#please stop making them all say such cliche things when you expostite

[the-siren-in-your-fridge]

One oddly specific trope I dislike is when the audience can’t understand a character (usually because they’re on the other line of the phone or because there’s a language barrier) and the character who knows what they’re saying repeats all their lines verbatim or close to it. If you write the dialogue correctly, we can guess what they’re talking about without you making the translator say everything back to them in various tones to establish what they think of it

Here’s an example that I frequently see (I can’t think of any specific scenes right now, but they usually play out like this):

“Meep.”

“The tunnels of Macguffin? Are you serious? There’s no possible way we could make it through!”

“Meep!”

“I don’t care if we have the Macguffin sword, we’ll never get past the goblins!”

“Meep!”

“There’s no way the sword could scare them away like you say it would, it’s too unlikely.”

“Meep.”

“True, if we bring the Item of Scaring, it could work.” They then turned to the rest of the team and recounted the entire conversation, which the rest of the team effectively just heard both sides of.

It feels like I’m being exposited to and it’s driving me insane, partially because it doesn’t sound like a real conversation. Consider instead:

“Meep”

“Are you serious? There’s no possible way we could make it through.”

“Meep!”

“One sword isn’t enough to keep every goblin at bay, even if it’s the Macguffin sword.”

“Meep!”

“It’s too unlikely.”

“Meep.”

“True, that could work.” They turned to the rest of the team. “Meep proposes we go through the tunnels of Macguffin. With the Macguffin sword and the Item of Scaring, we might be able to make it past the goblins.”

The second one might give less information during the exchange, but if the reader has heard those terms before and the translator is reacting in a way that the audience can understand, we have a good idea of what they might be suggesting. For the sake of the whole thing not sound like such an obvious attempt to make sure the audience understands what’s being conveyed, the translation summarizing afterwards works better. You can even write out the conversation as if Meep speaks the same language as everyone else and go back and replace Meep’s dialogue with Meep. And the conversation doesn’t sound so stilted and unreal

Maybe my actual beef is with terrible dialogue and cliche exposition lol but my point still stands