It’s intuitive to me that stories about achieving status and recognition within a system while also having misgivings or desiring to change or destroy that system are currently popular.

Moses being adopted into the pharaoh's family

This is oddly enough much more positive on the Empire at least; it just be refreshed by its core principles (elites taking responsibility) rather than demolished

Tbf that series does a tremendous job of combining that trope with the “very special boy gets discovered and goes to special school” trope. Though in that book the prodigy from the hinterlands was [redacted redacted] but it still counts.

Cahokia Jazz kind of subverts this dynamic.

A Memory Called Empire gestures at this.

The Strength of the Few came out last week!

I feel like in the past few years I've read about a million different fantasy books about, specifically, "a prodigy from the hinterlands who is absorbed into some kind of colonial imperial bureaucracy that they ultimately decide must be burned down". But it's probably only 3-5 different books.

Not conventional mysteries per se, but De Palma plays all kinds of games with “invisible” dissonance between the dialogue and the visuals in Dressed to Kill, Raising Cain, and heck even Mission: Impossible

I remember Wetherby (1985) doing a bit of this, with flashbacks showing how a particular detail was explained by something going on in a previous flashback. Not primarily exactly a mystery though (and I saw it forty years ago). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetherb...

more obvious to him bc he was trying to follow the plot based on nonverbal cues and reading the emotional vibes

my dad was living in belgium when this came out, didn't really speak french and accidentally went to see a dubbed version of this rather than subtitled and decided to stick around. he said he figured out that bruce willis was dead very early on bc it was obvious nobody else was interacting w/him

R-Point

Midsomer Murders (the good seasons, 1-8) did this from time to time. I won't give any spoilers.

This is a second category of TV trick I like where the writers play off common TV show conventions to set up twists or mysteries like when Dawn showed up on Buffy or everyone lists their memories on TNG and it wasn't automatically self evident that the new guy was an alien because new crew 1/2

Apple’s Afterparty was good at this www.reddit.com/r/TheAfterPa...

I think you’re hitting on why this doesn’t happen; in the moment, “plot point you can dismiss as a continuity error” just looks like a continuity error and takes you out of it. even worse in a series, where fans can assume you’re retconning an actual continuity error

It was extremely well received by fans (and used as proof of the showrunner’s brilliance etc) in part because it *was* a plot point based on a purely visual cue (and one you could easily assume was just an error) which as you say, you really don’t see that many of

Brokenwood (tv). Midsummer Murders (tv). Lynley (tv). Maigret (2025). Rivers of London books. The original Bosch books. Ludwig (2025 tv). Elementary (except the last season).

Not exactly what you’re saying but I’m thinking here of the Doctor Who plot where the Doctor loses his jacket and then suddenly has it back for one scene later in the episode and it’s later revealed as a deliberate plot point (involving time travel, obviously).

I think by definition I don't want books here (for once!).

Wondering if anyone on here can beat the other site.

Yeah, it's all very varied, but you'll probably get better CRITICAL analysis about something from (somewhere) within its fandom than from without. They've thought about it the most and they care the most.

Want to go on a David Bordwell kick. What's the best stuff? (Not necessarily the broadest introduction, I like reading narrow works too.)

Finished "Apothecary Diaries". Never seen another show that had the protagonist sleep through the climax because she probably wouldn't be very interested in it.

Kellogg's made their own until they got sued so they changed the name to "granola".

Just took out:

Depends on time and place I guess, in "The World of Yesterday" Stefan Zweig recounts the extreme reverence with which actors were treated in Vienna towards the end of the 19th century, although as he notes Vienna was far from typical in its appreciation for the arts

There were definitely prestigious actors (I think William Macready is an early example - famously he sparked a riot by performing in the US at a time of nationalist fervour) but I think the profession as a whole was still maligned en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astor_P...

I think Carl Bernstein is the last journalist to basically take a joruneyman route, starting as a copyboy in high school and moving to papers where they were fine hiring journalists w/out college degrees when he flunked out, and then moving up from there as he built his reputation.

People try this today—I knew someone online who moved to North Dakota after college because they snagged an opening at one of the papers there (this was ~2013). In the 20th century one could do it locally, and earlier without a college education.

Though this is more in reference to fiction. If you were a journalist there were definitely ways to move up, both to better and better beats and to better and better papers, possibly eventually becoming a magazine correspondent.

Oh, and civil servant. I think that's pretty exhaustive. A brewer also qualified as a gentleman for some reason, but I feel like it would be a bit gauche for the son of a duke to go into brewing. You could make passive income from real estate, as well, of course, which was the ideal.

Actual jobs you could have if you from a duke's family and need to work for a living, without it being embarrassing: army or naval officer, Church of England clergyman, lawyer, physician (not surgeon, surgeons are tradesmen), Oxbridge don (overlapping with clergyman), banker.

To be less snarky, there’s moments where barriers to entry have yet to be erected (1st dotcom boom, eg) but the US magazine writing market has always been super competitive. “We” “all” know Janet Flanner (longtime Paris correspondent f/the NYer), but everyone has forgotten Kay Boyle

Even then there was a mountain of submissions that never got published. It’s more in reference to book publishing, but the per The Awl (woah that goes back) it was already an issue at the beginning of the 20th century and “slush pile” probably dates to before 1952 www.theawl.com/2010/07/very...

"actor" is, like, a historically maligned vocation, you'd see documents from the Middle Ages that ranked them as practically subhuman - I think "stage actor" crawled out of spite and into prestige relatively recently in human history and "film actor" more recently than that

Or you hear about how every big actor in the UK these days comes from a family of dukes. Did those kinds of people just consider acting beneath them back in the day? "Gosford Park" made a joke of this with Maggie Smith turning up her nose at the Hollywood types but IDK if it's true.

I think what you can sell as raw mechanical units obviously has a lot to do with it (like music has never made as much as it did in the CD era), but yeah, I have to wonder if there's a reason someone like Hunter S. Thompson was doing it at the time

I think the pay was better because there were fewer writers of sufficient quality but also you had way more profitable publications to sustain writers. Lot of reasons for the collapse of the profession but ad revenues disappearing from print publications played a big role.

Fewer people trying to do it, certainly, but also I think the definition of "anyone" is extremely limited. ("Any Yale graduate")

or if entry was only open to, uh, "certain kinds" of people