History PoorCommunicationKills / Literature

** ''Literature/TheWayOfKings'':

* In a Franchise/StarWars novella, Imperial officer Kyle Katarn defects to the Rebel Alliance after he finds out that the Empire recently killed his father. He embarks on a black ops mission to recover part of the Death Star schematics, but is, naturally, monitored by the rebels to see if his turn was legitimate. When he's seen meeting with another Imperial, Mon Mothma gives the order to agent Jan Ors to kill him. What they don't know is that the officer was an old friend of Kyle's whom Kyle had persuaded to help him. Jan and Kyle end up in a MexicanStandoff, and if Jan hadn't found it impossible to kill the man that she was developing feelings for, the scenario would have ended in tragedy.
** There have been some ''terrible'' cases of this trope occurring across the Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse. One of the biggest ones was the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. It turns out that a number of people like Palpatine/Sidious, Vergere, Thrawn, and Darth Krayt ''knew'' about their existence and simply did not tell the galaxy at large - and giving vague hints to only a few people at the most. Sure, most of these people were villains and some of them were neutral, but a lot of grief (among other things) could have spared if people were simply told about it. The same things can be applied to Jacen and Abeloth, as well as Darth Bane's Sith Order and the Jedi Order.

* ''LightNovel/ACertainMagicalIndex'': No one bothers explaining the existence of magic to Mikoto, even when she's brought along on a mission to fight against a magical organization. This eventually leads to her using the [[{{Magitek}} Anti-Art Attachment]] without knowing about the [[PsychicNosebleed consequences]] of an esper using magic.

* ''Literature/WhileMyPrettyOneSleeps'' has a justified example; after barely surviving being shot by the Sepetti gang, undercpver cop Tony Vitale is stuck in a hospital bed and he's either unconscious or hardly lucid when he's awake because of all the medication he's on. He tries to tell his superiors that there's a contract to kill Neeve Kearny, but [[spoiler:Nicky Sepetti]] isn't the one who ordered it. Unfortunately, all he's able to get across to the other cops is "[[spoiler:Sepetti]]...no contract", which they assume to mean there's no contract at all and Neeve is safe. [[spoiler:Tony is eventually able to communicate that he learned Gordon Steuber put out the hit, prompting the cops to move against him and bust him for heroin smuggling, though they still have to find a way to foil the assassin, not to mention Gordon is actually being set-up by the real killer]].

* In ''The Land of Love and Drowning'', the StarCrossedLovers Anette and Jacob are repeatedly told by their families they can't be together, but nobody tells the truth about ''why''--they're half-siblings--so they don't listen. Jacob's mother at least has a sensible motive for keeping it a secret, because her in-laws will cut Jacob off financially if they find out he's illegitimate. But Anette's sister is just too proud to admit her beloved father had an affair. It takes until almost the end of the book for the pair to learn, by which point it's too late. They're irrevocably in love and already have a child, so all the knowledge does is make all three feel awful.

* Justified in ''The Riddles of Epsilon'', which is ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. Epsilon has to leave puzzles and clues for Jess, the protagonist, because the forces of evil are watching her and her family. If he just tells her what's going on and how to stop them, they'll hear. Unfortunately, the riddle game causes just as much trouble; his last human ally, Sebastian, couldn't crack the riddles and never fully trusted Epsilon, which meant the BigBad was able to [[spoiler: kill Sebastian's mother after its attempt to mind-control her into finding its MacGuffin failed.]]
* ''Mycroft & Sherlock'' by Creator/KareemAbdulJabbar and Anna Waterhouse is a {{Prequel}} set when Mycroft is an up-and-coming young civil servant and [[Franchise/SherlockHolmes his brother]] is an erratic university student. They are both looking into some strange events that seem to involve Mycroft's friend Douglas's business somehow, and which turn out to be connected to a series of killings. Since Mycroft disapproves of Sherlock's morbid fascination with murder, he glosses over this aspect for fear of encouraging it. Since Sherlock is aware of Mycroft's disapproval, he does likewise for fear of being stopped from investigating. Unfortunately, each brother has only discovered part of what's going on, and cannot make further connections without the other's information.

* Discussed and averted in ''Tender'' by Belinda [=McKeon=]. The main character has grown steadily more obsessed with her gay best friend, culminating in her going to his boyfriend [[spoiler: and saying she's sleeping with him (the best friend) in an attempt to break them up.]] Her now-ex-friend later asks her (during a well-deserved WhatTheHellHero) if she seriously thought his boyfriend was just going to believe her without reservation and go haring off instead of talking to him about it.

* One of the ''Inspector Montalbano'' books has a bad case of mishearing- Montalbano's lieutenant, Mimi, comes to his house late at night, looking very stressed, and tells him that he's got something that he needs to tell him: he's decided to get married. He phrases this as 'I've decided to take a wife', but Montalbano hears it as 'I've decided to take my life' and freaks out. It takes a while to sort out the situation, but they get there.

* ''The Key to Rondo'' could plausibly have instead been titled: ''Poor Communication Kills: The Novel''.

* The ''Literature/HarryPotter'' books run on this trope, otherwise they'd all be 100 pages long. The most prominent offenders:

** DownplayedTrope, in that it's personal rather than political, but the Lannister twins spend most of ''A Feast for Crows'' having a falling out due to their inability to communicate properly. This it ''is'' a plot device (they can't communicate properly because it would break the plot if they did) -- but it's also a JustifedTrope for these two. Their entire relationship is premised on the idea of "one soul in two bodies". Within such a belief system, the logical next step is that if you're ''me'' -- the other half of my soul -- I shouldn't ''have'' to explain my feelings to you, you should just ''implicitly get it''. So the Lannsiter twins aren't just ''incompetently'' bad at communication; they're in some ways ''willfully'' bad at it.

-->"But I was never told of this!"
-->"You were told to hold the castle. What part of that did you fail to comprehend?"
** Likewise, [[spoiler: Doran Martell]] keeps much of his plans hidden from his family and their allies. This ultimately leads to an ill-fated round of XanatosSpeedChess that led to [[spoiler:Princess Myrcella losing an ear after his daughter Arianne's failed attempt to crown her and his son Quentyn dying in a slow, agonizing death after failing to woo Daenerys and attempting to tame her dragons instead when she's gone]]. Ser Barristan Selmy noted that [[spoiler:if Doran revealed the marriage pact earlier then Daenerys wouldn't experience any trouble in Slavers' Bay]].
* In GRRM's first novel ''Literature/DyingOfTheLight'', this trope remains supreme. Although the main theme of the novel is that people often tend to hold onto once fulfilling things that no longer have a purpose, which impedes their personal growth, a second theme could be that maybe it's better to communicate with your friends and loved ones. Almost none of the unfortunate plot developments would have occurred had the characters actually had reasonable conversations with each other. At some point, this stretches suspension of disbelief like how Gwen never asks the protagonist (who is her ex-boyfriend and visiting her and her husband after seven years of no communication), "So, why *are* you here, exactly?" It's also unbelievable that after leaving a relationship because of unreasonable expectations upon her, she enters a second one with a guy from a different culture and never inquires about what this whole "Betheyn" thing means, nor does he offer that information to her despite being enlightened and having a good understanding of how foreign a concept it would be to her.

* ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'', where the excessively gentlemanly heroes deliberately choose not to tell Mina Harker about their vampire hunt so as not to distress her, thus making her the [[DistressedDamsel perfect target]]. Ironically, once the damage is done and they must let her in on it, she copes rather better than her husband did. And it's also the reason that Lucy and her mother died; if Van Helsing (who was the only guy who had any inkling of what was going on with Lucy at that point) had been upfront with the women, then there would be no plot.

* Romeo & Juliet (Older than Steam): Shakespeare's main characters die because Friar Laurence is unable to get word of the plan to [[FakingTheDead fake Juliet's death]] to Romeo. Instead, Romeo receives news that Juliet really is dead, buys poison and goes to her family's tomb, kills Paris after Paris thinks he's there to do something unspeakable to Juliet's body (since he's not aware of their love for each other) where he commits suicide. Juliet then wakes up and, on finding Romeo dead, kills herself.

* Quite a bit of the violence and resentment in ''[[Literature/BrotherCadfael Saint Peter's Fair]]'' could've been averted, had Abbot Radulfus at least ''hinted'' at his intent to bestow a portion of the Fair's profits to Shrewsbury as a charitable gift. The abbot's reticence is due to his determination ''not'' to set any precedent that the town should expect such largess as a regular thing, and to his not realizing how badly the town's young hotheads would take his initial refusal to forfeit even a penny, when the Guild leaders beseeched him.

** It gets ''really'' bad in ''Literature/PeaceTalks,'' as Ebenezer [=McCoy=] is aghast at the fact that Thomas knows about [[spoiler:Maggie, Harry's daughter]] and believes Harry is being stupid to the point of suicide in letting a White Court vampire get so close to him and his family. The thing is, Ebenezer doesn't know that Thomas is also Harry's brother [[spoiler:and thus his own ''grandson'']] and Harry doesn't see fit to tell him until literally the worst possible moment, leading to all kinds of conflict.

** Deliberately tampered with communication restarts the Manticore-Haven war. The guy who did it wanted to make the Havenite president just angry enough that she was ''almost'' ready to go to war and he could step in and save the day. He underestimates by about one degree of anger, and millions die. Suffice it to say he's lucky he [[spoiler:died in a ''genuine'' accident]], because the president in question was preparing to have him charged with treason and executed.

* Quite a bit of the violence and resentment in ''[[Literature/BrotherCadfael Saint Peter's Fair]]'' could've been averted, had Abbot Rsdulfus at least ''hinted'' at his intention to bestow a portion of the Fair's profits to Shrewsbury as a charitable gift. The abbot's reticence is due to his determination ''not'' to set any precedent that the town should expect such largess as a regular thing, and to his not realizing how badly the town's young hotheads would take his initial refusal to forfeit even a penny, when the Guild leaders beseeched him.

* In ''The Land of Love and Drowning'', the StarCrossedLovers Anette and Jacob are repeatedly told by their families they can't be together, but nobody tells the truth about ''why''--they're half-siblings--so they don't listen. Jacob's mother at least has a sensible motive for keeping it a secret, because her in-laws will cut Jacob off financially if they find out he's illegitimate. But Anette's sister is just too proud to admit her beloved father had an affair. It takes until almost the end of the book for the pair to learn, by which point it's too late. They're irrevocably in love and already have a child, so all the knowledge does is make all three feel awful.