Original YKTTW
, TRS thread
that renamed it from One Second Later. Note that the OP, at least, of the TRS thread seemed to have a different idea of the purpose of the trope than the creator of the original draft.
I think that it's relative to the overall length and pace of the work and how it's supposed to feel to the audience. Foreshadowing a few minutes before the reveal could still be this trope if it happens in a normally very slow-paced work, at the end of a five-season-long series or a massive movie or the like.
As a very rough benchmark, though, the foreshadowing should at least be in the same scene; it also helps if it's part of the same "narrative sweep" as the reveal. The ending of The Usual Suspects is four minutes long, say, so stuff that happens in it happens a few minutes before the actual reveal, but clearly this trope applies because it's all part of the same gradual build-up to the reveal.
Steven Universe is odd in this regard because on one hand it's a fairly long continuity-heavy series, but on the other hand episodes are only ten minutes long, so "a few minutes ago" is half the episode.
Edited by Aquillion on Dec 30th 2024 at 7:51:41 AM
I like "Same Scene Foreshadowing" as well — that feels a lot clearer than "Five-Second Foreshadowing". Perhaps some more ideas are in order though, in case a scene isn't brief and the passage of time is palpable?
Just something to get the ball rolling, though I still like "Same Scene Foreshadowing" the best.There's absolutely no evidence that the name is causing any problem, so I think it's too early to be coming up with new ones.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.
We're just discussing what we believe would've been a better name, also considering ideas in the event it turns out people are indeed using it for stuff that would fall under regular foreshadowing.
That being said, I was thinking of doing a wick check; with 3413 wicks, that means needing to check 58. The description could probably use improvement as well, so that its main focus is not so much on a generic example (or at least I feel it's that way currently).
Edited by Eggy0 on Dec 31st 2024 at 9:12:00 PM

So what exactly counts as "five seconds" in Five-Second Foreshadowing? The description, from how I understand it, implies the timeframe between the foreshadow and the revelation is supposed to be pretty short, in the sense of "it happens a few seconds after" and it even has the phrase "less than five seconds later". However, it seems to rely on some sort of "bomb planted somewhere" situation to describe the trope, and while visiting Recap.Steven Universe S 1 E 38 The Test looking for Foreshadowing (there was a moment of foreshadowing I wanted to add if it wasn't there already), I found an entry for Five-Second Foreshadowing listing hints to a revelation that doesn't occur almost immediately, but rather a couple minutes after. I exchanged it for the "regular" variant and left the hint that does happen mere moments before the reveal, but then I started thinking... is "a couple of minutes" considered as being short enough to fall under "five-second foreshadowing", or is that really just stretching it and turning into "Foreshadowing an event that occurs after a few minutes instead of three episodes later"?