusion which doesn't make a distinction about plot-relevance.

Secondly, users on here don't seem to know our specific definition of Call-Back either and list any Continuity Nod-like reference as a Call-Back. From my experience, I reckon the misuse is above 70% but will back this up with a wick check later.

As a lumper I don't see a good enough reason to make our lives difficult with this plot-relevant/non-relevant distinction. Just have one trope Call-Back for any internal references and be done. I'd like to propose this in TRS but wanted to run this by Trope Talk first in case I am missing something.

Opinions?

Edited by eroock on Sep 29th 2022 at 3:17:50 AM

You are looking at a very extensive clean up, those are some of the most ubiquitous tropes on the site.

Personally, I think sometimes there is value in keeping certain terms separate despite functionally meaning the same thing. It's keeping one hand on the value of the site as a standing encyclopedia and another on the site as being an internal community trying to capture and define new terms.

My main point is that the difference seems to fly over the head of most users here. What good is having the distinction when let's say 15,000 of the 26,000 cases of Call-Back are misused? For all I care, Continuity Nod could be made an alias of Call-Back and in so prevent any extensive cleanup effort.

Frankly both names suggest lack of plot relevance to me, and it doesn't make clear what would be used in the case of a comedic work with little to no plot. I guess there's Brick Joke but I'm not sure if that would always be proper either.

In keeping with both of these tropes dating to the time when we were still TV Tropes, if you had asked me what the distinction was I might have given one that would only really work in the context of TV: a Call-Back refers to something within the same episode or at least arc (like a non-comedic Brick Joke), while a Continuity Nod refers to anything earlier in the series. The general gist would have been that a Continuity Nod sits on a continuum of back-referencing somewhere between Call-Back and Mythology Gag.

I do think the description of Continuity Nod does a decent job of defending the current distinction on grounds that the purpose of the tropes is different: a Continuity Nod lets the fans know that, yes, this thing happened, while a Call-Back brings back something from the past to actually inform the present storyline. Given our definition of a trope and how that colors how we see the wiki, as (to a significant extent) a resource for writers, that makes it an important distinction; the idea of purpose as key to the identity of the trope informs (my reading of) pages like People Sit on Chairs and (more relevant to this case) The Same, but More Specific. The problem, for this and several other tropes, is that that distinction isn't always as clear to the audience, and the audience is who is filling up the wiki with examples.

It doesn't help that Call-Back only really applies to series with enough continuity to mine to bring something back to inform the plot, but not enough to do it on a regular basis, making it a fairly specific trope. For a highly serialized series, it's almost to be expected that elements from the past are always informing what you're seeing now. The result is that it's Call-Back's description, not Continuity Nod, that contains the sentence "This is often used to remind viewers that there is an ongoing storyline." That's not to say a work where the storyline is front and center can't use this if it's something that came up a while ago but hasn't been brought up since, though.

Another problem might be the names. The defining word of Continuity Nod is supposed to be the "nod" - it's just a little nod of the head to something in the past of the show's history. But I wouldn't be surprised if people pay more attention to the "continuity" and assume a work has to have some sort of strong continuity for it to apply. Meanwhile Call-Back says nothing about the character of the reference, and someone could assume it's relatively tightly related to Brick Joke (either in terms of the length of the call-back, as suggested above, or its character) or just a case of someone saying Remember When You Blew Up a Sun? without anything else to it (the page quote does not help with this). So one could reach a conclusion that Call-Back is comedic or specific to comedic works while Continuity Nod is dramatic or specific to dramatic works, nearly flipping the distinction on its head.

Not helping matters further is the snowclone Call-Forward, which is something in a prequel or flashback referencing something that's already been published but set later than the prequel or flashback, which short of time travel, can't be plot relevant... and whose description defines Call-Back as when "characters make a quick Shout-Out to an event that happened earlier in the series", which is close to what I might have defined it as but which doesn't seem to jive with the whole "must be plot-relevant" aspect.

This is all me thinking out loud, I don't know how relevant or productive any of this is.

One of the continuity tropes was in TRS relatively recently, but the thread failed because nobody could figure out the jargon and intricacies.

Does that mean we're in a chicken and egg scenario?

More of a Grandfather Clause, they've been around so long it's hard to tell which is stronger. For what it's worth it looks like Call-Back has 26,000 wicks and 15,000 inbounds while Continuity Nod has 18,000 wicks and 14,000 inbounds.

I personally have viewed Continuity Nod as the supertrope where there is an acknowledgement of past events (ie "after Vegas I decided to get a security system"), while Call-Back is more explicit with the specifics (ie "maybe we can try the same trick we used in Vegas").

Edited by EmeraldSource on Sep 29th 2022 at 10:51:11 AM

As someone who's gotten into Expanded Universe media, and have had trouble figuring out if the examples I find count as either a Call-Back or a Continuity Nod, I'm in favor of combining the tropes into one. Especially since minor distinctions between similar tropes have come under more scrutiny lately, like "Funny Aneurysm" Moment getting merged into Harsher in Hindsight (since "comedy that now looks bad after this event" and "drama that now looks bad after this event" weren't meaningfully distinct enough).

That said, the wick count is massive, and it is daunting to try and figure out what name to settle on.

EDIT: And as for Call-Forward, I have heard an alternate name for that if we wanna move away from snowclones: "Pre-Weight", which I believe was coined by The Nerdwriter in this video on the second Hobbit film. His definition also seems to be Mythology Gag as well though, since he uses the phone booth joke in Superman as an example.

Edited by harryhenry on Sep 29th 2022 at 11:50:25 AM

I find "Pre-Weight" super unclear and would rather just stick with Call-Forward.

It's not like either name is so weird and esoteric that a snowclone is bad by default.

I believe Continuity Nod is almost exclusively a TV Tropes term, while Call-Back is a pre-existing term that has a few definitions in both writing communities and general vernacular (maintenance companies have a "call back" as a type of job).

Edited by EmeraldSource on Sep 30th 2022 at 1:30:56 AM

If that's the case, Continuity Nod could work as the overall name if we wanna avoid that confusion with the many definitions of Call-Back. It's akin to how Fanservice has evolved in the wider internet lexicon to include nonsexual fan-appeasing (which we still call Pandering to the Base).