Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Wall of Text

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/wall_of_text_1664.gif
tl;dr lol

"Shakespeare wrote that 'brevity is the soul of wit.' He did not then add 'unless you're writing a webcomic.' It applies to everything, and don't tell me you're arrogant enough to claim to know better than Shakespeare."
— Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw

A paragraph should ideally be a smooth, succinct experience that goes through a bit of exposition, illustrates an idea, sums up the point, and primes the reader for the next paragraph.

Ideally.

In practice, a writer can get too caught up in all the things they have to say and fail to organize it all into bits an ordinary human being would be able to digest. The end result is a huge run-on paragraph that makes it difficult to recall the original point of it if there was one in the first place. The reader's eyes glaze over and all they see is a wall of text.

This afflicts all written media, but it is particularly infamous for its effect on Comic Books. One of the first things learned in comics is how to use dialogue bubbles effectively; a writer not allocating space carefully will end up covering their panel with a bunch of text and white space. Eventually, the reader will realize that they're primarily looking at plain text rather than the vivid form of visual storytelling that comic books are famed for. TL;DR indeed.

At best, a Wall of Text is just a signal of really heavy exposition. At worst, they are a warning sign that the author is soapboxing about something.

Like a lot of tropes, though, even this isn't necessarily a hopeless evil. There are occasions where a person will go on and on in real life, or perhaps is giving one huge, unbroken speech or rant, and for these cases, "walls of text" aren't necessarily a terrible formatting idea; they can help visually reinforce what's happening in the story and match the experience of the reader to the experience in-universe. Using it like this, though, still requires skill and finesse to avoid making just another negative example.

In older times (For an example, in early medieval and earlier), walls of texts used to be far more common. This was partly because writing medium was more expensive and because value of text formatting was not deemed that important.

Speaking in Panels is often a way to evade this trope while recounting what happened.

If Speech-Bubbles Interruption are used to show it's not being listened to, see Wall of Blather. If the text is literally written on a wall in-universe, it might be a Room Full of Crazy. See Read the Fine Print if these kinds of text actually contain very important information. Ominous Multiple Screens is sort-of the video equivalent. Compare Doorstopper, usually related to works that are literally nothing but words. Sister Trope of Textplosion, when this happens in comics media rather than written media.

TV Tropes is not immune to this phenomenon.

Examples

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • Parodied in the Mac ad Legal Copy when PC starts making claims about his performance, causing a disclaimer to appear on-screen. Said disclaimer becomes bigger and bigger throughout the commercial, ending with PC saying "PCs are now 100% trouble-free!" causing the disclaimer to fill the whole screen.
  • Funnily enough, in Anglophone print advertisements from the 1920s through to about the 1960s, the use of these was actually fairly common. It varied tremendously depending on the ad and the product, but it wasn't uncommon at all to see ad copy that could make use of huge paragraphs, or even if it was multiple paragraphs, to have the written copy take up most of the page. This style of ad copy gradually fell out of favor in the following few decades, and ultimately ended up as a Dead Horse Trope by the time The '90s rolled around.

    Anime and Manga 
  • A meta-example happens in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. The class takes a trip out to the local forests in order for the students to draw artworks of nature. One of the professors who accompanies the students constantly goes on a wild tangent discussing the philosophical relationships between science, nature, art, and well... let's just say a lot of Big Words are used in a very, very fast manner. The official subtitles literally take up the ENTIRE SCREEN when he's ranting.
  • While the red, bold text in Kill la Kill doesn't cover the entire screen at times, it displays so much, it covers a good portion of the episode time. Especially, the last one.
  • Moyashimon: Prof. Itsuki is prone to long educational monologues on fermented foods and his studies in bioremediation, and a Running Gag is other characters being squeezed awkwardly together in the face of his massive speech balloons.
  • My Hero Academia: Izuku Midoriya, when he goes in-depth about his analyses, has been known to accidentally cause these; at one point, when telling Pro Hero Endeavor about what skills he wants to improve on in his internship, the transcript for his explanation takes up much of the spacenote  in the scene/ panel. Fortunately, Endeavor understands the main idea.
  • This is Tsugumi Ohba's Creator Thumbprint. Reading a single chapter of anything they've written is a kind of mental workout, as every last word will be important to keep up with the plot. By comparison, their latest work, Platinum End, downplays the amount of the dialogue, but not by a whole lot.
    • The Death Note manga can be particularly guilty of this at times. In the later volumes of the manga, the characters spend a ton of time out-thinking each other in a 3-way cat-and-mouse game, and all of the text used for that can be jarring, even though it's essential. To make it worse, it's complex enough that, if you blink and miss a crucial detail, you're totally lost.
    • Bakuman。 can be wordier than Death Note, to the point that chapters often boil down to the heroes talking about manga.
  • Attack on Titan: The "Information Available For Public Disclosure" eyecatches can usually be read in the short pause, but the Episode 25 one is quite long, and is only readable if you're able to pause it. It's a story about a miner that sought to tunnel under Wall Sina to live there, working harder and harder at his goal. He goes missing after telling a friend about it, then sometime after everyone searches for him the friend disappears, too. It's unclear whether the Wall Cult or Internal Military Police disposed of them or whether the Titans within the Walls ate them.
  • Case Closed more often than not features walls (and walls and walls) of text while pulling the thread to reveal who did it.
  • The Kindaichi Case Files can be jvery wordy, but he has the courtesy to break up his walls of text.
  • Hunter × Hunter: It's very common for author Yoshihiro Togashi to flood readers with huge passages of dialogue in his installments of the manga, as he likes to be incredibly crafty, cerebral, and thorough with the way he thinks out his story, covering things from all angles and trying very hard to avoid making anything seem poorly thought out or approached without examining all important points of a situation. What happens in the end is you get a comprehensive analysis of each little detail that can give you eyestrain. And boy, does he get comprehensive on us. Some fans have even noted that they think they need PHD's just to understand some of the most complicated fight scenes.
  • Level E contains a couple examples of this. And yes, you have to read them all (or at least skim them) to understand the plot that is going on.
  • Liar Game is mostly a story about chessmasters who try to beat each other in different "games" to see who is the best Magnificent Bastard. To do so, they use gambits after gambits based on game theories, psychology, economics, social studies and more. While they take the time to explain everything clearly, a certain knowledge of these subjects greatly helps to understand.
  • Medaka Box's Mukae Emukae, immediately after being introduced in chapter 60 and meeting one of the main characters, Zenkichi Hitoyoshi, delivers a monologue via double-page spread◊, consisting of four massive text bubbles the size of your hand, going on and on about how she wants to marry Hitoyoshi and have babies with him and have a nice big house and some pets and…. When Zenkichi tries to leave, she immediately impales Hitoyoshi's foot with a cleaver so he can't move.
    • A staggering example of this trope occurs when Anshin'in, a goddess with quadrillions of named skills, uses 100 skills apiece to defeat six enemies in six consecutive full-page panels. Each panel is composed of three elements: Anshin'in, her beaten enemy and, surrounding them, the names and descriptions of the one hundred skills she used (example◊). Each list of skills — sword skills, martial art skills, magic skills, mental skills, biological skills and "boss skills" — takes a few minutes to read, but is increasingly impressive.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi often falls into this, and even plays this one for comedy once, having Yue go off on lengthy Expo Speak tangents only to discover no one was listening.
    • Hakase also goes into a long rant with a speech bubble the size of your fist filled with tiny writing where she babbles to herself about Chachamaru's emotions.
    • Also when a scared-stiff Yue described the various impossibilities of the really, really big wyvern that was just about to eat her and Nodoka, ending with, "wait, what am I saying?"
  • Played for Laughs in a Soul Eater extra chapter (later adapted into an anime Breather Episode) with Excalibur giving another rambling story which takes up half a page that the author specifically tells us to skip because it's so annoying.
  • Played for Laughs in The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You. After a chapter devoted to each of the current girlfriends telling Rentarou all the things they love about him, Rentarou fires back with a massive page covering list of every single thing there is to love about them. The entire monologue is represented as a two-page spread consisting of almost nothing but two gigantic speech bubbles (completely filled, with quite small print) and a single drawing of Rentarou sandwiched between them.
  • Cipher Academy:
    • The climax of the code battle between Tayu and Iroha takes the form of a single image split between four pages, with a wall of questions from Tayu on one side and a wall of answers from Iroha on the other.
    • The complete solution to the murder mystery game is given in this way—as text in tiny letters taking up half a page, along with a Lampshade Hanging from Kogoe about how the mystery game's finale would take too long to present in any other way.

    Comic Books 
  • Warrior: The short-lived comic, based on pro wrestler The Ultimate Warrior, was filled from cover to cover with walls of text, much of it consisting of incomprehensible, made-up jargon. Much of the text centers on Warrior's strange pseudo-philosophy that's quite out there. To see just how crazy and nonsensical it is, almost to the point it is hard to believe it could exist. Making it worse was that sometimes it's printed in font colors that are unreadable on the background color. The sheer volume of text and its insane, babbling nature really can't be overstated here. There's a text box for the crazy narrator, a text box for Warrior's crazy inner monologue, and then thought bubbles for Warrior's crazy thoughts. It amounts to, at minimum, a good 4-5 paragraphs per page...
  • Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark went beyond the Walls of Text and into chronic Author Filibuster when the comic itself was repeatedly put on hold to make space for multi-page misogynistic rants of plain text. It does get over that phase eventuallynote , then later falls back into it.
  • Don Rosa's earlier works (particularly The Pertwillaby Papers) had tight-packed expository speech bubbles. Not so much in his Disney comics, though; the "Disney remakes" of his stories are a good example of how one can thin the information flow without really affecting the net amount of information conveyed to the reader.
  • One issue of Howard the Duck was 22 pages of text-with-an-illustration of Steve Gerber apologizing for not having a fully-formed comic ready for publication that month. Notably, at one point he paused his essay to describe a battle between a Las Vegas showgirl and a standing lamp, just so the comic would have a mandatory fight scene.
  • EC Comics had a pattern: the dialogue was put on the page before the artwork was drawn. Al Feldstein wrote his scripts in pencil directly onto the storyboards as he came up with it. This often meant that around 90% of the panel was pure text, with the art shoehorned into what was left. Some comics would end with a panel that was nothing but text to explain the story. The exception are the stories that Harvey Kurtzman drew, as well as the ones he wrote and storyboarded for other artists.
  • The Thrawn Trilogy comic series doesn't quite go to those extremes, but since it's a very Compressed Adaptation, there are quite a few pages full of text.
  • The comic adaptation of The Stand basically takes most of the narration from the really long book and puts it in dialogue boxes over the action as it is happening.
  • In Justice Society of America, vol 3, issue 1, a wall of text is used to show just how much Cyclone talks.
  • Parodied in Asterix as you have never seen him before. Asterix delivers a barrage of verbiage that occupies three-quarters of the panels and ends up putting Obelix to sleep.
  • The problem has been endemic long enough in the comics industry to make famous one particular work offering a way to patch it: "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work, or Some Interesting Ways to Get Some Variety into Those Boring Panels Where Some Dumb Writer Has a Bunch of Lame Characters Sitting Around and Talking for Page After Page!" Also available in PDF.
  • In an interview, celebrated comic scribe Larry Hama, a penciler turned writer, observed that the format of Marvel Comics' books in the 1970s and early 1980s was often guilty of this, bemoaning the overuse of captions. "You'd have a caption covering 3/4 of a panel, describing the content of the panel it was covering!"
  • Justified in American Splendor, as the story is less about the pictures and more about character dialog and Harvey Pekar's inner monologue.
  • Done tongue-in-cheek in The Spirit. When a suspect (a comic book artist) expresses an extreme hatred for his (currently dead) coworker's tendency to indulge in this trope, the Spirit replies that he thinks that sometimes wordiness is necessary for comic books — only instead of just saying that, he gives it in the form of a Character Filibuster while Commissioner Dolan cautiously eyes the massive speech balloon that engulfs the panel.
  • Scott McCloud demonstrated the disadvantage of it in a strip about an Upper-Class Twit: At first, he's overjoyed about making the Best Party Ever; then he gets confused about what the friend of him said; then he's shocked because said friend can't come to the party; then he's sad because the party is nothing without him. In one panel, you simply cannot demonstrate four different feelings; break it up, and it works.
  • Brian Michael Bendis's unique way of writing dialogue has a habit of ending up as this, with it being especially prominent in series like Powers.
  • Transformers
  • Invoked in The Unbelievable Gwenpool. When Gwen discovers her comic book-based Reality Warping abilities for the first time, one of her first tests is to see if she can interact with text boxes, so she creates one filled with random, rambling thoughts. The resulting wall of text is so big, it nearly kills Gwen by throwing her out the window of her bedroom.

    Comic Strips 
  • The online archive of the surreal Brown University newspaper comic Burble is fully aware of its large bits of dialogue; despite its high quality compared to most other strips at the time, it was mocked (and later self-mocked) for "too many words".
  • Peanuts once lampshaded it by having Linus, after a vast amount of talk, comment to Charlie Brown that a contemporary complaint is that there's far too much talking and not enough action in comic strips.
  • Mallard Fillmore often doesn't even draw the character's body, instead crowding piles and piles of text around a floating disembodied head.
  • This Modern World also has the piles of text around a head. Lampshaded by the artist on more than one occasion.
  • Jeremy "Norm" Scott's Hsu and Chan comics can get VERY wordy at times. While the walls scare off new readers, fans of the series will usually claim that Norm's style of humor justifies the intense word count. The comic's creator is aware of the wordiness of his comics and likes to joke about it constantly on his website.
    Norm: (about the issue Deep) Oddly enough, nobody complained about the wordiness in THIS comic. It's possible nobody ever made it to the end.
  • In Mafalda, each time Susanita starts telling gossip about the neighbours her speech bubble becomes a Wall of Text. On one occasion Felipe's body gets covered in text, until Manolito "saves him" by arriving and greeting them, breaking the flow of gossip.
  • German comic Rudi is (in)famous for this and sometimes lampshades it.
  • Beetle Bailey had Plato doing this now and then. He wrote philosophical screeds as bathroom graffiti.
  • The K Chronicles is very much this. It's not unusual to have strips where a majority of the panels are nothing but text, with very little actual drawings.
  • This Pearls Before Swine comic. Commentary even said how proud he was that the panels went on so long.

    Fan Works 
  • Always Visible: Three hundred or so pages, in which there is little dialogue, but a lot of pseudo-philosophical reasoning about what the author has no understanding of at all - that’s what this work is.
  • At the Official Fanfiction Academy of Starfleet, some of the classrooms have literal Text Walls. (Recycled from the students' fanfics.)
  • In My Huntsman Academia, Izuku spews out all of his thoughts while mumbling about the notes he's taking in his first Grimm Studies class, resulting in a massive block of text that is only broken when Port calls Izuku out.
  • Green Tea Rescue: Toga creates a group chat for the newly minted Dekusquad, which most of the group treats like a normal chatroom complete with emojis and abbreviations. Iida, on the other hand, introduces himself in a massive post with perfect grammar and punctuation, much to everyone else's amusement.
  • Chapter Eight in The Power of Friendship (And This Gun I Found!) has Joey give a summary of the last few days in-universe that forms a single unbroken paragraph over a thousand words long. Seto can only respond with a Flat "What".
  • It is apparently a popular joke in Touhou Project doujinshi to have Nitori or someone else go to lengthy descriptions (usually of technology) to the other characters who more likely than not are not actually listening. One doujin parodied it by having Alice get pushed against a wall by the huge speech bubble.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The opening crawl of Alone in the Dark (2005) goes on for ages.
  • In the documentary Crumb, Robert Crumb peruses his brother's old amateur comics to show the brother's mental breakdown. With each page, the drawings become more and more pushed back by larger and larger bubbles crammed with text, until finally the drawings are discarded and Crumb is just flipping through page after page of microscopic text. It's quite creepy.
  • The Shining famously shows Wendy looking at Jack's manuscript and it just says "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" for pages on end.
  • Shin Godzilla employs this trope while the Japanese government is first trying to find cause to deploy the JSDF against Godzilla, the text in question being excerpts from Japanese law that the polititians have to work through.

    Literature 
  • Works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended towards this, with paragraphs that sometimes ran for pages; remodeling these walls for modern printings isn't an option, however, since they were frequently single sentences with dozens of clauses and semicolon cancer out the wazu, preventing stylistic renovations without violating rules against line breaks in the middle of a sentence. Often this was because the authors were paid by the word; in serial works, editors wouldn't cut off in the middle of a sentence.
  • William S. Burroughs' books often recreate the hallucinatory ramblings of drug addicts and rely on a "cut up" collage method to create free associations. This often results in long, barely coherent blocks of text, especially notable in Naked Lunch and his cut-up trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express).
  • Charles Dickens's style is quite wordy. The discussion Scrooge has with Marley in A Christmas Carol is very short by his standards. (Then again, he WAS paid by the word...)
  • William Faulkner's stream of consciousness style lends itself to this quite often, with many instances of sentences running on for half a page or more, particularly in As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!.
  • Henry James's style includes almost impenetrably long sentences grouped into paragraphs that often span over a page in length.
  • Hardly anybody in the Anne of Green Gables series is as prone to this as Anne herself, who, especially in the first book, has a tendency to ramble on for pages (longer when Marilla is not there to interrupt her). Fortunately for both the characters' sanity and the readers', Marilla constantly lampshades this, leading to amusing scenes where Marilla tells Anne to stop talking, whereupon Anne starts to go off on a tangent about how hard it is for her shut up ... and then gets distracted and starts building an ironic Wall of Text.
  • The novel The Rotter's Club has a sentence that is apparently 13,955 words long.
  • Most people's first impression of The Bible. The genealogies are necessary to trace Jesus' ancestry, but they are long.
  • The book Ulysses ends with two sentences in its final chapter. The first one is 11,281 words long and the second is 12,931 words long.
  • Nobel Prize winner José Saramago loved to do this. Do not try to imitate him; he got a Nobel for a reason.
  • Another Nobel Prize in Literature: Camilo José Cela wrote a novel made up exclusively of a single sentence lasting more than 100 pages: Cristo versus Arizona.
  • In The Reptile Room, the narrator fills an entire page with the word "ever" over and over and over again when telling the reader not to fiddle around with electric devices unless they're Violet Baudelaire.
  • In Emma, Miss Bates' speeches can go on for pages, and Emma is always looking for an escape when politeness has her visit. Other characters habitually tune Miss Bates out, and readers often gloss over her endless rambling... which leads to a number of clues about the plot Hidden in Plain Sight because they're included in her speeches.
  • Atlas Shrugged. A certain someone smacks the reader in the face with a massive monologue made of capitalism; the first edition counted it at 70 pages.
  • The literary style of maximalism emphasizes the author writing down everything that crosses his/her mind in the interest of painting a more "complete" picture of the author's/character's mindset.
  • House of Leaves has some Wall Of Text passages that are deliberate - they illustrate a character (who, arguably, never had his shit completely together to begin with) slowly going crazier and crazier and talking and writing in more of a stream-of-consciousness style as his sanity leaves him. It's not pretty, and it's not supposed to be.
  • Robinson Crusoe has sentences that go on for more than a page at a time, with heavy use of semicolons instead of periods. Check it out here.
  • The first chapter of Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy consists of two paragraphs. Paragraph one is about a page and a half long; paragraph two usually exceeds eighty pages.
  • In the works of Roberto Bolaño:
    • 2666 has paragraphs that last up to around five pages, they are most common in the fourth part ("The Part About the Crimes") of the novel.
    • Exaggerated in By Night in Chile. The whole novella consists of just two paragraphs, the first one takes almost the whole part of it, while the second is just a small sentence on the last page.
  • Each page of A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates is made up of giant columns listing either 2500 random digits or 500 normal deviates.
  • Some of Franz Kafka's paragraphs (especially in his unpublished stories) span pages.
  • Jack Kerouac typed the original draft of On the Road in several frenzied bursts on a hand-taped, 120-foot scroll of paper, with no paragraph breaks at all. Fortunately for readers it was broken up into a more conventional form before publication.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Whose Line Is It Anyway?:
    • One "Let's Make a Date" game gave Wayne a very complicated role to play (something pretty close to "smooth rap star blindfolded and tied to the bed by his girlfriend gradually realizing the night is going terribly wrong"). When Greg saw the card (about 8"x8"), his reaction was a stunned "There's two paragraphs of text on this!"
    • Another playing of that game gave Ryan the role "Witch who entices the beast to her magic sleeping stool so she can break the magic spell and turn him into a prince". Again, the players made a number of jokes about the length of the suggestion.
    • The guessing-game personalities when Whose Line started in Britain were extremely simple ("a pirate," etc.), and gradually became longer and more convoluted over the next 18 seasons. Part of it was just to not repeat themselves, but also because the longer the performers worked together the simpler ones were too easy to figure out.
  • In Friends, Ross sleeps with a random girl after he and Rachel broke up. Rachel considers it cheating, even though the actual circumstances are more complicated (Ross interpreted "take a break from us" as a break-up, and in his depression the other girl came into the picture, "We were on a break" became a long lasting Running Gag). Ross is trying to get back in her good graces and Rachel writes a 20 page, front and back, letter for him to read to understand her feelings. He fell asleep trying to read it.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Time" time traveling petty criminal Berlinghoff Rasmussen asks the senior staff of the Enterprise-D to fill out questionnaires and to be thorough in answering the questions. Data's answers to Rasmussen's questions were in total well over 50,000 words long, prompting the Professor to tell Data that he should have asked Data to limit himself to 50,000 words in answering his questions.

    Music 
  • A white-on-black wall of text adorns the cover of XTC's second album, Go 2. Way to go, Hipgnosis!
  • The lyrics to Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom are printed this way.
  • The text on David Bowie's Station to Station is printed without spaces.
  • The cover of the Chumbawamba album whose full title is usually shortened to just The Boy Bands Have Won shows a long title of 865 characters (156 words), granting it the Guinness World Record for the longest album title in history.
  • One of the "Right Now" statements in the video for Van Halen's "Right Now" is a wall of text that takes up the whole screen, with a finger frantically tracing each line. It’s up for all of five seconds, cutting to the next statement right before the finger is done.

    Print Media 
  • An audiophile magazine featured an article lamenting the Loudness War, and attempted to explain it to laypeople by writing a whole paragraph in all caps with minimal line breaks as a visual metaphor for excessive dynamic range compression. It proved to be a bit too apt, as the magazine then received a ton of letters complaining that the technique made the article unreadable.
  • Textbooks. Some college texts books are solid walls of text that go for pages with no pictures, diagrams, or even paragraph breaks. Also, the text is usually really tiny.
  • Manual pages for Linux/Unix commands are notorious for this.
  • European Spanish magazines and newspapers tend to be wordier than their Latin American counterparts since Spaniards love detailed explanations. On the other side, Mexican magazines and newspapers (with few exceptions) generally try to get to the point more quickly than the European Spanish ones.
  • Old newspapers and magazines in general (at least until the 80s) used to feature longer articles.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Sentinels of the Multiverse parodies this with Guise's incap art, which features him being crushed under his incap abilities, one of which is a huge wall of text. It even has him saying "Too much text." His foil incap art, meanwhile, has him on a typewriter, writing out his own incap abilities, including the huge wall of text one.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! has a number of cards that are more text than card, but the biggest offenders are undoubtedly Pendulum Monsters. Why that is is because they have two blocks of text that describe what they do, one for their monster effect and the other for their Pendulum effect. Both can reach damn-near unreadable levels due to how tiny the text can get. For example, Endymion, the Mighty Master of Magic. This phenomenon relative to other card games is often blamed on the game's lack of keywords (the only real one being "piercing") combined with the existence of Problem-Solving Card Text necessitating often pedantic levels of effect description.

    Theatre 
  • The soliloquy of William Shakespeare can frequently become this. There's no fewer than three from the title character in Hamlet:
    • Act I, Scene 2, where he laments his mother flying into the arms of her brother-in-law Claudius after his father's death.
    • Act III, Scene 1, the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, where he ponders suicide.
    • Act IV, Scene 4, where Hamlet muses about the will of Fortinbras, and comparing the Norse conqueror's actions to his own plans against Claudius.

    Vanity Plates 

    Video Games 
  • Bram The Toymaker: After you've beaten the game, you're treated to a scrollable wall of text detailing The Player Character's relationship with his grandparents, the discovery of an old diary in their attic, the Dark and Troubled Past of the titular toymaker's house, and the protagonist's decision to investigate it.
  • Marathon 2: Durandal features a terminal in the level Kill Your Television with no spaces or punctuation deliberately to be cryptic and vague. Fans did decrypt the message, but, in typical old-school Bungie fashion, it still didn't make much sense.
  • If you make a rather wordy post on the City of Heroes forum, some people will complain they were killed by your wall of text. Some Trolls will engage in wall of text contests to see if they can overload the forum display.
    Wall of Text crits you for 9999 damage.
    You cannot use that power after you have been defeated.
    You cannot use that power after you have been defeated.
  • On World of Warcraft's official forums, people use TL;DR (Too long; didn't read) both offensively and defensively; someone building a wall of text will add "TL;DR version: Stuff", and people protesting will post just TL;DR. Sometimes people will lampshade their own wall building; one added "Edit: Remodeled Wall of Text, adding a door, a couple of windows and some nice flower boxes" after breaking it up into paragraphs.
    • But this can also be subverted when readers simply didn't bother to read a long post. "TL;DR" can basically mean: "Your well thought out, and the valid post was just too long to read, so I didn't bother."
  • The Neverhood has a literal wall of text: the hall of Records, thirty-eight screens full of text for Klaymen to read, detailing the game's vast backstory in a format spoofing that of The Bible. Fortunately, reading any of the text is optional, although the game does force you to trek through the entire hall to fetch a Plot Coupon.
  • Sacred 2: Fallen Angel doesn't have extensive voice acting for many of its NPCs. In particular, NPCs that give you quests (which usually boil down to go here and kill five wolves), will preface this with a page and a half of scrolled text detailing exactly why they want you to this. And if you're not playing on an HDTV, you won't be able to read a word of it.
  • In one stage of Wangan Midnight, Gatchan lets off two consecutive blocks of texts so big that they obscure your vision. In Maximum Tune 3 and its upgrades, not only does he have four blocks of text, he has the gall to say them NEAR THE END OF THE STAGE, making you more likely to lose. This is no longer the case from Maximum Tune 4 onwards, where Gatchan's wall of text is replaced with him and his wife constantly trading barbs for the whole race.
  • In the early text-based game Colossal Cave, the description of the volcano (depending on your computer's resolution) can take up nearly an entire screen.
  • This is hilariously done with Nemone's unique buff in Granblue Fantasy. Rather than the conventional way showcasing stacked buffs by adding a number to show how many stacked buffs she has, her buff (nemone) instead adds an extra -mone at the end, which would eventually span offscreen due to how ridiculously long it is.
  • In Minecraft, due to the lack of usable books or notes (Until 1.3), most downloadable scenarios, public servers, etc. will leave introductory text written on signs attached to walls near the initial spawn point. This results in literal walls of text.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has the blabbering owl, Kaepora Gaebora. He shows up to give you pages and pages of information that is useful for your first playthrough, but useless and trivial for subsequent ones. The slow text-scrolling speed is far from helpful. At the end, he asks you if you want to hear his advice all over again, or if you understood what he just told you. Be forewarned that the cursor will always default to whichever option makes him repeat himself. God help you if you were mashing the A button throughout his blabbering. Fortunately, this is a downplayed example in that his wall of text can be mostly skipped by simply pressing the B button past a certain point. Not that the game tells you that.
  • In Suikoden V, you must recruit Egbert by enduring his wall of text complaining about the Godwins. You can't press the button to advance the text, and the text moves slowly on purpose.
  • The original version of Space Station 13 had an infamously long and excessively complex backstory. It was so lengthy and impractical that most people just ignored the backstory completely. Sometime later, the devs of the Goonstation server made up a much better-received backstory that was much shorter and a little more to the point.
  • The character of Mr. Resetti in Animal Crossing exploits this trope: after the developers noticed how much play testers were Save Scumming to get better items, they created Resetti to punish anyone else who tries this by deliberately wasting their time with endless walls of rambling dialogue.
  • The end credits of Mighty No. 9 last for four hours, and most of said credits is a list of every single person who helped fund the game. That's 67,226 different people.
  • Final Fantasy XIV's favorite method of storytelling and exposition is to have main NPC characters stand in a circle and talk at ridiculous length about pretty much anything, from whatever threat you're currently facing to philosophical pablum, all while the player character stands there with a stupid look on his face. Alphinaud and Minfilia are the worst about it, and the situation is usually exacerbated by the dev team's need to pad the story and stall for time before the next significant update or expansion.
  • The Impossible Quiz and its sequel has a question on each that contains a wall of text. The first quiz had the question written on a sheet of paper, while the second quiz wrote it with the four choices. Needless to say though, if you try to read through the text, a bomb will eventually appear and start ticking down your doom.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Fate/stay night, Kotomine and Rin are prone to expository lectures, Kotomine describing the functions and history of the Grail Wars, Rin less frequently on the mechanics of magic. Many Chekhovs Guns have been obscured in the pages of text, and the voice-acted version hardly saved them. This was impatiently Lampshaded by Shirou's internal monologue in the final arc: "Doesn't he ever shut up?"
  • When Rin in Katawa Shoujo starts rambling, it's shown in the largest and fullest textbox in the game, generally reserved for Hisao's inner monologues. With barely if any punctuation.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • The Black Sand Bar, full stop. [1]
  • Geek Rage has this as its basic mode.
  • The Onion's articles Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Textnote  and Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail
  • Video game blogger Tim Rogers is infamous for producing these, and in fact, takes pride in it. If pressed to justify his extreme verbosity, his explanations vary from "it's just trolling" to "it's a legitimate style and you can take it or leave it".
  • Happens on The Other Wiki occasionally, more in the obscure-ish pages than others. Plot summaries in particular were so prone to this that the site imposed a hard 600-700-word range on them to prevent repeat cases.
  • RPers in text chat based media (SL, IRC, Instant Messaging, Etc) will often call others out (Often jokingly) on Walls of text. Happens most often when you get people who like long posts mixed with people who make short posts. Often happens in the reverse as well if others harassing people in a more harsh way for posts that aren't long enough.
  • Nobody Here's home page is comprised of a tall wall of links to every other page on the site.
  • The credits section of episode 25 of Battle for Dream Island lists every single subscriber to the channel up until that point. In a really tiny font. It goes on for over twenty seconds.
  • Petscop: Toneth's description has 2 of these that go off the text box. One of them is about someone wanting to put down a dog after it's been hit by a car, and the other is a repeat of the word 'toneth' 17 times before ending with 'the end' and 'it's yucky outside'.
  • The Encyclopedia Dramatica page on Desu. After a brief description, it just says DESU over and over and over and over. God have mercy if you try to count.
  • The Uncyclopedia page on Run-on sentence, pretty obvious given the nature of the website. The longest sentence there is exactly 2,531 words long.
  • This MSTing by Guardian's Song of a rant by Cori Falls, contains a riff that goes on for over a thousand words before returning to the actual rant. True, 90% of it is just a copy and paste of one of her fanfics, but it still counts as the longest riff in history. And yes, it is awesome.
  • The Channel Awesome wiki page on "The WORST Movies Nostalgia Critic Has Reviewed". As the video it takes its transcript from contains few video clips, it would be this by default, but there is a massive paragraph describing The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, which goes on for over 1300 words before giving a single indentation. It just emphasizes how much Doug Walker really hates that movie.
  • The Annotated Series uses these to block out the transformation sequences from Super Duper Sumos because they're just padding.
  • Solid jj: Played for Laughs in "Jesse, have you solved the Five Nights at Freddy’s lore", where Five Nights at Freddy's lore is depicted as so convoluted that the subtitle for Jesse's explanation of the lore becomes this yet it still needs at least five such wall of text.

    Western Animation 
  • Discussed in an episode of Chowder where the title character tries to publish a magazine whose cover consists of one of these and is genuinely shocked to learn that a cover with a picture is more likely to attract potential buyers.
  • A second-season episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy, "Key to My Ed", featured an auditory version of this when Edd experienced a rant-inducing slight, the titular key having been flicked into the gap in his front teeth. His rant, about how he perceived Eddy prefer whoever the key belonged to would suffer, went through a change in scenes.
    Edd: Mortified? Yes. But I won't let myself fall prey to such shallow emotion. Not now.
  • Inverted in The Simpsons, where Shakespeare's quote "Brevity is the soul of wit" is reduced to "Brevity is [...] wit" at a Reader's Digest essay contest.
  • South Park pokes fun at the trope by having Kyle and two other people being imprisoned by Apple for experiments because they signed the agreement when their software had updated, even though Kyle and the others couldn't be bothered to read the EULA due to the massive text walls.

    Real Life 
  • Due to outdated equipment that attempts to save on memory and bandwidth, official messages within the U.S. Coast Guard (and possibly other branches of the military) tend to be eye-crossing, migraine-creating, acronym-laden all-caps nightmares.
    • Here's a sample from one (imagine trying to read multiple pages of this): SUBJ: REVISED CUTTER FUEL INVENTORY REPORT REQUIREMENTS A. SUPPLY POLICY AND PROCEDURES MANUAL, COMDTINST M4400.19 1. PURPOSE: ACCURATELY REPORTING FUEL CONSUMPTION IS AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT TO ENSURING ALL OBLIGATIONS AND EXPENDITURES ARE RECORDED IN THE COAST GUARD FINANCIAL SYSTEM, A VITAL STEP IN ACHIEVING CFO AUDIT SUCCESS. THIS MESSAGE UPDATES THE STANDARDIZED FUEL REPORT MESSAGE FORMAT AND PROVIDES SUGGESTIONS TO REDUCE COMMON REPORTING ERRORS. IT ALSO ESTABLISHES NEW LINE ITEMS IN THE REPORT TO INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING MONTH'S ESTIMATED FUEL CONSUMPTION, WHICH WILL ASSIST IN IMPROVING THE ACCURACY OF COAST GUARD FINANCIAL STATEMENTS, END OF YEAR PIPELINE, AND CFO AUDIT COMPLIANCE. EVERY EFFORT WAS MADE TO ENSURE REPORTING REQUIREMENTS MINIMIZE, TO THE EXTENT POSSIBLE, IMPACT TO CUTTER WORKLOAD.
  • A lot of the last usage licenses are like this.
  • Pretty much every educator in Public Speaking or similar will strongly warn you against letting this happen to your slide show presentations that you make in Powerpoint or similar software. Instead, it's preferred that you combined small doses of text such as bulleted lists with graphical visual aids, and let your actual speech be solely responsible for any InfoDumping that you need to do.
  • Francis E Dec's rants are like this◊. The text covers every inch of the page, with no paragraph breaks, opening, ending, and mostly without any kind of title.
  • Unix manual pages. This eventually got so bad that a new system, info, was invented. Then Unix documentation moved to the Web. And there was much rejoicing amongst the TTY jockeys.
    • Within Unix terminals, the less command is for downplaying this Trope. It parses manuals (or other texts) one line or screen at a time for the user to read at their own pace, instead of spitting out a wall of text that the user then has to scroll back and forth through to read.
  • Ad Turds once featured this incoherent, babbling, jargon-filled mess of a job description, which isn't exactly helped by some of the worst grammar to ever exist in something that was supposed to attract people to the job: three full stops in the entire block of text, random capitalisation, and abuse of apostrophes. This borderline word salad was more likely to have put people off applying than it was to generate recruits.
    Zola the Gorgon (commenter on blog): "I think someone wrote this ad by running a mission statement generator (e.g. http://www.isms.org.uk/mission ...) and cutting and pasting all the results into a solid block of text until they met their word count."
  • Most contracts and user agreements. Unfortunately, 'I didn't read the contract! It was too long!' won't do you any good in court.note 
    • In certain countries, the tiny text dumps placed at the end of contracts, that most people are more than likely going to either quickly glance over or ignore altogether, are made illegal. In addition, text is required to have a minimum size and spacing in order to be included in said contracts.
  • Programming can get this way if you don't use white space properly, good luck trying to debug otherwise.
  • Students that are new to writing tend to type their reports without formatting for paragraphs or don't use enough paragraphs, which can result in several pages of text walls. Professors of higher-level classes may dock points off their students' papers for poor formatting since it makes it difficult for the professor to read the report to see what the student's main ideas are.
  • In the March 2017 government elections of the Netherlands, no less than 28 political parties and over 1000 candidates ran, resulting in this giant wall of paper and text to choose from (and yes, each line within each column on that paper represents a political candidate you can vote for). For foreign news reporters, especially from countries that traditionally have a two-party system like the U.S. and the U.K., this was remarkable, and the size of it was commented a lot on BBC and CNN news.
  • Many an internet forum, including this site's forum, have some users who like writing a bit too much, which occasionally results in this trope's appearance.
  • Some of the longest single words ever created, especially the scientific name of the protein titin, which is 189,000 letters long. Yes, it has in fact been fully shown on some websites.
i ain't reading all that
i'm happy for u tho
or sorry that happened

Alternative Title(s): Walls Of Text, Too Long Didnt Read, Text Wall

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top