Subtle Foreshadowing

Subtle Foreshadowing (Eng. ‘subtle foreshadowing’) is a trend on TikTok featuring millions of videos where a disaster, downfall, or failure is registered in advance. This means that the scene of the catastrophe is repeatedly shown throughout the video, like an unrelenting refrain, woven into the very fabric of the content, almost as if it’s there for no reason, just hanging in the air. Often, this is a reenactment of a well-known internet scene, an unsuccessful movie, a TV show fragment, or a TV program segment.

As I write about cultural trends, this is an example of cultural recycling and, although at first glance films from the Subtle Foreshadowing series may seem incomprehensible, they are actually an intelligent evolution of historical forms of humor [1]. In traditional action movies, the twist or climax is meant to surprise, sometimes even shock the audience. The Subtle Foreshadowing trend breaks away from this old structure. The anticipated scene, the climax, is woven into the entire film multiple times, disrupting its linear narrative. This creates a sense of dissonance between the way young users of media from Generation Z perceive the world, who consume information from many sources simultaneously across multiple screens. These films reflect how young people view the world, which is filled with irony and lacks a traditional narrative with a solid starting point and ending climax.

Examples:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5BBXSvKVJQ
• https://www.tiktok.com/@simplyni__/video/7426760053241154849
• https://www.tiktok.com/@memix.exe/video/7426089446606441760?_r=1&_t=8rA3EpBf9za

Sources:

• Calum Booth, The ‘Subtle Foreshadowing’ TikTok Trend, Analyzed, https://www.forbes.com/sites/callumbooth/2024/10/10/the-subtle-foreshadowing-tiktok-trend-analyzed/
• Calum Booth, The ‘Subtle Foreshadowing’ TikTok Trend, Analyzed, https://www.forbes.com/sites/callumbooth/2024/10/10/the-subtle-foreshadowing-tiktok-trend-analyzed/ (accessed: November 30, 2024).