Discussion Main / OffscreenInertia

The trope is about the fact that if there is an interruption in the story flow, the characters upon resumption will be doing whatever they were doing before the interruption.

Actually, it's not even that. It's about the fact that, unless we are given reason to believe otherwise, we will assume that the characters will be doing whatever we last saw them doing.

...Since we seem to like renaming, here's some alternative titles. Remember there's nothing stopping you from adding suggestions.

But the name doesn't actually refer to the cartoon itself. It refers to Gary Larson's comments in The Prehistory Of The Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit where Larson uses this trope to explain why people were angered. He dubbed the phenomenon "The Tethercat Principle." Gary Larson isn't just the trope namer in the usual sense of having a trope named after him, he actually named it! Calling this trope anything other than "The Tethercat Principle" is basically taking someone else's work and putting your own name on it!

He put a name on an existing principle. It's not like people before The Prehistory of the Far Side never believed in Offscreen Inertia.

Putting a name on something is still significant. Just because it was always a thing doesn't mean that properly pointing it out and giving it a name is meaningless. The world was already aware of the fact that advanced technology would be perceived as magic by primitive peoples, long before that fact came to be called Clarke's Third Law. As far as I know, nobody had ever really formally described this trope's phenomenon until Larson did, nor named it. Therefore, his contribution definitely matters and, at the very least, the name should really reflect that contribution. In any case, I submit that "Offscreen Inertia" is a stupid name, if only because it's just boring. Accurately descriptive? Eh...if you explain what it means, sure, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of a name? Also, the title is nonsensical. "Offscreen Inertia" is just the same thing as regular Inertia. The whole name just sounds like someone rushed out a new name and didn't really give it any thought or care. "Narrative Inertia" is a bit more accurate, but still doesn't sound great to me. Anyway, I don't understand the need for everything on here to have technical-sounding names. It's purely a pop-culture-oriented site, and other, similarly esoteric trope names have made their way to the greater lexicon simply by virtue of TV Tropes' popularity. Personally, I liked "Tethercat Principle" a lot better. The trope is not actually about the things in the work itself; it's purely about our own psychology, and how our brains perceive the actions of observe objects. "Offscreen Inertia", to me, implies that, for example, the dogs actually do keep playing the game for eternity...it's not just our perception, it is reality. It also is referring to a theoretical force that causes the phenomenon, rather than referring to the phenomenon itself. To me, the "Principle" part, at least, reflects the fact that it is a quirk of our psychology that makes us perceive it this way. "Larson's Law" would also work, unless you can point me to somebody else who concisely defined and described it first or, failing that, more famously. And if you doubt Gary Larson's significance to scientific jargon, I urge to you look up "Thagomizer" on The Other Wiki.

Anyway, long story short, if it really rubs you the wrong way, then it doesn't have to be specifically "Tethercat Principle", but "Offscreen Inertia" just doesn't work, and I think Larson deserves some kind of recognition.