A character in a comic talks, on and on and on, but the exact content's not important. Or else no one is listening.
Their blathering is given in a Wall of Text—often as the backdrop—but the text is obscured with Speech-Bubbles Interruption (whether by other speech bubbles, the characters themselves, or some other visual element) so that the reader knows the complete text is not important.
Enough words are usually shown to get the gist of what the character is expressing, although Blah, Blah, Blah is also common, depending on whether the characters listened enough to get the gist, or not at all.
Long Speech Tea Time can have actions that obstruct the bubbles. Sub-Trope of Textplosion.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Asteroid in Love: When the cast are looking at different mineral samples at the Geological Museum in an unanimated part of the eleventh chapter, Mira and Ao come across the heart-shaped Japan-law twin crystals. Ao wonders how it's formed, and Mira suggested it might just like materials molded into a heart-shaped cavity. Ao falls into a dilemma about how to respond
, handled through this in a thought bubble.
- Ayakashi Triangle: After Soga accidentally grabs Matsuri's breast, the following shocked Reaction Shot has over a dozen different lines of text imposed over it, all expressing embarrassment and sexual confusion.
- Akina Shinozaki is not prone to this normally in Don't Become an Otaku, Shinozaki-san!, but get her on the topic of her favorite anime, PrePure and her budding otaku side will burst out in a decent wall.
- Describing delicious food will cause Food Wars! Leonora Nakiri to break into this. It's especially notable as Leonora normally speaks very broken Japanese, but when the Wall of Blather kicks in she's instantly fluent.
- Genos's backstory in the manga version◊ of One-Punch Man is recounted by two panels full of deliberately-undersized text, the latter of which Saitama stares up at annoyance before yelling at the cyborg to shorten his story to 20 words or less. The anime depicts this by having Genos rattle off progressively faster while cutting to Saitama's exasperated expression.
Comic Books
- Used in Górsky & Butch, mostly for really unimportant stuff but once for the authors' notes, which are extremely plot-relevant. But not only that — in one scene they talk too much, and the speech bubbles create a traffic jam.
- In Pax Americana #1, while interrogating a criminal, The Question lectures him about his personal philosophy with his speech bubbles placed behind him as he rambles on. The criminal—currently in a precarious situation and could die at any second—just yells that this is why the other superheroes kicked the Question out of the Pax.
- Transformers: More than Meets the Eye has Swerve, a diminutive Motor Mouth who has the ability to talk at length about nothing in particular. In one instance, he did so for 147 hours straight. There's comic panels demonstrating why he is also known as "Shut The Hell Up."
Comic Strips
- In Prickly City, Winslow at a press conference — going Blah, Blah, Blah as well.
Fan Works
- Hollowtale: In the first page of the Part 4, when Papyrus learns the Knight's name, he immediately starts blathering about the Royal Guard of the Knight's world, with his Motor Mouth speech obscured behind himself, the Knight and Sans.
- In Turnabout Storm, Rarity gets carried away when she gets the idea of making a new suit for Phoenix, and she keeps blathering in the background while Phoenix and Pinkie discuss where to go next.
- A comic for the Kingdom Hearts fanfiction Those Lacking Spines shows Jeffiroth's Badass Boast as this to the protagonists, who would much rather see what fight he can put up with rather than be bored with words.
Films — Live-Action
- The credits to Wrongfully Accused, among other Credits Gag, include a section headed "Nobody Cares About These People", which is then scrolled through at about 300% speed.
Live Action TV
- In the TV movie Get Smart, Again! our Comedic Hero manages to cock up CONTROL's replacement for the ever-unreliable Cone of Silence. The Hall of Hush turns spoken words into visible words floating in the air, but Max spends so much time raving about how wonderful this invention is the Hall of Hush becomes full of words and no-one can make out what anyone else is saying.
Music
- Comedian Henry Phillips' song "She's Talking Again" tries to drown out his blind date, whose ongoing voice-over continues throughout the entire song. She rambles inanely about anything that comes into her head, including uncomfortable medical topics and incorrect historical references, nonstop without segue or purpose of any kind. At the end when the song runs out of energy, she says what a great listener he is and they should do this again in the future.
Video Games
- In one of the dream sequences in Max Payne, Max answers a phone to be greeted with a stream of meaningless nonsense spoken in his own voice, which is represented in the in-game graphic novel using this trope.
- Twice in Bowser's Inside Story, a goomba in Bowser's castle, and a magikoopa in Peach's Castle.
- Twice in Sonic Riders: First, when Tails is explaining how the Extreme Gear stays aloft—much to Knuckles' consternation—and again when Wave is lecturing Jet on how he should be more responsible as the leader of the Babylon Rogues. Humorously, Jet hears her dialogue as a speeded-up chipmunk voice, and then goes on to the next race, abandoning her mid-speech.
Webcomics
- In anti-HEROES, overriding a monologue.
- Brawl in the Family: Kaepora Gaebora bores Link to tears.
- In Bruno the Bandit, the introduction strip had Bruno's speech bubble over the narration -- which he can apparently hear.
- Critter Coven: Florence has a habit of rambling on about subjects like the origins of witch’s hats, or how ghosts can be banished.
- In Cucumber Quest,
- Sometimes used in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures. For example, in the Abel's Story bonus arc, Abel's friend Mink is quite the chatterbox, as shown here.
- In the first strip of DM of the Rings, the characters talk amongst themselves and their speech bubbles partially hide the DM's captions, who is rattling off the campaign's endless backstory in the background.
- Dream*Scar: She's really rambling.
- Dresden Codak, often uses a variant where we only see the part that fits within in a speech bubble, as if viewing a Wall of Blather through an elliptical window. For instance, rambling on and on about a new found robot. This creates the effect that the listener is drifting in and out of a spiel they can't be bothered to pay full attention to, or couldn't follow if they tried.
- El Goonish Shive uses this here and here with the Walls of Text fading out and here with an argument continuing in the background. In the last two examples the full text is given in the commentary.
- In an early Flaky Pastry strip, a potential roommate fails to grasp the meaning of "tell us a LITTLE about yourself".
- Grrl Power: When a group ends up taking Sydney hostage, one of them gives her a 'truth serum' to try to get information they could use in some way. Given that she takes an ADD prescription implied to be just one short step down from meth, and has trouble keeping quiet even then...
- Gunnerkrigg Court: Too whoozy to attend.
- Homestuck's Kankri Vantas is an over-the-top social justice warrior who loves to go on long sermons given the slightest provocation (or, in fact, none at all). Particularly ridiculous ones are displayed in several columns of unreadably tiny text just to drive the point home.
- In MeatShield, Leonid isn't exactly listening to Disparoxus.
- MegaTokyo: Asako does this to Yuki only to be abruptly interupted a few panels later when Yuki realizes there was vital information in that wall of blather.
- In Nip and Tuck, Thelma produces one from the pure excitement of her beauty contest win.
- The Order of the Stick:
- Vaarsuvius, the party's wizard who suffers from Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, has had this treatment a few times. Here's the first of several.
- When Genius Bruiser Roy and his (unknown to him yet) Evil Counterpart, Dumb Muscle Thog go in a dungeon together, Roy's Blah, Blah, Blah speech bubble is obscured with Thog's thought bubbles.
- Vaarsuvius, the party's wizard who suffers from Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, has had this treatment a few times. Here's the first of several
- In the second strip of Our Little Adventure, Angelika and Rocky's loud argument is the background of the last panel.
- Rusty and Co.
- Here it's for the readers, not the characters.
- Calamitus doing his first monologue is similarly obscured, as Mimic and Princess aren't paying attention.
- Here it's for the readers, not the characters.
- Sandra on the Rocks: When Lavali (for reasons of her own) gets Sandra to talk at length about her work, the details that Sandra offloads are unimportant to the plot, so the trope shows up.
- Slightly Damned has a lot of fun with this. It also has speech bubbles through which show a small patch of what's obviously a larger Wall of Text.
- Star Impact's Aster gets wordy when...
- In Three Jaguars, the clipboard of slogans while Artist and Business Manager discuss marketing.
- In Widdershins, Malik blathers about the gun without realizing what its being real means.
- Yang Child: Rambling.
