Lost in Medias Res: Difference between revisions

 

This trope is not related to ''[[Lost]]'' [[Recycled in Space|In Medias Res]]. [[It Gets Better]] is the other extreme, where there is too much exposition.

 

* This criticism has been levelled at ''[[Doki Doki School Hours]],'' especially in comparison to the more widely recognised ''[[Azumanga Daioh]].'' While ''Azumanga'' began by giving the viewer short segments to establish a small, core set of personalities, ''Doki Doki'' begins with a group of students finding their diminutive teacher lost in a crowd of first-year students. The characters already know each other, so no exposition is given. Instead, [[eyecatch]]es of each student are used as "personality profiles" (breaking the rule of "show, don't tell" to which most writers adhere). This, in combination with a much larger cast, means that it takes time to memorise which personality belongs to which student, even if the characters are arguably more visually distinct than those of ''Azumanga Daioh''.

* ''[[Azumanga Daioh]]'' itself suffers from this a little, at first (and only in the manga). Not because it fails to introduce characters properly, but because the art style is very simple and a large number of characters are visually non-distinct. There are at least four characters with straight, loose, short-to-medium length black hair in identical school uniforms (Tomo, Chihiro, Kaorin and Osaka) and little obvious other than hairstyle to distinguish the characters. Colour-coded hair is ''not'' employed.

* Writer Steven Erikson claims to have done this deliberately in the forward for recent editions of ''Gardens of the Moon'' (the first book in the ''[[Malazan Book of the Fallen]]'' series), in order to weed out readers without enough patience to enjoy the series.

 

* ''[[Power Rangers Samurai]]'' suffers from this, due to [[Nickelodeon]] [[Out of Order|skipping the origin episodes]]. Additionally, it is the first ''[[Power Rangers]]'' season to do so, as previous seasons start properly with the origin.

* While the first season of the ''[[Game of Thrones]]'' TV series eventually gets around to explaining who everyone is and what they're doing, the first episode includes scenes like three young, shirtless, dark-haired men getting shaves and haircuts (i.e., removing their only remaining distinguishing features). Little details like their names and the fact that one of them is ''a prisoner of war from another family'' aren't mentioned. If you can manage to tell the three apart, you'll notice that only one of them actually does anything for several episodes. And he's not the most important one. Even if you can keep track of everyone's names, the series deliberately averts [[One Steve Limit]] just to leave you something else to trip up on.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* The first few episodes of ''[[Code Lyoko]]'' explain virtually nothing about the premise. What is Lyoko? Who are the characters? How do they know each other, or how long have they? Who or what is Aelita? Who or what is XANA and why is he evil? Why can the characters go onto Lyoko? How do they know how to do the things they know how to do? How did they find out about the computer and Lyoko? Why is the computer stashed under an abandoned factory? How long has it been there and who put it there? It isn't until later that any of these questions are addressed.

 

 

{{reflist}}