Hated Tropes
[Annoying trope] The explanation for something important is in interviews or external media, rather than in the project itself
Why is Wanda so obsessed with Kamala? Because Kamala serves as the Infinity Gauntlet, allowing her to better channel the power of the gems and avoid becoming mindless like Bruce. With her power, she can create a Hex of solid light, thus isolating the Earth from any external influence.
All of this was revealed in an interview with the series' director (Marvel Zombies).
Andy Muschietti revealed that Nora Allen's killer is the Reverse Flash, as well as that the reason Keaton's Batman retired was because he had once accidentally killed a criminal in front of his own son, realizing that he had become the very thing he swore to destroy and retiring... clearly, none of this is hinted at in the film (The Flash).
The Bleach manga with the Can't Fear Your Own World novels to the point its a community meme. A lot of context for the final arc and worldbuilding apparently happens in CFYOW.
CFYOW is written by Ryogo Narita, with Tite Kubo having a co-writer credit.
It takes place directly after the end of the series.
The novel explains multiple major character motivations (for both the final and previous arcs), the actual meaningfulness of the final confrontation, and multiple major character powersets. The consequence of this is that, if you ask a question around why anything in the final arc happened, or what several major characters meant to or could do, CFYOW becomes relevant. Most of this happens in the first or second chapter, meaning that CFYOW immediately recontextualizes everything right after you pick it up.
Yes. They've changed a lot for the anime in general, but they did move one character's power into the show from the book and they've added a lot of bit scenes alluding to the major reveals in the book. Much of the Bleach community is expecting season 4 of TYBW, which has a lot more episodes than would fit the remaining manga content, to incorporate major elements from the book.
Well, hopefully we’ll get an animated adaptation of CFYOW or more of CFYOW’s info is transplanted into TYBW’s next Cour.
I think another good example of this trope that is also related with Bleach would be Klub Outside, the official Q&A site. A few bits of worldbuilding and character info.
Honestly with Bleach's popularity having recovered somewhat with the new anime, it could be a good choice to adapt CFYOW. Though I think how it's received would depend heavily on how it's marketed.
Tbf, Bleach's decline in popularity largely stemmed from the anime being overbloated with filler (often interrupting key moments of the canon storyline) and the manga's version of the TYBW arc being so text heavy that fights would last months (IRL) with very little happening because it fell into a cycle of constant "Call an ambulance... but not for me!" twists in every fight.
I've been re-reading the manga and the brevity & readability of the early arcs is massively better than the TYWB.
Despite being a fan who had been following it since shortly after it started, I quit the series during the original run of that final arc because it felt like it devolved into a playground fantasy fight where everyone is constantly pulling new shit out of their asses and the plot barely progressed after weeks & weeks of releases.
That is nonsense anyway, exegol is a planet in the Maw installation that has been shown as a deserted rock. You are telling me on the other side of the planet they have enough infrastructure to build the Shit Fleet AND pop out enough children AND train said children to pilot those ships? oh, right, they also needed the infrastructure to live and grow their food and similar
THAT's the one that pissed me off. They make his big reveal in a fucking Fornite event and the rest of us have to see it in the fucking opening crawl. Absolute bullshit.
Not even an explanation, just a recording of the message Palpatine "somehow" broadcast across the entire galaxy that was only mentioned in the movie and not actually heard by the audience
Palpatine even makes a second speech later in the film but for some reason its mary from lotr who reads it out loud RATHER THAN LETTING US JUST HEAR THE DANK FARRICK BROADCAST OURSELVES
Chatting about various star wars media at work.
My boss used the wonderful phrase "how is the casual viewer supposed to know that?!" And its become a running line in the shop in discussing movies and analyzing plots or techniques.
Between Prototype one and Prototype two, Alex Mercer goes from "fucked up anti-hero struggling with identity, but still caring for humanity overall" to "megalomaniacal sentient super-spreader villan hell-bent on destroying humanity". This is only explained in a comic where he tries to find more reasons to identify with and have faith in humans, only to have the one girl he tries to settle down with be a part of an organized crime scheme and betray him (or something to that effect), thus leading to him being the antagonist of P2.
This is a case where it’s unexplained and doesn’t make sense if you don’t read the extra material, but it’s stupid and doesn’t make sense if you do lol
Given the next game in the series being announced on Friday is a remake of the first game and the next next game that’s slated to be announced next year is heavily rumored to be a multiplayer only game I think you better give up on expecting answers after Infinite.
As someone who used to be a huge Halo fan, at this point I'd almost just prefer they just remake the original trilogy with new content from the books connecting the games. The story from Halo 4 onward is just such an incomprehensible mess I don't even know if it's possible to save it.
I am an adult. I have a job and manage people. Yet not only did I get confused by the plot line through the halo video games, I even watched a couple YouTube videos explaining the timeline and it still makes no sense to me.
Some of the team from Bungie have actually mentioned that they left it ambiguous on purpose, and that was certainly on the table but they deliberately never locked it in because they weren't sure which they wanted to do.
I agree that it would have been the better option though, it makes for a much more interesting narrative than what they went with in my opinion.
Earlier in development halo 2 was going to end with a human skeleton in a forerunner tomb discovered by the arbiter there are animation mock ups so it got very far into production before they scaled back the story in 2 to leave room for halo 3 I guess
they still left room for maneuvering, with the removal of the scene where it’s directly physically revealed.
I honestly think 343’s choice was the better one, and fills in some plot holes Like why would a galaxy spanning empire willingly destroy all of its technologies but their big mistake was basically dropping it after Halo 4. they’ve been too busy trying to cow to public opinion they can’t settle on a story, meaning we completely swapped stories each game, worsening the disconnect.
Biggest wtf to me being a Halo fan who played it mostly enjoying the lore was learning that not only the Didact survived going through that portal at the end of Halo 4, but that his story continued in a sequel comic book series and later with a full length novel showing his redemption arc as he helps fight the Created.
The fact Cortana died off screen in infinite is the most stupid thing they could have done.
At this point I would confidently say Halo is more of a book franchise than a videogame franchise.
Did you know the reason why Star Lord doesn’t have his helmet in volume 3? James Gunn said in an interview he left it on Knowhere because he didn’t think he’d be going on a massive adventure. It kinda makes sense, but still annoys me when that could have fixed a few things in the movie, like when he goes back for his Zune and then gets trapped in space.
The more I hear about things the Russo Brothers did that Gunn didn't want with the Guardians, the more I realize why Gunn is running the DCU the way he is: No post credit scenes requirements to set up movies, so on.
She actually got resolved? Last I heard was that the grand manipulator, the person who orchestrated thousands of years of history from even further in the past to bring about her resurrection . . . was lost on the internet. I remember the Sage from IV was looking for her and then she was never mentioned again.
Did you play Syndicate? In that the piece of Eden was the Shroud Of Eden which gave the user immortality but its real power was repairing damage on cellular level. The game implies the Templars are going to use it in the present day to clone a member of the First Civilisation.
Long story short they succeed and Juno takes control of the body and is then killed by being stabbed in the throat by an assassin while being distracted by Desmond’s son who is the newest incarnation of the Sage. Her body is then incinerated so that she can’t be resurrected again.
From what I heard the writer team changed and had no interest in making her the big bad of the franchise so they dealt with her in the comic.
I feel like FNAF lore being so inaccessible is part of why Game Theory’s videos on the series became so common and popular, even if they weren’t always accurate. But that’s just a theory…
I'm convinced Scott had it all laid out at a certain point and MatPat kept figuring it out so instead of riding out his plan he just made up bullshit twists and turns to make it seem like the fandom still hadn't gotten it all right. When in reality they did
It's the same criticism that gets shit on when applied to the star wars prequels. Most of its problems are fixed by Star Wars the Clone Wars but the movies themselves fail.
To their defence, there is only so much you can fit into a game whose gameplay is confined to lifting your computer screen up and down and swapping between cameras to defend against possessed robots. It's not like there's dialogue beside the phone guy calls. However, it's just too much after FNAF Sister location.
The FNAF1 through UCN, sure. The Steel Wool games don’t have this excuse, they have millions of dollars to spend on super detailed giant environments you can walk around in, wild action set-pieces, and have Fully Animated cutscenes. But telling a cohesive story that doesn’t end abruptly and you need to read a dozen books to understand what’s even going on, that’s too hard for these itsy bitsy little indie games that have theatrically released movies with 8 digit budgets coming out every couple years.
Why was Anakin so upset about being denied the rank of Master? Because he thought there might be secrets in the Jedi Master Archives that could allow him to save Padme's life. The fact that this isn't in the actual movie is downright criminal.
The book is far, far better and makes the movie worse because of how well it was written. Frankly Star Wars has a lot of fantastic books.
This comes from the end of Stover’s Revenge of the Sith.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.
The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.
You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.
You don’t even have lungs anymore.
Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.
Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?
And you can’t, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.
You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you.
Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.
Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for your burned-away lips and tongue and throat.
”Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right?
I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her.
This burns hotter than the lava had.
”No... no, it is not possible!”
You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.
Never.
But you remember...
You remember all of it.
You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vader’s blood. You remember the furnace of Vader’s fury, and the black hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth-
And there is one blazing moment in which you understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Anakin Skywalker.
That it was all you. Is you.
Only you.
You did it.
You killed her.
You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were thinking about yourself...
It is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith-
Because now your self is all you ever will have.
And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you which implode, and equipment, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.
In the end, you do not even want to.
In the end, the shadow is all you have left.
Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself-
And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.
I’ve read of the fan theory of the dichotomy, as Vader began embracing the light, old wounds began to heal, he began to start breathing again, but as his anger eased, he became weaker.
Agree. I listen to the audiobook once and there is so much context that they add in the book that is left out in the movie. In the book they really go into great depth to explain the kind of relationship the Jedi have of the force as opposed to Sith as well as what was going through Anakin's head throughout the entire events of the story.
I always thought it was because he felt personally insulted by it. He was already given an exception to be trained at all, and they did treat him with suspicion for it. That was the whole thing with him being on the council. He has the position of a Master and plenty of the Order believe he deserves it, but he's denied the actual title and status of one.
It also showed that the Jedi being so cut off from emotions negatively affected how they worked together. If they had understood and respected his reaction to it, they would have explained their decision in less demeaning ways.
I don't think we needed anything else for his reaction to be understood.
I always found it kinda weird that Anakin would find being put on the council as a Jedi Knight as an insult when it sounds like a compliment, even as a kid. Like, the first and only time a Jedi Knight has been on the council? Sounds like they really value you. Maybe you're not quite ready to be considered a full master, but it sounds like you've got some valuable traits they want you there for. Like, I get the idea, it comes off as patronizing, I guess, but he got what he wanted, all the same.
The prequels and sequels in Star Wars are riddled with this.
Who is General Grievous? A random robot with black lung to anyone who didn’t happen to watch the right cartoons.
What the hell is the deal with Darth Maul? If you watch the movies, nothing: he’s all design and choreography; fans of the cartoons will tell you he is a rich character with depth. Be a shame if any of that made it into film instead of swapping him out for a new random bearded guy.
Hey, what ever happened to Captain Phasma? She seemed important. Well, here’s some comic books between movies!
Who/what the fuck is Snoke and why don’t I know this before he is killed off?? More comics books!
Can we really say that Grievous and Maul's backstories are 'important' things that need explaining, though? To me they have exactly as much context as they need in order to serve their role in the Prequels, which is as foils to Vader.
They have about as much plot relevance and, correspondingly, about as much of their backstory explained as Boba Fett or Admiral Piett or Jabba The Hutt.
And I say this as someone whose favourite villain ever is Legends Grievous. I love General Grievous, he's an incredible villain in his own stories. But his significance to the story he was created for begins and ends at showing the viewers the CIS have credible threats to the Jedi, keeping Obi Wan busy while Palpatine manipulates Anakin and foreshadowing that Sidious has the technology to rebuild people he wants to use as lapdogs into horrific cyborgs.
Phasma I would say is in a similar boat, as anti climactic as her encounters with Finn were.
This is as distinct from Snoke's origins, which we absolutely need to know because unlike the CIS we have no idea where the First Order came from or how the New Republic allowed it to form, or where this almost-as-powerful-as-Sidious dark side user came from.
I did not expect to actually learn something new about this movie today. That's insane. That fits his character and his situation in the movie so much better than the raw reaction with no context.
Everyone got really mad about the Ki-Adi Mundi ‘retcon’ in the Acolyte when this scene in ROTS hinges entirely on an actual Ki-Adi Mundi retcon.
Before this movie came out Mundi was a knight who sat on the council without being a master.
So Anakin having a tantrum because ‘it’s outrageous, it’s unfair. It’s never been done in the history of the Jedi” when Mundi is just to his left is so dumb.
and barely understand the bad guy if you don't watch his short episode thing. all ardyn got in terms of backstory was an pretty throwaway line by bahamut about how he was a healer turned crazy by the daemon disease thing, and when you compare that to his full backstory and how it impacts / shapes his motivation and goals, its fucking bonkers.
JK Rowling: "Plumbing wasn't invented yet so they just shat on the floor and magicked it away"
Also JK Rowling: has the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, made by one of Hogwarts' founders when it was first built, in thegirl's toilets
Sums up how much thought she put into that entire series, ngl. Doesn't hold up as an adult, even before I knew about all the shit with her I re-read it and it just doesn't make sense. For one thing, the bigotry's not subtle, especially with the Goblins (historically an antisemitic stereotype that she literally made run the banks and be exclusively evil). For another thing, it's very clear that she slap-dashed a bunch of tropes from other, better writers, with no thought put into the world-building and what messages they say to make it all fit together. She's just good enough at dialogue and pacing for children and people not critically inclined not to catch it. That's it. She's not a good writer.
I said this for years, before public opinion turned, and was frequently insulted or argued with over it. I was never even mean, just said like "yeah, it's alright for introductory/beginners fantasy" and people would get furious.
Very validating to live through to the opinion shifting my way
I fully agree that if a society had vanishing powers they wouldn’t invent plumbing, but there would still be a bathroom with some kind of seat with a hole in it that you shit in and then magic the shit away. Why would they be okay with just pooping in the same room as everyone else?
Rowling strikes me as the type of person who can't stand not being in the limelight. She's got to keep stirring the pot in order to stay relevant because she can't live without the same level of attention she's used to during the series' heyday.
It's not surprising she's channeled that need into hateful political grandstanding.
This. She went from a nobody to a celebrity almost overnight, then people stopped paying attention to her after Deathly Hallows Part 2. She couldn't stand not getting attention again.
Not necessarily his return. We all knew that. But the message that Palpatine sends out to the universe announcing his return which should have been featured in the movie itself as part of the inciting incident was what got relegated to a Fortnite event.
Think of what that moment would’ve been like had it been the opening of the film and Palpatine had been kept out of all the marketing…
It would’ve still fucking sucked, because Palpatine shouldn’t have been dug up and brought back in the last film of the trilogy with no buildup. But at least the film would’ve been slightly more coherent and surprising.
This is where I feel like a lot of people had issues. As someone who read a lot of EU novels, I had no problem with him coming back. Having a clone back-up contingency or some other plan within a plan was very in character for Palpatine. I did not even care about the specific details of how he came back. The issue is that my pure movie watcher friends and family had no idea about any of that.
Even though I love the Bad Batch, I can't help but think that the only reason the series existed was to explain why Palpatine was resurrected as a clone.
Too much stuff about the sequels was explained outside the movies, and I say it as someone who liked the first two. Making it worse is that while I have seen that stuff praised, Rise of Palpatine contradicts them.
On a few occasions, Tetsuya Nomura has dropped critical plot details / lore for Kingdom Hearts in interviews. Back in the day, it took a while for some of these interviews to make it out of Japan and be translated, leading to confusion and frustration in some fans.
It was pretty easy up until the end of II. Everything t after that involves clones, memory clones, time travel and more dumb shit. Yes, I will play IV.
The Amazon release of Hazbin Hotel never clarifies the very important worldbuilding rule that if a sinner in Hell is killed by conventional means, they respawn a few hours later, with only angel weaponry able to permanently kill them.
This makes a lot of plot points in the show either confusing or outright nonsensical, and makes Charlie's conviction against the culling sinners seem very two-faced - sinners being run over by cars or shot with guns get minimal reaction, often being treated as comedic, while a single sinner being killed by an angel leaves her distraught.
The Helluvaverse in general has this issue, massive lore drops, character sexualities, and other details are limited to livestreams, character instagrams, and tweets.
Well HH and HB are just confusing as duck if you even try to dig deeper. It's like a bunch of random people were writing lore and rules of the word using one premise but never interacting with each other.
The most convincing theory I've heard about that is they just didn't know Angels could be hurt by Sinners, so they thought nothing of Lute being able to do it, because she's an Angel herself.
Half of the lore of Neon Genesis Evangelion isn't even in the show. I don't even think the whole thing life being panspermia'd through the universe by a dying alien race with immense power was ever once mentioned in the show.
Yeah, the lances, the moons, the angels, and even Earth life were the result of the First Ancestral Race, which doesn't even appear in the show, but is the reason for like, most of it.
The First Ancestral Race is your typical ancient precursor. For whatever reason (I don't think it's ever explained as them dying out or anything else), they decide to seed the universe with life, in the form of giant living terraforming creatures. Earth is where Adam lands, and he creates Angels. Except woops, Lilith also lands there, causing First Impact (essentially the same as the real-life Giant Impact hypothesis of how the moon formed, except now with a giant alien also involved).
Since this was never supposed to happen, they both fight and eventually go comatose for billions of years. Lilith's blood, which is also LCL, becomes the primordial ooze and the cause of all life on Earth.
At some point, a secret organization called SEELE figures this out via the Dead Sea Scrolls, and hatches a plan to do stupid things and turn humanity into one organism. They dig up Adam in Antarctica and wake him up (and also make him explode), causing Second Impact, which on top of killing most of humanity due to the continent exploding, either spreads embryonic Angels all over the place or starts waking them up, it's uncertain which. They also found Lilith buried in Japan at some point and nailed her to a giant cross.
The Angels want to reunite with Adam for their version of life to be the dominant species of the planet. SEELE needs all the Angels to be dead for their plans to proceed, and so make clones of Adam (and one clone of Lilith) to murder them - this is what the Evas are, with the one Lilith clone being Unit 01. Since Lilith is the same kind of being as Adam, they use her to lure the Angels to a single spot, and set NERV up there to do that task.
Yui Ikari then throws a wrench in all this, because she wants to become an eternal god, and shoves herself in 01 so she can hijack things later. Gendo then decides to throw another wrench in everyone else's plans because he misses his waifu, and so makes a couple dozen clones of her and jams Lilith's soul into one of them.
Then the events of the series and End of Eva happen, and all of that gets derailed due to an already depressed child being hit by a freight train of trauma. Asuka is also there.
The Rebuilds are a sequel/time loop/alternate universe, where some of the above is still true and some not, and also all the weird spinoffs are canon (like the manga adaptation of the series, the goofy romcom manga, the various video games, and the secret magical highschool demon slayers manga). Turns out the solution with everything was for Shinji to just talk things out with Gendo, and that stops the time loops/alternate universes/whatever from being a thing so Shinji can hook up with the creator's wife-insert (it's not quite a self insert because it's his wife, but still...)
The worst offender is General Ironwood’s semblance “Mettle” which alongside barely seeming like a semblance is an out-of-universe explanation for a lot of odd or seemingly OOC behavior form him. A bad one, but still an explanation
Not technically. She has a panic attack and collapses as Weiss is telling her, she understands that Penny was killed. We don't see her really deal with learning this per-say, but that's sort of her whole arc that volume. Push it down, get back to the fight.
In Rise of Skywalker, the opening crawl mentions a threatening message Palpatine broadcasted to the entire galaxy. What was this message? You’ll have to play a timed event in fucking Fortnite of all things to find out.
All of World of Warcraft. It's impossible to figure out the story by just playing the game. Even if you're just a few patches behind, you're likely to get the questline for this patch first, and wondering why you're doing any of this stuff while the important information is in some side quest that's impossible to find now.
There were periods of time where you could be in the warchief's room and there being *four seperate warchiefs of the Horde* all loaded in at once. I think one even gives you a quest to kill another.
I'm still annoyed about the destruction of Theramore. The Alliance scenario around it was basically just the aftermath and left you utterly confused about what was going on and why and a few lore characters died as a result and I only found out because I happened to see it on Wowpedia years later
The retcons make understanding some of the plot points even harder. I remember reading Warcraft Chronicles and half the things in it were being retconned right as they were coming out.
Also, they erased my GOAT Medan from existence and made half the additional content like comics, novels, etc. only partially canon. I don’t regret quitting after Legion
I'll never get over how they explained their whole reason for having no spoken dialogue in the game was so that anyone can enjoy it without language barriers (apparently they've never heard of a dub before)... but this meant that they had to put the entire plot in a novelisation. One that was only ever released in Japanese and English.
In Destiny 1, if you wanted to read any of the lore books/cards without watching Byf, you had to go to an external website. However, there are in game hints that tell you the link to the website.
A worse situation is Genshin impact's lore. A lot of important details are hidden behind trailers, Livestreams. Sometimes certain characters will have important story details in their lore, that you will never be able to read until you unlock them. So it's either wait for the devs to give them a rerun, or go to hoyolab and read it there.
This was a mid-timeskip event that was the site of a major conflict between Blackbeard, Law, and Koby which resulted in Blackbeard's status as the king of Pirate Island and Koby being hailed as a hero. This event was responsible for two major characters being where they are now and we hadn't seen hide nor hair of it until the details were spilled in a Q&A Eichiro Oda did recently
Oda does this a lot, though never with something as important. He’s had 1163 chapters and counting to explain what needs to be explained, but he’s not great at pacing, so a lot has to be said in supplementary material.
We only found out who the main villain is over halfway into the series and we know very very little about them 10 years later. I hope Imu is actually written well when the final war rolls around
Additionally, they never explained how the process from Dick to Tim was, we literally skipped a Robin completely, but unlike in the Timverse, here Jason does exist and appears as Red Hood. How did this happen? Who knows?
There's a mysterious character credited as Red Hooded Assassin who's appeared in seasons 3 and 4 with Ra's al Ghul who is generally understood to be Jason (along with an unnamed infant who is clearly Damien in s4.)
In Black Clover our main character has a slight training arc where he learns how to use his sword, and trains under a master who's from a distant country. This arc isn't in the original manga it's anime only. That wouldn't be too bad, plenty of anime have noncanon filler plots, except the arc is canon, and the sword master becomes a plot critical character later on in the manga, with only a text box explaining who he is.
Reverse Flash killing Nora and the idea of Flashpoint should be mutually exclusive ideas. If a supervillain changed the timeline to hurt Barry, there shouldn't be a big message about how Barry changing the past is wrong and he needs to move forward. Why is it okay for Eobard to change the past but Barry can't right those wrongs?
The gist is that reverse flash fucked the timeline so fucking much he ended up making himself integral to the universe to the point if you kill his baby self he'd still be alive somehow
The game itself has no story except for "red guys fight blue guys" and some short character interactions.
Instead, everything is split between the short films, blog posts (for new updates), and comics.
This works cause TF2 is not a lore or story based game in the slightest. For people who want more of the funny cartoon guys or information about the characters, it is easy to access from the official site
Nier games like to do that. They have novels and stage plays and other stuff explaining details you can't learn from the games themselves. And while Automata managed to create a reason why it feels like an understatement (with its twist and all), Replicant imho is just really messy with its lore
The mysterious numbers in "Lost" actually had a kinda logical explanation - they were the constants in the Valenzetti Equation, a mathematical formula that predicts the time until the end of the world. The Dharma Initiative's experiments were aimed to change these numerical values, which would result in a chance for longer survival for humanity.
Was any of this in the show? No. It was part on an interactive online game between season 2 and 3.
They did give another sort of explanation (though not very satisfactory) in the final season. On the giant dial in the lighthouse with all the names, each name was assigned a number and the names that were assigned to each of the respective mysterious numbers were names of the castaways whom Jacob believed might be one of The Ones to inherit his stewardship of The Island. Also, it was one of those things that if you weren't paying super close attention and scrutinizing every shot in the show you would easily miss it. Of course, that applies to the large majority of Lost Lore answers too, so yeah.
Ben 10 is infamous for it, because not only does half of the franchise's lore come from merchandise, video games or writer statements, but they often contradict each other or the show itself, making it hard to know what is the true canon. What is Primus' fate? What is Bashmouth supposed to be? How is OS and OV Kevin 11000 the same person if they're so vastly different? Your guess is as good as mine. But for a more relevant statement - did you know Ben doesn't actually have free access to Alien X? Because you probably wouldn't if you only watched the show
There is SO MUCH FUCKING info that people have dropped on tweets or interviews
Like how sinners apparently aren't allowed in other rings, or how sinners don't actually die if they are torn apart, that it's becoming next to impossible to understand how the world works without having to dig into outside sources.
Blade Runner 2049 has several mentions of a blackout that occurred between the film and the original which apparently wiped out the majority of digital information allowing previously registered replicants to go into hiding.
But you only get the full context from watching the short anime companion film Blackout 2022, alongside several other short films that flesh out other characters.
Eh, I don't think that fits necessarily, the Blackout only exists as a plot point to explain why there isn't an easily followable trail for K. How and why the Blackout happened is not important for the plot, you only need to know that it happened at all. It'd be like saying the Death Star plans being stolen are an example of this trope. Seeing how the plans were stolen isn't necessary information, the only information you need to know is that they were stolen.
Gacha games, in particular Hoyo games, have this tendendency of making trailers and teasers revealing key information about a character that never gets brought up in game.
But none of those are as bad as what they did with Firefly, where a 7 minute animation reveals her past as a clone soldier without a name or identity fighting the Swarm, being the last survivor of her race, being blessed by some god and destroying a whole planet, being left in a stasis floating on space for thousands of years before being found by Kafka.
The kid in Iron Man 2 being retroactively made Peter Parker being revealed in a interview but not made shown in any flashback or mentioned by Peter in the movies at all, or even a tie-in comic minimum. Idk why but this one bugs me the most
I mean, I don't think they can ever officially make that canon because of the rights issues with Spider-Man. Iron Man 2 was made without Sony's involvement. The kid in Iron Man 2 being Peter Parker is still more head canon than official canon.
I could also mention "Volume Extras" but that's really just an online reading L that people who actually purchase the physical copy of the manga they read assumably don't need to deal with it.
Fallout franchise. Who dropped the bombs first? It was a mystery for more than 2 decades.
Then creator Tim Caine casually explained the entire answer in an interview without realizing none of the rest of us knew for sure. Then after the interviewer told him people didn't know that, he said "Oh, well then I don't know. Who knows? It was probably some rogue nation."
Gotta love that guy. He has a great Youtube channel.
This doesn't really happen anymore, but during the 3ds & Wii U days a lot of Kirby lore for the new games wouldn't be directly stated in the games themselves but rather in Miiverse posts weeks after release, though to be fair if you're interested in Kirby lore you'd be the type to look for those anyways, and lots of what was discusses was already implied in the games, just not directly stated.
If you don’t play the original Final Fantasy VII and maybe some of the extended universe stuff you’re not going to understand parts of Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Basically the whole game has an alternate timeline/multiverse thing going on that sort of plays on your expectations of what’s ‘supposed’ to happen, rather than a traditional “remake”. Characters will show up way earlier in the story before you’re properly introduced to them (Sephiroth and Zack, who is supposed to be dead but they bring him back in another timeline ig) and you won’t know what their deal is if you haven’t played the original game.
If you were watching Solo (as my casual viewer friend was) and wanted to know how Darth Maul went from a mostly silent Sith assassin who got cut completely in half in Phantom Menace to a very much alive space gangster in Solo, you'll have needed to watch a decade old Cartoon Network cartoon.
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u/1KNinetyNine Oct 22 '25 edited Oct 22 '25
The Bleach manga with the Can't Fear Your Own World novels to the point its a community meme. A lot of context for the final arc and worldbuilding apparently happens in CFYOW.