oh i never know how to explain this properly but i looooooooooooooooove when a story just absolutely TELLS you something and itâs so obvious it goes right by you. like the equivalent of hiding in plain sight. iâm thinking in the original cut(?) of alien where they showed the full xenomorph, crouched and ready to pounce, but because weâve never seen it before, we canât tell what it is and interpret it as part of the spaceship. or itâs a detail that seems so out of place or wildly insane that you automatically ignore it and assume you misinterpreted until that exact detail comes back in a big way? (like when noah the raven boy flat out tells everyone heâs a ghost and they take it as a joke, so the reader does too) is there a tvtropes name for this iâm obsessed with it
I think that this is known as "delayed decoding" in literary analysis. The term was coined by Ian Watt in the '70s, don't remember the exact year, to describe a technique used by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, but a lot of writers picked it up. It's basically what you described: you present a detailed image but don't make its moral and psychological relevance obvious. You give facts but not their meaning, not until later, and the revelation can come directly from the characters who suddenly realize what they have observed or it can also be left in the text, to be understood by the reader. You can see why Modernists loved it!
