Basic Trope: The characters’ reminiscence of past events is relayed to the audience through another scene.
- Straight: Alice flashes back to the day she watches Bob die in a car accident, and we go into another scene showing the incident.
- Exaggerated: 70% of the work focuses on Alice’s past, and the current story is quickly resolved.
- Downplayed: Alice remembers the time Bob died in a car accident, and we quickly cut away to the incident before cutting back to the present.
- Justified: Alice is a Reality Warper, and strong emotions allow her to go back to specific moments in the past to relive them.
- Inverted: The whole work takes place 20 Minutes into the Past, but there are moments where Alice flashes 20 Minutes into the Future to see what will happen to her then.
- Subverted: Alice begins to recount the car crash that killed Bob, and we cut to a scene of the highway… then we cut to Alice driving to Claire’s house, revealing it’s actually set in the present.
- Double Subverted: Then we cut to Bob’s car getting rammed by a truck, revealing it is a flashback after all.
- Parodied: Alice begins to recount the time she saw Bob die, and… we continue to focus on her as she begins staring into the distance, the flashback clearly going on in her head. The other characters are confused and try to get Alice back into reality, but it’s futile and she continues staring blankly until a minute later.
- Zig-Zagged: When Alice recounts something for her pasts, sometimes it’s shown as flashbacks while other times we just hear her recounting it.
- Averted: There are no flashbacks whatsoever in the story.
- Lampshaded: “Well, looks like you really have a good memory of what happened.”
- Invoked: Claire asks Alice to recount the story of Bob’s tragic death in full detail so Claire can know Alice better.
- Exploited: Emperor Evulz has powers that allow him to go into minds. He takes advantage of Alice’s flashbacks to enter her memories and see what really brings her down.
- Defied: Alice refuses to talk about the car crash, knowing it still gives her trauma.
- Discussed: “If this were a drama movie, there’d probably be some scene related to what Alice is talking about.”
- Conversed: “Wow, this scene is really pulling on my heartstrings. God, I really hate flashbacks, they just keep breaking my heart…”
Back to Flashback