Hindsight Cleanup

100 pages, and 100 more and greater.

The hell kinda shitass happened here on Undertale?

The first two folders use the tactic of "this moment from earlier in the work becomes harsher because of this moment later in the work", which I'm not too sure what to do about it, but it usually works. The Hilarious examples seems a bit more varied (I'm mostly sensing Fan Myopia) but I can't go through them right now because Adam ruined everything:

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In "Adam Ruins Going Green", the end-of-episode silver-lining that Adam presents the Paris Agreement as a sign that things are looking up. This episode came out December 27, 2016, six months before Donald Trump announced that the United States was pulling out of the Paris Agreement.
  • "100 Years Ago Today", the final episode of the Reanimated History arc, ends with a segment on the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Adam makes the sobering argument that even today, the world is unprepared to handle a pandemic of that magnitude. Two years after the episode aired, COVID-19 came along and proved him absolutely right.

• In "100 Years Ago Today", Adam explained that during World War 1, the Spanish Flu claimed far more lives than the war did, but because of the war it wasn’t reported on for fears it may lower morale. The Spanish Flu eventually died out, not because of anything man did, but because it claimed all the lives it could at the time. The CDC even theorizes that another Spanish Flu-like epidemic may be upon us, and that in the time it takes to make a vaccine, the disease will have already claimed millions of lives. Then COVID-19 said hello.

So, we've got a Trump example that I'm not sure about, and a COVID example that definitely needs to be cut. Any thoughts here?

Edited by WoodKnapp94 on Dec 28th 2020 at 11:43:42 AM

The Trump thing isn't strictly about Trump so much as a thing that happened to be done by him, so maybe it could stay if edited to remove his name.

>"this moment from earlier in the work becomes harsher because of this moment later in the work"

Those are usually valid; the trope namer for "Funny Aneurysm" Moment was like that after all. They can still be a huge reach sometimes, but it's usually obvious.

I think I heard somewhere that examples within the same work are acceptable if it’s years later, but not if something happens only a few episodes later, since the two events were likely planed at the same time.

Edited by costanton11 on Dec 28th 2020 at 4:59:06 AM

I personally see it as a case-by-case thing, where generally as long as it's not blatantly obvious foreshadowing that only makes sense in the context of the later event, it can count. We've never really established rules about in-universe Hindsight, and some people on this thread just cut it outright, which I personally find too hasty.

Oh, yeah, it's not a FAM if it's actually Foreshadowing.

From Rambo: First Blood Part II

• Hilarious in Hindsight: This line:
  Co: Rambo! You're not expendable.
  • At one point in production, after Co gets shot, it was planned on having Rambo scream "No!" in anguish before being cut, feeling it would be Narmy. Whoever decided this must have felt vindicated when Revenge of the Sith had a similar moment.

The first is pretty interesting. Could it work if more context is added or is it actor garbage? The second just tries to force a connection and seems like an easy cut

Cut the second one. As for the the first, maybe some context could be added.

Edited by callmeamuffin on Dec 28th 2020 at 8:06:32 PM

From Dirge of Cerberus:

• Hilarious in Hindsight: Weiss has spiky white Anime Hair and karate pants, and during his boss fight, he has a Flash Step, he can attack you so fast you can't see his hits coming, and he dodges almost everything you throw at him. Weiss mastered Ultra Instinct over a decade before Goku did!

More in-depth than some, but all of this still reads of Fan Myopia.

Indeed well-thought out, but cut it

From YMMV.In Spectre

• Harsher in Hindsight: The anime series aired in 2020, the year when almost everyone witnessed the destructive power of lies and propaganda on the internet and social networks (the documentary The Social Dilemma also helped), and major media companies trying too late to put a stop to hate speech and conspiracies. Kotoko's attempts in stopping the spread of a lethal urban legend seem too optimistic compared to the damage caused by social networks in the real world, and these cannot summon faceless murderous specters.

Permission to cut for being too early?

Comment it out from the YMMV page until the pandemic ends! It can be commented out with the two percentages.

Edited by callmeamuffin on Dec 29th 2020 at 5:14:56 AM

I wrote most of the Funny Aneurysm moments for Undertale because the game had a huge emotional impact on me, except for the one about Toriel being called an "old hag" and the last one about the Dog Room. (Sending good vibes for Toby to recover, since carpal tunnel syndrome is no joke.) If people have an issue with them they can bring it up to me and I will defend them to the best of my ability. I also did one Harsher In Hindsight about Asriel reverting to a flower after the game's canonical Golden Ending and the Hilarious one with Papyrus revealing he's actually never tried his own spaghetti.

The other thing is that a lot of these aren't necessarily foreshadowing. There is no way at the very beginning of the game to know that the talking flower is Toriel's son, and people would have to pick it up with hints until they reach the Golden Ending that confirms it. The same goes for the friendliness pellets because you would have to commit to the Genocide run to the point where you kill Flowey as he's begging for mercy.

FWIW, what is the Funny Aneurysm Moment trope when you can't reference in-universe material that doesn't fall under foreshadowing? The trope name comes from a literal aneurysm that happened in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If in-universe examples were invalidated, it would get rid of the trope itself.

Edited by Jayalaw on Dec 29th 2020 at 3:12:17 AM

This is on The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show under Hilarious in Hindsight:

• Shaggy pretends to be psychic.

Edited by fragglelover on Dec 29th 2020 at 2:03:36 PM

Don’t you just love ZCEs?

Edited by MatthewLMayfield on Dec 29th 2020 at 2:06:33 PM

That's exactly what foreshadowing is- things you don't catch on the first run around, but are hinting at things to come. Of course at the beginning you don't know these things- it wouldn't be foreshadowing otherwise.

I'm assuming there must be some actor connection here because I don't want to believe this person assumes all psychics can be tied back to Psych (didn't even spell it right).

I think foreshadowing can count as Hindsight as long as it's not an obvious setup (i.e. "Bob saying Trent will regret crossing him is much harsher after Bob killed Trent for crossing him"). But the deliberate stuff can probably fall under Rewatch Bonus.

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 29th 2020 at 3:54:16 PM

There is a whole foreshadowing page for Undertale that describes the building blocks for the narrative. An FAM or Hindsight entry seem to refer more to the realizations you get when they aren't in that category, and the former is when a moment seems really funny. If they have to be moved, I'd rather they weren't outright deleted and instead moved to either Foreshadowing or Cerebus Retcon. I didn't write most of the Hindsight entries but many other people did.

(Update to my previous entry; there are two FA Ms I didn't do, about Toriel being called an "old hag" and Asgore a "fool". The other is the Dog Room.)

The Sans entries under "Harsher" especially become this when Deltarune hints that he may have hopped timelines with Papyrus and is trying to find a way back to the world where monsters aren't trapped. Delta Rune isn't necessarily a sequel but it does have connections to the first game.

Generally, a Pacifist Run takes about seven hours while a genocide run can take a little less since you're doing more killing and less exploring. Speedruns exist, but unsure if that should count for a measure of time.

With Toriel batting away Flowey, it doesn't build up to any narrative relevance in the sense that she hurt her own child. It's just a moment of pure horror in hindsight after a player may snicker at the suddenness. The foreshadowing is that Toriel swats Asgore similarly to end your battle with him before it can begin a second time on a Pacifist Run, showing that if she wanted to end anyone quickly, she can.

Here's a question: Is it hindsight if it comes up later in the same installment, not a later episode/sequel (like with the trope namer)?

Also, someone brought up saying "nine eleven" and how nobody said that before 2001. People have been saying that since 1963.

In regards to this...

During an entry assessment of many media, I put up an Aneurysm entry I deleted from YMMV.Dream SMP, because of the short timeframe (1st event happens in late November 2020, 2nd event happened in early December 2020) and the fact that the Dream SMP is ultimately one single installment, with arc seperation only existing for viewer convenience AFAIK. Another troper agreed on what I said.

If all of the events occur within what's basically a single installment, and it isn't about any out-universe stuff, does it really count as a hindsight?

WARNING! Examples from Touhou Project!:

Edited by SomeLibre on Dec 30th 2020 at 10:28:26 PM

From The Dark Knight

• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment:
  • Hong Kong actor Edison Chen, the man you can hear asking Lucius to hand over his mobile phone in the beginning of the Hong Kong scenes. Chen had just been involved in a Real Life scandal, where the people repairing his laptop went the extra mile to upload his Porn Stash to the internet - including nude photos of several of his Production Posse. The ending of The Dark Knight involves a city-wide breach of privacy...If it happened before production, it's not hindsight. Also the ending isn't Played for Laughs
  • Also, Alfred's early throwaway line to Harvey Dent takes on a much different meaning after Rachel's death. "You've known her her whole life, haven't you?" "Not yet." Ouch. Is it really "in hindsight" if it's within the same installment? This seems like foreshadowing and/or Rewatch Bonus
  • Joker's "I think you and I are destined to do this forever..." after Batman beats him.Actor mortality, ZCE
  • One of Alfred's famous lines (mentioned in the Hilarious in Hindsight trope) later became a metaphor to Zack Snyder somehow ruining DC's reputation in the film industry due to his direction in two of his movies. Complaining
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The posters featuring The Joker with "Why so serious?" written in blood became extremely eerie after Heath Ledger's sudden death.And? Is that in anyway similar to Heath Ledger's death?
  • "Madness, as you know, is like gravity; all it takes is a little push" became this several years later when it really did happen to someone in a different continuity (though courtesy of a different villain).Sounds more like a reference to the Joker's "one bad day" from The Killing Joke
  • The Joker's loftier or more abstract threats ("If I say that one ole little mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!" "When the chips are down, these 'civilized' people? They'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve.") all basically come to pass in The Dark Knight Rises. For that matter, Bane's ultimatum regarding the nuclear detonator is, essentially, a scaled up version of the boat scene (and, like with the boat scene, control ultimately lays with him).Not sure
  • A meta one: remember Joker's rant about how nobody cares about anything when things are going according to plan, but when someone shakes that up people lose their minds? A stuntman - Conway Wickliffe - died while filming the movie. Heath Ledger (the Joker himself) died some time after. Conway's death is a footnote, as people seem to "accept" that sometimes stuntmen will die when a movie's being filmed. Ledger's death is widely remembered, discussed, and sometimes mis-attributed to the movie. He had wrapped and was filming something else by the time he died. But a lead actor with a lot of buzz isn't "supposed" to die. The disparity makes this an unsettling case of Life Imitates Art.Reach, actor mortality
  • The double-date between Bruce, a Russian ballerina, Harvey and Rachel leads to talk of authoritarianism being a sensible choice when things get out of hand. In The Dark Knight Rises we find out that a Gotham without Batman immediately turned to authoritarian measures to keep the crime rate down. This seems valid
  • The line "You either die a hero, or lived to see yourself become the villain": The latter became the fate for Batman's Earth-99 counterpart.Reach
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Alfred tells Bruce "Some men just want to watch the world burn.". The very next day audiences got to see Fire Lord Ozai trying to burn the entire Earth Kingdom to the ground. It was like they knew the movie would be premiering on the same weekend! It gets better! Fire Lord Ozai is voiced by Mark Hamill, who voiced the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series.Fan Myopia
  • Among those suspected to be the Batman is Abraham Lincoln. Guess which one of Lincoln's relatives once wore the cowl?Actor garbage for someone not appearing in this movie, not hindsight
  • Stephens being taunted into attacking the Joker. Considering the person playing him would later voice The Joker was able to outsmart Harbinger long before Shepard did and the cop even refers to hurting someone how ironic is that looking back at the Dark Knight now.Actor garbage
  • We now have Batman: Arkham Origins, released five years after the film came out, and the game's plots become strikingly similar to the plots of the film.
    • The setpiece of Batman having to rescue hostages by steathily taking out both heavily-armed SWAT and Joker goons on various floors of a building, while using sonar tech to establish enemies and hostages through walls, is virtually a beat-for-beat sequence of a typical Batman: Arkham Series mission, the first of which releasing the following year.Seems at best superficially similar
  • Way back in Two-Face's first appearance in the comics, it's briefly mentioned that there was a particular surgeon who could've fixed Harvey's face, but he was put in a concentration camp during World War II. The name of this doctor? Dr. Ekhart, one letter removed from the name of the actor who plays Harvey.Actor garbage, not even hindsight
  • The Joker kills the Chechen by having him fed to his own dogs, claiming that a dog is not loyal to anyone when it's hungry. This is exactly how Ramsay Bolton dies in Game of Thrones, specifically because he starved his dogs.Fan Myopia
  • The line "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" is also this now that Michael Keaton, who played the Caped Crusader in the Tim Burton films, plays the Marvel villain The Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Even earlier than that, in 2011, Val Kilmer, Keaton's immediate successor in Batman Forever, voiced Walker Sloan in Spider-Man: Edge of Time. Christian Bale is even now set to play the Big Bad of Thor: Love and Thunder.Actor garbage
  • Stephens is an expy of Harvey Bullock. Come the second season of Batman: The Telltale Series, his actor, Keith Szarabajka actually voices Bullock.Actor garbage
  • Every time the Major Crimes Unit is brought up, given that the film was released at the last time ever that a movie, especially from DC Comics, could use that acronym without being awkward.No

Probably cut them all.

Since you brought that film up, here are the examples from YMMV.The Dark Knight Rises:

• Harsher in Hindsight: A murderous gunman killed a dozen people at a midnight screening of the movie. The notoriety of this incident, and the killer being dressed as the previous movie's villain, can make the film much harder to enjoy after the fact. Also, the Gangster Squad trailer that aired just before the attack featured a shooting in a movie theater. Warner Brothers since pulled the trailer and had the final act of the film (in which the theater shooting would've taken place) re-written and shot, though some people's screenings still showed the trailer.
  • Bane's storming of Blackgate might be uncomfortable to watch when you take into account that in 2015, Al Qaeda operatives stormed a prison in Yemen amid the overthrow of that country's government and ensuing chaos to break out Al Qaeda members that were imprisoned there.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Batman telling Gordon that anyone can be a hero, even someone doing something as simple as putting a coat around a boy's arms and assuring him that it's not the end of the world, became even more heartwarming after the tragic Colorado shootings, where Christian Bale himself went to visit the victims unannounced, on his own money and time.
  • In Batman Begins, Ra's Al Ghul tells Bruce to pick out a rare blue flower as part of his quest to find what he was looking for in the first place. At the end of this film when Alfred sees Bruce with Selina in Italy, Selina is wearing a blue dress.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The CIA agent played by Aidan Gillen claims that he threw someone out a plane after shooting them, joking that they "didn't fly so good". This becomes humorous when you keep his role in Game of Thrones in mind, as two years later, Gillen's Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish actually throws a character through a trapdoor overlooking a drop of thousands of feet — an action which was referred to by another character as "flying" when other people met that same fate.
  • More than one person has noted the similarity between the climax of this film and Batman's troubles with disposing of a bomb in Batman: The Movie. Both sequences even ends with Batman appearing to get blown up only to appear unharmed later.
  • Bane's previous, much-criticised, appearance in a Batman film was in Batman & Robin. One reason fans complained was because he was not a villain in his own right as in the comics, but was reduced to just been the mook of a female villain. At the end of this film, we find out he was working with another female villain, though the film does not establish who is working for whom, or if they are a Big Bad Duumvirate.
  • On a similar note, there's Selina Kyle. Like Bane, Catwoman's previous film appearance was widely hated, in part because the lead, despite using the name "Catwoman", had little to do with the original character. Now, as noted under Ensemble Dark Horse above, Selina's character is widely praised for capturing the character's essence perfectly... but she never uses the name "Catwoman".
  • In the beginning of the movie, Selina manages to steal Bruce's car by claiming she's his wife. Ultimately, she's the one Bruce ends up with.
  • A few years before The Dark Knight Rises, Anne Hathaway was rumored to have been cast as the main villains in the unmade Spider-Man 4. The villain in question? Black Cat, a character who has a reputation for being a total rip-off of Catwoman.
  • This is the second time where Bane leaving Batman alive ultimately came back to bite him, and those he's working with, in the ass.
  • The moment the power went out at New Orleans stadium during the Super Bowl of 2013, jokes about how Bane was attacking the city spread like wildfire.
    • Which is doubly hilarious considering all the comparisons made before hand of Baltimore Ravens (winners at said game) Linebacker Ray Lewis' facemask to Bane's mask.◊
  • Selina saves a street kid (played by Aramis Knight) from several thugs. Aramis was later cast as Bean in Ender's Game, who grew up on streets dominated by bullies. Maybe he misread "Gotham" as "Rotterdam"?
  • John Daggett tries to intimidate Bane, a Darth Vader Clone, and gets strangled to death doing so. Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Daggett, would star as Imperial Director Orson Krennic in Star Wars: Rogue One, where he faces Vader himself, and again, nearly gets strangled while trying to be intimidating, with Vader countering "Be careful not to choke on your aspirations, Director.".
    • On the topic of Star Wars, Nolan himself has compared Bane to Darth Vader. As it just so happens, "Darth Bane" is a real thing in Star Wars.
  • A comic book aspect of Bane that is Adapted Out of the film is the source of his super strength, a super-soldier steroid called venom. Hell, just seeing Tom Hardy wearing a black mask with "teeth" qualifies as this alone.

Edited by costanton11 on Dec 30th 2020 at 7:36:49 AM

I question both examples on YMMV.Marvin

• Harsher in Hindsight: Tom Armstrong himself said the inspiration for Marvin was both his own experiences as a parent as well as various 1980s news articles about an increased birth rate of babies during said decade. Knowing this, it can be harder to look at the strip nowadays given that by the start of the 21st century, birth rates in First World countries have plummeted.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A Sunday May 8, 1988 strip shows Jeff and Jenny bottle feeding Marvin while lamenting how time goes by fast and Marvin won't be a baby forever. The final panel shows an adult Marvin being fed by his now elderly parents with him saying in thought balloons that he'll always be their baby. Besides being both a Tearjerker and very heartwarming, it's also funny as in the present, Marvin is still a baby.

Edited by rjd1922 on Dec 30th 2020 at 9:25:11 AM

Entry 1: This is violating the "wait till the event is over" criteria.

Entry 2: IDK much, haven't read the strip.