All the important characters are brought into a room together so they can drop exposition and summations into the mix. This is accomplished through the pretext of a party, frequently a birthday party.
Contrast The Hilarious Table where the purpose is to show how well characters get along with another.
Examples
- This trope was used frequently in the manga of Boys over Flowers. Birthday and various other parties served as pretexts for four separate declarations of love, two disavowals of family, and the introduction of several major plot points.
- The first issue of Runaways has the kids attending a party with their parents as a way of introducing their various relationship dynamics with each other.
- Rob's going-away party in Cloverfield was used to reveal considerable exposition, such as Rob's relationship with Beth and Hud's crush on Marlena.
- Played with in The Fly (1986): It starts In Medias Res at a cocktail party (later explained to be a press event for a technology company) at an art museum as a scientist is trying to break the ice with a journalist by teasing an amazing invention he's working on, and deliberately not giving her more information because he doesn't want "half the scientific community of North America eavesdropping" — instead, he invites her to his lab to see it.
- The beginning of Swing Kids has a party where four of the main characters: Peter, Thomas, Arvid, and Otto, meet up with some girls to swing dance.
- Coherence: The first act of the film is just a dinner party establishing the eight characters and their dynamics with each other before the supernatural events take over.
- In The Hobbit, the impromptu party that the dwarves throw at Bilbo Baggins's place (where they lay out the plans for the upcoming quest) might qualify for this trope. The Rankin-Bass animated version of The Return of the King begins with all of the principal players at a party, relating all of the events of the movie via song and flashback.
- The Westing Game
- The closing chapter consists of several vignettes that are exposition parties revealing what happened to the characters after the mystery was solved.
- Also invoked and subverted earlier in the story, where one of the characters throws a party that everyone attends in the hopes that they'll learn important clues from each other that will help one of them win the titular game. It doesn't work and everyone leaves disappointed.
- Harry Potter
- The last chapter of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets features an impromptu feast in the middle of the night which details the return of all the petrified victims, Hagrid, and other school news.
- Bill and Fleur's party in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows serves so Harry can get information from Xenophilius Lovegood about what are the Deathly Hallows.
- Star Trek: Voyager
- In "Endgame", the final episode, the story begins at a party at Admiral Janeway's home to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Voyager's return to Earth. Each of the surviving major characters makes an appearance to drop important expository information.
- The episode "Revulsion" opens (after the Opening Credits) with Tuvok's promotion party. The dialogue between different characters introduces the episode's plot threads.
- A dark version of this trope features in the season 2 finale of Robin Hood. Robin's birthday party is the pretext for getting the gang in one room, but the exposition comes about when the party turns out to be a trap, and the characters decide to share their secrets, thinking they will all be dead by morning.
- This was used in the Firefly episode "Out of Gas" during a dinner/birthday celebration. The writer of this episode, Tim Minear, has talked about how he threw out as many words as he could - like "wife", "whoring", "shepherd", "doctor", "married", "companion", "preacher", "warrant", etc. - in order to introduce the characters, their relationships to one another and what their place is as part of the crew of Serenity.
- The Stargate SG-1 episode "2010" starts with Carter meeting with her husband and then going to a commemoration service to honor Earth's alliance with an alien race. These two scenes serve to fill the audience in on what has "happened" since the audience will be completely baffled by the sudden jump 10 years into the future.
- The first episode of Runaways (2017) has Alex trying to get his former friends to come to an impromptu party at his house as a way of introducing their relationships to one another.
- Cyrano de Bergerac: Act I Scene II. All the important characters are in scene (except the protagonist) waiting to see a play. Some of them are presented to Christian, and Ligniere talks about the relationship between Roxane, De Guiche and Valvert. The protagonist himself is absent, so everyone talks about him… because he promised to ruin the play they intend to attend.
- In Fallout 3, the Lone Wanderer's 10th birthday party is a part of the tutorial, and introduces most of the important inhabitants of Vault 101.
- An extra-long installment
near the end of the "Island and the Idol" arc in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! is devoted to the characters' trip home in a spaceship, where they all give exposition that wraps up loose plot threads from the story. Lampshaded at the end.
- Used in A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever, to establish the rich and successful protagonist as such before his circumstances change.
- In Holiday Wars, Halloween takes the three main cast members into a room to give them the backstory of the war, which can be seen in this episode.
- One of the longest-running arcsnote (in every sense of the phrase) in El Goonish Shive was "Grace's Birthday Party", in which all but one of the major characters had their gender reversed, and considerable exposition and character development occurred. Ironically, in actual time elapsed in-world, it's the shortest arc.
- Bob and George had an anniversary party that lasted a couple of days, the last of which was an illusion showing roughly what the webcomic would have been were it the hand-drawn series it was originally intended to be.
