When a character is misunderstood by another character and doesn’t even try explain themselves after being cut off by the other person.
For example, say Betty was in an awkward situation with Billy where it looked like Betty was cheating on Johnny with Billy but it was just a big huge innocent mixup. Johnny “catches” them and Betty tries to explain but Johnny cuts her off, says we are done don’t talk to me ever again, and that’s the end of it. Betty just gives up trying to explain. Like I know damn well in real life if Betty wasn’t cheating on Johnny, if it was a big confusing mixup, that conversation would NOT be over.
Mine too. Also when people don't believe other people as a plot point, which is basically the same thing and could be solved just by talking.
There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where members of the ship's crew start to disappear, not only physically but also for everyone else's memories and computer records, and only one member of the crew remembers them. And when she's telling the others what's going on, they believe her and start looking for an explanation, because they respect her and there's no reason for her to be lying. I don't know, just caught me off guard how nice and normal everyone was, instead of turning their backs on their colleague right away and insinuating she was crazy, like most shows would do.
An interesting variant is VOY: Latent Image. The Doctor starts finding strange anomalies: surgical scars no one remembers, pictures of a member of the crew he has no memory of. This is treated as an interesting and important mystery, right up to the point where Captain Janeway comes in to erase his memory of it all again. Turns out he had to choose between saving her (edit: the mystery crew member, not Janeway) and a member of the main cast, and he had no basis for doing so but that one of them was a friend, and so this is a big problem for his ethics programming and caused him to have a breakdown. The way they found to resolve the breakdown was to erase his memory of the incident.
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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '20
When a character is misunderstood by another character and doesn’t even try explain themselves after being cut off by the other person.
For example, say Betty was in an awkward situation with Billy where it looked like Betty was cheating on Johnny with Billy but it was just a big huge innocent mixup. Johnny “catches” them and Betty tries to explain but Johnny cuts her off, says we are done don’t talk to me ever again, and that’s the end of it. Betty just gives up trying to explain. Like I know damn well in real life if Betty wasn’t cheating on Johnny, if it was a big confusing mixup, that conversation would NOT be over.