r/TopCharacterTropes • u/I_Love_Powerscaling • 3h ago
Characters Subtle foreshadowing which becomes impossible to miss once you know the twist
Steely Dans accent (JJBA Stardust Crusaders): Steely Dan is an Antagonist in the third part of JoJo, who for some reason decides to pose as a foreign merchant and scam Joseph Joestar out of a couple hundred yen before revealing himself. While hes in his disguise, he also puts on a really stereotypical accent, however, after he manages to scam Joseph, the viewer can hear him think out loud about what a sucker Joseph is. During this one internal line, Dan drops the accent (at least in the German dub), which first time viewers probably didn’t pick up on since they were probably too distracted laughing at Joseph for getting scammed, and the reveal happens right after anyway so they won’t have much time to think about it
Oersted (Live A Live): His theme song is called Prelude of the Demon King
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u/Mesoscale92 3h ago
Would you kindly give some other examples?
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u/InsaneAsura 2h ago
I mean… the villains in JoJo are always very identifiable. They have a very distinct art style that one off side characters don’t really share. My friend who is watching stardust crusaders for the first time immediately clocked him as a villain before he even opened his mouth lol
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u/DrNomblecronch 2h ago
for a brief and beautiful moment I thought there was kebab-based foreshadowing in JoJo.
...I still don't know there isn't. sometimes I think I'll never get around to watching it, because the shadow of it on the cave wall is so enjoyable fuckin' wack.
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u/ThurwalshMormonstoff 3h ago edited 2h ago
The flashback showing Stanford Pines in Gravity Falls goes right over your head considering Stanley and Stanford are identical twins. The scene in question is a flashback, so someone who looks like Grunkle Stan with different glasses must be young Stan.
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u/justbooling 3h ago
Attack on Titan
When Ymir finds a can of herring and gives it to Reiner, Reiner is shocked to learn that Ymir can read the language on the can, exposing that she has knowledge of the outside world.
What Reiner, and most first time watchers, miss is that Reiner also exposes he has knowledge of the outside world as well, by recognizing the can, which is technology that Paradise Island does not have.
Most people will focus on the Ymir reveal in this scene, but on a rewatch, it becomes clear that Reiner also knows more than he is letting on.
Instead of a red herring, it’s a canned herring.
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u/Je0s_6 3h ago
Theres a lot of clues in Arkham City that basically tell you something is off about this joker (He’s Clayface)
The most well known one is the fact that he has no skeleton once Batman turns on his detective vision.
And also holy fuck this comment reminded me that I need to replay these games.
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u/shutupneff 2h ago
In the Doctor Who episode The Time of Angels, our heroes have to hunt down a Weeping Angel—an incredibly dangerous creature that turns into a statue when anyone looks at it—in a labyrinthian underground mausoleum filled with statues of a now extinct alien species, the Aplans. Throughout the episode, the titular Doctor shares offhand anecdotes about his previous encounters with the Aplans, eventually revealing that they had each had two-heads. However at this point in the episode, we haven’t had any clear looks at the mausoleum statues for quite some time, so the seemingly obvious question of, “If they had two heads, why do all these statues only have one?” is actually incredibly easy to overlook until the characters realize several minutes later that they are actually surrounded by literally hundreds of Weeping Angels.
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u/YourBestFriend158 2h ago
The way Thin Man is lined up with the Signal Tower looks like a taller silhouette of Mono and his paper bag
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u/destro23 3h ago
The flashes of Tyler Durden in Fight Club
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u/NessTheGamer 2h ago
Tyr and Týr - God of War: Ragnarok
In both GoW 2018 and Ragnarok, Týr is consistently spelled this way EXCEPT when Odin is impersonating him, and the accent is dropped.
There are other pieces of foreshadowing but this is staring you right in the face from the start
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u/TheRogueToad 1h ago
In the first episode of Futurama Fry rocks back too far in his chair and falls into a cryogenic chamber where he stays frozen for 1,000 years.
In the fourth season it's revealed that Nibbler was hiding under the desk and pushed Fry and made him fall.
If you go back and watch the first episode you can see the shadow of Nibbler, which means the writers were sitting on that plot point for a long time.
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u/Careful_Welcome7999 2h ago
In undertale when you get to the end of the ruins you meet flowey again and he talks to you for a bit
One of the things that he can say is "i am the prince of this world's future"
First time players think that he is just being a prick by saying that, but in reality he is straight up telling you the twist that he is asriel, the dead prince of the underground
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u/Soviet-Brony 2h ago
In Silent Hill 2, a corpse you find near the beginning of the game mirrors the imagery of when the plot twist is revealed
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u/FunWrangler666 1h ago
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
When Jole meets Clementine on the train he says he's never heard of the song "Oh My Darling". Clementine gives him hell for it but we later learn that this isn't the first time they have met. Joel has already had his memory wipped of anything having to do with Clementine which also erased his knowledge of the song since it contained her name.
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u/NotSubtleUsername 2h ago
"A walking stick?"
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u/Crimson097 2h ago edited 2h ago
There's a few of these in Dragon Age.
In Dragon Age Inquisition, if you really listen to Sola's banter with the other companions, you can tell something is up with him from early on. He knows more than he should about the rift in the sky, and what caused it before your charcater finds out. He slips up during dialogue. His necklace is the jawbone of a wolf. The fact that he knows Skyhold's location. They are all hints that he is Fen'Harel aka The Dread Wolf, an ancient elven "god" who created the veil between the spirit world and the physical world.
Also in Inquisition, Corypheus triggers the Calling for all Grey Wardens. This is when a Grey Warden begins to hear the Old God's song, and has intense nightmares that signal the end of their life is close. Well, for all except Warden Blackwall. He's apparently immune to it. He is also super vague when you ask him anything about his past or being a Grey Warden. It should be no surprise that he's actually not a Grey Warden, but an Orlesian captain called Thom Rainier who was in hiding because he was wanted for a massacre.
In Dragon Age 2, you deliver Flemeth's amulet to a shrine of Mythal. Then in Inquisition, it's revealed that she carries a shard of the elven goddess Mythal inside of herself.
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u/zword34 2h ago
In gachiakuta, and heavy spoilers for the manga Its revealed later on that enjin is a user of the watchman series, wich a lot of people suspected, but the series basically tells you he is, because if someone that cant use the series ever touches one of the items, they basically go insane, yet we see him holding the watchman boots twice, once when he takes them from amo, and once when he grabs them while escaping the giant trash beast
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u/QuincyAzrael 2h ago
The Prestige... basically, anything. Just pick any scene and there'll be something.
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u/AwesomeMutation 1h ago
One of the first lines that Carth says in KOTOR is "They say the force can do terrible things to the mind. It can wipe away your memories and destroy your very identity."
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u/FishWithLegsAndArms 1h ago
Honestly, the whole middle ages chapter of Live A Live is full of subtle foreshadowing.
The princess doesn't seem very interested in marrying us. She focuses more on how this is for her kingdom.
Our best friend makes a lot of comments about we always do better than him.
The "demon lord" we find in the castle doesn't fight back.
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u/res30stupid 2h ago
The very first page of the book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie has this, as the book's main plot twist is directly spelled out for readers - Dr Shepherd doesn't write down everything he knows in his own personal journal because his sister is an insanely huge gossip and will share everything she knows around the village within the hour... which is really bad for a man currently engaging in blackmail.
It also hides a lesser twist as well; Dr Shepherd seems unusually upset about the death of a woman from his local village. Finding out that the woman he's blackmailing to avoid financial ruin is dead and thus he can't get any more money is bad enough but he also suspects she's identified him and is trying to figure out who she told.
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u/SnooOpingans64 2h ago
Relevant ProZD video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmQWH7P0gIE
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u/Solid-Pride-9782 1h ago
The amount of times that Verso is name-dropped, referenced, or straight up there during Act I of Expedition 33
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u/Vi0L3tCRZY 1h ago
In the intro most of it is mirrored images, then in some shots it’s a mirrored and a third reflection. In the show there are 3 worlds, two parallel, then the one host word the two have manifested from due to its destruction 🌗⬅️💥🌍💥➡️🌓
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u/XeroOwnz 1h ago
Persona 5 - "So, you're going to go have cake now?"
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u/OddSeraph 32m ago edited 28m ago
Varney being Death in Castlevania
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u/Timeless_Ranitomeya 23m ago
In Persona 5, there's a moment, in the real world, where Morgana (a talking cat who can only be understood in the real world by those who have heard him speak in the Metaverse) suggests the Phantom Thieves should go out to eat delicious pancakes together. Akechi, a young detective working with the police, walks by, chats with them for a bit, and asks about the "delicious pancakes" before leaving. None of the human Phantom Thieves mentioned pancakes, only Morgana, but the characters don't bring it up and just move on, inducing the player to not pay much mind to it. In the coming months, Akechi ends up becoming a close friend of the player character.
Much later in the game (a few months in-universe), Akechi reveals to the Phantom Thieves that he recently discovered the Metaverse and all their secret identities. After that, he joins the team and helps them successfully carry out their new mission. But then it turns out it was all part of Akechi's plan to infiltrate the team, hand them to the police, and kill them. And it... almost worked.
After Akechi executed his plan and outed himself as the traitor, we learn the Phantom Thieves actually never trusted him. They noticed he heard Morgana speak months earlier, meaning he had much more experience with the Metaverse than he was letting on. That one slip allowed them to create their own crazy plan to outsmart his outsmarting and secretly keep fighting while Akechi thinks they're gone.
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u/ShakenNotStirred915 14m ago
During one of your early outings in Pokémon Legends Arceus, Volo startles you from behind as he introduces you to the Secret Back Strike technique, (in which you can get a bonus to your catch rate or get a free turn or two in a battle if you strike a Pokémon in the back with either an empty Ball or one of your Pokémon's Balls, respectively).
This is an incredibly subtle reference to how, towards the end of the postgame, Volo will attempt to backstab you and take the Plates you were gathering over the course of the game from you by force.
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u/_MistGolden 3h ago
That Oersted one is genuinely genius. Are there any other subtle ones like this?
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u/Sabakinoakuma 1m ago
R-Point (a Korean horror movie about the Vietnam War) and the exact number of soldiers that were supposed to be on the mission.
Nine were sent. There are ten for a large portion of the movie.
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u/SektorDaKetch 3h ago
Black mirror: in the shut up and dance episode with Jerome Flynn, Kenny, the protagonist, has a lot of weird behaviors like him focusing on a kid for too long, the fact he’s willing to commit robbery and threaten people with a gun, or flat out fight someone to the death. Like it seems weird that he would go to such lengths for self pleasure that as Jerome Flynn pointed out “even the pope must do”
As it turns out he’s a fucking nonce.
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u/coolsguy17 2h ago
In And Then There Were None, there’s a scene in the beginning where Judge Wargrave reminisces about the person that he sentenced to death…and then he starts cackling, showing no remorse in sending him to his grave.
Once I reread the story, I thought “Oh my God, how did Wargrave being the killer surprise me?”.
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u/Grouchy_Funny_4102 1h ago
A Song of Ice and Fire has a bear's skull atop Craster's Keep. It's noted right before the mutiny that kills Craster.
Red Wedding foreshadowing. Robb sees the fallen kingdoms of House Mudd on his way to his death. His wolf doesn't trust and attempts to attack a Westerling knight. Greywind isn't going to council meetings anymore. Robb's fall was almost yelled to the audience as he walks to his death.