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general media Opinion on foreshadowing? Any favorite foreshadowed moments?


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I'm wondering about everypony's view on foreshadowing in movies, writing, story-driven video games, etc. Despise it? Can't get enough of it? Couldn't care less?

I personally am obsessed foreshadowing, as long as it doesn't give away too much and is fairly subtle (in most cases. I like obvious foreshadowing in moderation). Especially in my own writing, I love it when someone picks up on the hidden hints I put in my writing.

This foreshadowing scene is my favorite, and it gives me goosebumps every time I read it.

Spoiler

 

"I had a nightmare," she said, "and then something woke me. Didn't you feel it?"

"Feel what?"

He heard her cross to the wall of windows. It sounded as if she put one talon on the translucent leaves and stood for a moment quietly, without speaking.

"Something that shook the earth," she said at last, so softly that he wondered if he would have been able to hear before, when he could see.

"I didn't notice anything," he said.

A small sound -- Anemone's wings shivering together.

"It felt," she said, "like someone slithering over my grave."

From Starflight and Anemone's conversation in the epilogue of Wings of Fire: Escaping Peril by Tui Sutherland

 

Are there any foreshadowing moments in media that you love?

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Good foreshadowing IMO is when you only know it after the event happens (or think really hard about everything). It then makes fun rewatching the series like Babylon 5 and spotting the foreshadowing moments. And B5 is full of them, because the broad story was essentially created before the show was started to film (while filming season 1 JMS had already created the story for season 4) with options left open in case real life interferes with it (an actor quits etc).

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My favorite DS game of all time, Ghost Trick Phantom Detective, has a great mystery with a lot of foreshadowing clues that are much easier to noticed the 2nd time around.

There also was some great foreshadowing in Gravity Falls

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I love the way foreshadowing is used in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson to build eeriness and uncertainty for the future events in the story. The Lottery is about a village that sacrifices a member of their community each year. A person's name is randomly drawn out of an ominous "black box" to be selected as the person that gets stoned to death by their friends and family. However, at the beginning of the story you don't know this: it just seems like a happy little village with sunshine and rainbows. Jackson foreshadows the upcoming horror by describing a few of the children nonchalantly collecting stones.

"Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix-- the villagers pronounced this name "Dellacroy"--eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys."

As your first reading the story, this paragraph seems pointless until you realise why they were collecting stones.

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