Characters
Characters that present themselves saying that they were always there. And they were always there, actually
Blendin (gravity falls): time traveler that work trying to fix time anomalies in gravity falls saying that he's been there for some time and at the end of the episode show him fixing every anomaly caused by Dipper and Mabel. If you rewatch the episodes (or put atention in the background the first time) you were noticed that he was in fact in all those places.
Shou (dorohedoro): man acts as a deus ex machina, manage to move the family from the mansion to a underground base and make a plan to defeat the cross-eyes gang before anyone remember who the fuck he is. Shou simply say that he was there the whole blue moon festival with everyone else, and not only he was there, he's been there since way before appearing in En's movie and in several photos.
Death (puss in boots 2): He talks with puss in a bar acting like a bounty hunter saying that he's been following him for a long time, later reveals himself as death and mention to be there in each death. You can actually see him at the start of the movie when puss die for eight time.
In the fourth season, he reveals that he was the one who pushed Fry into the cryopod in the very first episode, and if you rewatch the first episode, you’ll see Nibbler’s shadow by the chair.
it's just that it was the first time i saw it and i was all like "hey" and then i paused it it and i was like "woah" and then i ate waffles and i was all like "mmfmmmfm"
No worries, if you want to do it yourself for other topics try using the "before:" feature with google search
The way it works is you type something like "before:2003-01-01" (In Year-Month-Day format, but I always do 1/1 for simplicity) and it will only show you search results from before that day.
For example if you type "before:2004-02-15 Half Life Theories" then it would show you what you would have seen if you had searched up the term "Half Life Theories" before Febuary 15, 2004
It's an incredibly useful feature that I barely see anyone talking about, especially because using 2022-01-01 as the cutoff means you can filter out anything made by AI
Idk if it was planned and its a different trope, but i REALLY love how great Futurama was at this.
Fry causes a time paradox by not going to the future. Its later revealed this is because he is only born because he goes to the Future (and time travels back to 1948) meaning he ceases to exist, there-go the universe cannot exist anymore.
Fry is shown to be immune to mind control. We later learn this is due to the temporal shenanigans he got into in 1948
Given that the last part is the reason why nibbler pushed him into the cryo chamber in episode one the general idea must have been there from the start yes.
Another great Futurama one in season 2 episode 1 "I second that emotion" there is a single scene that last about a two seconds were you can see Leela's parents a whole two seasons before they are properly introduced in season four episode two "Leela's home world"
Might be the episode where the big brain sends Fry back in time to stop Nibbler, only for Nibbler to convince Fry it is necessary and Fry himself gets his past self stuck in the cyropod
I know he later went back in time to do it himself, but would he still show up if it was Nibbler who originally did it? Since he was rewriting that part? Kinda confusing when I ask about it.
Yes. Fry's shadow appears with Nibbler's in "Jurassic Bark" (aka the sad dog one) to foreshadow (heh) the events of a later episode in the season "The Why of Fry".
in the episode of gumball "The anybody" clayton, the shapeshifter, says that he had shapeshifted into inanimate objects before. It then shows a montage of previous episodes where clayton is objects in the background, such as a trophy or mall fountain. However if you watch those episodes, he actually was the objects, so the writers planned this gag before the episode even aired
Adding onto this, Rob was another character who was always in the background in Gumballs earlier seasons. He was never important in any way though, and when the world realized his uselessness he was sent to the void. He later escaped by riding on the back of Janice, but was disfigured as a result. To take revenge against Gumball for ignoring him so much prior to being sent to the void, he became his arch nemesis
I mean
It could also have just been a regular object when the episode aired, but for the Clayton episode they just chose random objects from previous episodes
In the Odyssey (650BCE), Odysseus arrives home to Ithaca to find Athena waiting for him there. He complains to her that if she was going to help him now, why didn't she help during the entire journey?
She basically admonishes him and asks him who he thinks broke Poseidons waves, kept his ships afloat and got him off Calypsos' island?
The Adventure Time DLC for Powerwash Simulator also continues the trend, I believe every map has a snail that waves at you when you find it, it'll retreat into its shell if you spray it.
I don't know if anybody else thinks about this but every time I hear his surname pronounced with the 'sch' sound I can't help but think about how it's probably totally pronounced with a K sound as the end, same way as Third Reich, but his family just pretends it's something else to make it less awkward right?
As EinBRinDE already wrote, 'ch' is not pronounced as a K in German (except maybe for loan words, which don't count imo). Now there are two ways to pronounce 'ch', depending on context, one softer and one a bit harsher, for that one, using a 'K' would probably be alright, The 'ch' in Reich, however, is much softer and 'sh' would be a much better substitution if one does not know how to pronounce it properly. Describing it with words is not so easy unfortunately, so videos like this might be more helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55099gBTPFI
Now, since Sam is jewish (according to Wikipedia, at least), one might also look to Yiddish for the 'correct' pronounciation (although that's up to Sam and his family, ultimately). Yiddish is very close to modern German, but as far as I can tell, it does not have the soft version of 'ch' (only the hard one). I couldn't find anything where Sam himself said his surname, but since the people around it pronounce it with a 'sh', I'm going to assume he bases his surnames pronounciation off how it would be pronounced in German.
A bit long of a response, but it irks me how often people say that my native tongue sounds incredibly harsh, when these days that stereotype is mostly based on Americans yelling broken German with the worst pronounciation imaginable.
it irks me how often people say that my native tongue sounds incredibly harsh, when these days that stereotype is mostly based on Americans yelling broken German with the worst pronounciation imaginable.
It's definitely overdone, but admittedly, linguistically our language does have some "harsher" qualities than many; especially in contrast to (politically) Western European languages.
(Very simplified,) it's all about our stops between words.
This is most obvious when compared to French, and with us being such close neighbours, and our two languages having effectively been the two "continental" ones in the eyes of the Brits, it makes sense why this different "vibe" survived well into our peaceful era.
French is very fluid with a heavy emphasis on preserving "the flow". Each word smoothly follows the next. This is so central to the language, that if it isn't really possible to smoothly connect two words, the words themselves are adjusted to make it possible. In French, the cohesion of the sentence has the highest priority. Contractions are probably the primary example: le arbre -> l'arbre, il me a embrassé -> il m'a embrassé. Unlike in English, these aren't optional. This absolute requirement to make it work goes so far as to sometimes using articles of the opposite gender, if the correct one simply can't be made to work: "friend "= ami, "my" = mon/ma (m/f), => "my (female) friend" = mon ami (using the masculine), because ma ami is simply unacceptable and m'ami ain't it, either. Imagine calling your best male friend "meine Freund", simply because everyone agrees that "mein Freund" sounds stupid.
Fun fact: sometimes the French go too far with their love of contractions so that they for example messed up the word for the bird we call "Pirol". The etymology is clear cut. It's a distinctly yellow, or golden bird. So it was called "the golden one": le oriot -> l'oriot. At some point the French "kind of forgot" that the article was already included, added one, and started calling it le loriot.
German has a completely different philosophy. For us, the flow and overall cohesion of the sentence is less important than the individual word. No matter how fast we speak, our sentences don't turn into "soup", you can always hear distinct words. We do this by adding literal (if very short) breaks/stops between words, but also further accentuate it by ending our words on hard consonants, even if the word is written as ending on a soft one. Notice the difference between "Hund" und "Hunde", "Burg" and "Burgen", "Haus" und "Häuser". If it's at the end of the word, it turns hard.
It's easy to see how this might make it sound much harsher when side by side with a French sentence.
But there's more.
English shares some of the French style. They for example have contractions ("I am" -> "I'm", "are not" -> "aren't", etc.), even if they're somewhat optional. More importantly for the "German sounds harsh" bit is that English doesn't have our "words end on hard consonants" rule. There's no difference between "dog" and "dogs". For us native German speakers, our hard consonants rule is so deeply ingrained, that it is one of the harder aspects of learning to speak English. It's so hard in fact, that very few of us, even those among us for whom it becomes the primary language, ever properly learn it. I have spoken English as my primary language for nearly two decades, but because my early childhood was in German, my "dog' sounds more like "dock", if I don't make a conscious effort to get it right. More fuel for the "German sounds harsh" fire.
Ninja-Edit: obviously all of the above only really applies to the standard dialects. There's harsh, staccato French dialects and soft, contracting, flowing German ones.
The first time you watch the movie, Dante is just sort of seems like a dumb animal who keeps running off and being annoying while Miguel is just trying to get home with the Guitar.
Meanwhile, the movie starts piling on coincidence after coincidence of Miguel running into people, including a random man who JUST SO HAPPENS to be his real grandfather.
But, then near the end you find out that Dante is an Alebrije (spirit guide) and on the rewatch you’ll see that NONE of it was coincidental. Dante was always there. Guiding Miguel to the people he needed to find.
The movie doesn’t even really say it outright, and it’s only really something and I really recommend a rewatch, because watching how Dante “manipulate” is fun.
Frida Khalo does directly refer to Dante as an Alebrije, although she does so in a confused tone and given her eccentric taste, it's dismissed as her misunderstanding the situation.
But Miguel does directly say that Dante was trying to guide him back to his real grandfather after being rescued, right? I watched it recently and I remember him saying that
We don’t officially meet him until the music festival arc, however he is always in the background usually drawn poorly or off model until he gets real focus
I think it's important to mention that Purson's bloodline ability is "detection warding". He comes from a family of spies and information brokers and was sent to the school specifically to hone his stealth skills. So the reason you didn't notice him, even though he was always there, is that his power even worked on the audience.
This is who i came to say. Its great considering a bulk of the show for the first while is the main character befriending each of his classmates, and you consistently see someone else that never gets a spotlight until i think season 3 of the anime
Gravity Falls: the Government agents claimed they had been monitoring the Pines family all summer, and it’s true — they can sometimes be seen in the background. And also in the episode “Sock Opera” there’s a bug device in Mystery Shack's interfloor space
Exactly, there’s a big difference between a character being revealed as always present and the story actually showing us that. The reveal hits so much harder when you can look back and realize the clues were there all along.
Tbf, would you really pay attention to an omnipotent being who you don't even know exists in personification? Like being careful of death as an idea is very different from being careful of Death the godlike being
It's more about the same person who always appears in many different places that you go to. For example, seeing the same person at a grocery store, on the streets, in a bar, a movie theater. Puss has experienced Humpty appearing in many different places during adventure. He'd have reason to notice a singular person that constantly appears in the places he goes to, even if they are one off locations.
CDPR even held a contest to see if anyone could spot all of Gaunter’s background appearances. No one did (they gave the prize to the one who spotted the most).
In Final Fantasy XIV’s Hildibrand missions, one quest in Stormblood has you discover a Lalafell who has been following Nashu for five years. Though Nashu dismisses it, turns out the little bastard has been stalking her since patch 2.45!
You can always tell when a Hildibrand quest is nearby if that lalafell is nearby, badly hiding. I still haven't started the Dawntrail one, so that lalafell is still there, stalking Nashu.
In Futurama, when Leela meets her mutant parents, they tell her that while they did leave her in the “normal world” alone to become an orphan, they never truly left her side and kept an eye on her as she grew up. We then see a montage of them being present in her life while remaining hidden. Also, I believe you can spot them a couple of times in the background in some of the previous episodes.
Also in Futurama, Nibbler reveals later on in the series that he was the one who tipped Fry back in his chair and caused him to become frozen and wake up 1,000 years in the future. If you go back and watch the very first episode, you will see Nibbler’s shadow for a brief moment, indicating that he truly was there in the beginning pulling the strings.
Dr. Maruki from Persona 5 Royal, he claims at the end of his confidant to have always known who the Phantom Thieves were because he caught us just as we were leaving the Metaverse, right after Ann awakened her persona. If you go back and watch that scene, you can actually catch Dr. Maruki leaving the school, having a direct line of sight with your group.
Until the music festival arc, people forgot about him. Like it wasn't retconned he was always there, he actually was always there in the background of the classroom and basically all the events.
It ended up being way more obvious in the anime cause of all the bright colors but in the manga this worked so well. From the very first chapters he’s there with everyone in the misfits class, but he just blends in so well.
I don't think it was ever confirmed, but it's highly possible that the naked character that appears in the background of Smiling Friends s1 finale is Mole Man, a character that stalked Pim and Charlie through the series and reveals itself in season 3
might be my absolute favorite example of this trope, not just "oh they were just there in the background the whole time" but "everything we've been doing up to this point has been entirely orchestrated by this motherfucker, and there is nothing we can do or could have done to stop it"
This is a weird case for those who don’t know. Technically he wasn’t there. But his powers give him the ability to retroactively overwrite both a person’s memories and essentially reality itself when he decides to use it.
In this case he saw Orihime, inserted himself into her past and it actually became retroactive history.
The Fullbring arc was pretty wack overall and the final arc et al was pretty rushed but god the payoff of Tsukishima towards the end of the TYBW arc was so cool. His power is so tremendously OP compared to everything else in the series, he's basically a Stand User in the wrong universe.
Just in case you only saw the anime version of this arc I would say try to give the manga version of this arc a shot.
Right before the TYBW anime I decided to reread the manga and I remember having a very similar opinion about the Fullbring arc for ages so I wasn't looking forward to getting there but once I did I was very pleasantly surprised when I actually ended up liking it on the manga.
Maybe it was because I could read it all in one go or because the anime had some pacing issues and fillers between the arcs but I actually found it very refreshing after the non stop fighting from the arcs before.
An inter-dimensional representative that’s been stalking the protagonist throughout the Half-Life games, and can be seen in-game observing you from far away or inaccessible locations
The problem with the G-man is that it's effectively the plot twist of the first game. "That's just a guy on his way to work" "Wait why is he just walking around like the place isn't falling apart?" "Holy shit, he might not even be human?"
But anyone born after 1995 probably recognised him from Garry's Mod when they saw him, if not from his opening sequence appearance in the much more talked-about sequel.
In Too Many Cooks, there's a murderer that becomes the central character at 4 minutes, but if you look closely, you can see him in half the shots in the background before that.
Yeah I loved having the realization years later in life when finding content online that a strong emotional memory of mine was NOT infact my own insane dreams and sleep paralysis but just falling asleep with the TV on haha.
In Fallout 4, the main character is followed around by a guy named Deacon. He is present at some pivotal moments and just stands around pretending to be a random NPC.
Eventually he will vouch for the player so his faction trusts them, saying he has been observing them.
There is even some extra dialogue if the player managed to out manoeuvre him and avoided the encounters throughout the game.
He had even built a little lookout near the start of the game overlooking the vault that the player emerges from.
They do show his shadow in a few shots if you pay attention, so it's not as full a cheat as "just off-camera" makes it seem. But they do cheat in a couple other ways.
IIRC you can actually see his chair's shadow in some scenes. And characters do mention him occasionally, the game just heavily gaslights you into thinking they're referring to a different character. It's a very dumb twist but also very, very funny.
I feel like this isn’t the case, the manga wasn’t anywhere near this reveal when season 1 aired and I doubt isayama told production or even knew himself all the details. I feel as though these figures that look like eren aren’t intentional
It isn’t. Eren and Zeke do not time travel physically, they travel back through Grisha’s memories using the Paths that connected the Founding Titan to all Eldians. The only time Eren is “seen” is when Grisha realises an older Eren is with him during ep 1 when promising to show young Eren what he’s been working on, and then when older Eren manipulates Grisha into killing the royal family. (And even then, Grisha wouldn’t be able to see Eren, it would have been as though he was looking at himself through older Eren’s POV given how the future memories work for the Attack Titan).
The only scene I can think of that they could be referring to is when Eren's dad stares at an empty space in the room when telling Eren he'll show him the basement. We then learn later that when Eren was traveling through memories that he was standing in that exact spot.
From how I understand it, Eren basically bootstrap paradox himself into existence. The attack titan can see the memory’s of past and future users. Eren used the memories of memories to set events into play
Yup. What specifically happened to make Eren become a misanthrope was seeing the memory of his future self egging his dad on to kill the royal family. Its never spelled out explicitly but the face of dispair he makes after kissing Historia's hand is identical to the one his dad made after being driven over the edge by future Eren, and just seeing the massacre shouldn't have shocked him because he already knew about it
Yeah, that’s the only thing that actually is seen of ‘Eren’ in previous episodes.
The people highlighting random silhouettes in previous episodes are just making things up, Eren didn’t literally travel back in time, he sent memories of himself back in time essentially.
he cant time travel, but he can visit memories, even ones being currently made by the person experiencing them kinda, by giving them the memory of his own of visiting their memory, so the other person can see from their eyes, like the other person said with his dad
His silhouette was actually present in the original airing of the first episode, before it was revealed that he was the one responsible for Fry getting frozen
In one episode of Miss Kobyiashi's Dragon Maid S (a.k.a. Season 2), Kana runs away to New York after an argument and then ends up saving another kid from kidnappers because fuck you 5000 year old electric bird dragon before going back home.
It's revealed at the end that Kobyiashi asked Torhu to keep an eye on Kanna the whole time in the case she was needed, with quick cuts showing amusing things of Tohru doing things to blend in. If you go back through the episode, she is in every place she is said to be, albeit difficult to see if you don't know she's already there.
I thought about posting this one!
I remember when I watched this with a friend, at the end I was actually like, "Hang on. I want to check if she's right."
And yeah as mentioned she is in them. And once you know she is, she stands out even. But when you're watching the first time, you're probably not expecting to see her, so you just won't notice her (probably).
while he doesn't make a lot of in-person appearances, Stanford Pines (Gravity Falls) and items related to him make numerous appearances throughout the show, such as when Dipper and Mabel go back in time and his younger self makes a brief cameo
Gibby Gibson protests when his friends, Carly Shay, Samantha Puckett and Freddie Benson, claim he wasn't always around and insists he actually spent quite a lot of them. They reflect and realize he was right but they just didnt truly befriend him until later on (iCarly)
the REAL ciel (our protagonist’s deceased twin brother) had been present for nearly every major event through out the story and we see several panels showing exactly where he had been as he recovered and waited patiently to reveal and reunite with his younger twin
She’s introduced as a ghost who has been haunting the hotel for a while but screws up by bumping the breakfast table in the first episode leading everyone to realise she’s alive.
If you go back to season 1 she shows up as a background host several times. One example is when Katherine is auditioning ghosts at one point she’s sitting in the crowd
I don't know if its an exact fit. In the anime Baccano!, the opening showcases each character of the varied cast in turn, flashing a nameplate next to a still of them.
During the show, in the 1931 arc on board the train, we learn of the legend of the Rail Tracer, a horror myth monster that disappears passengers on the train.
The identity of the Rail Tracer is in fact Claire Stanfield, an extremely talented assassin. He was there the entire time, as one of the conductors. This reveal is kept secret even by the opening song, as he appears in it like all other characters but doesn't get a freeze frame or nameplate.
During the 9th doctor's run, the phrase "Bad Wolf" popped up in almost every episode. Eventually, it was revealed that it was Rose Tyler after absorbing energy from the Time Vortex sending messages to herself through time.
In multiple scenes of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure part 4 the upcoming villains can be seen in crowds often. The overarching villain also appears in crowds far before he is relevant
Strong Bad Email #100: when the episode goes into widescreen, Homestar is suddenly next to the computer desk. He tells Strong Bad he was always there, just that he was always "behind the black". Then again, this being Homestar who's saying this, take it with a grain of salt.
Fat Neil in the series Community. During the first D&D episode, we learn that one member of the study group is responsible for coining his insulting nickname, which caused Neil's depression and near self-deletion attempt. The group helps him regain confidence, and he becomes a series regular who ends up hosting Greendale College radio station under the name Awesome Neil.
adventure time had 2:
1. episode 1’s pinata was actually revealed in the last season to be the result of an experiment & lost all her memories
2. the snail that later started the apocalypse
Manfried/Lolly doesn't really count because it was just a retcon that they pulled out later.
But the snail being in every single episode and then being a major plot catalyst feels like it has to count, even if they didn't know what they wanted to use the snail for at first (which they may have, I'm not sure)
In an episode of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid where Kanna runs off to America, at the end Tohru reveals that she was watching her the whole time, and you can actually spot her in the background on some scenes
By the time Absolute scarecrow is introduced we find out he's always been there via his vague figures in panels numerous places or with the joker or a murder of crows that always hint to his hand in tragedys
haunted hotel just did this! in season 2 there is a girl who isn't a ghost and everyone is like "what you aren't dead?" and she explains that her gramps told her someone from their bloodline always had to be there and she took his place when he died. there are hints in season one that were clues to her being there
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u/JuiceOfTheElderToad 10h ago
Nibbler in Futurama.
In the fourth season, he reveals that he was the one who pushed Fry into the cryopod in the very first episode, and if you rewatch the first episode, you’ll see Nibbler’s shadow by the chair.