Offscreen Moment Of Awesome / Literature

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• At the climax of 1634: The Galileo Affair, Father Mazzare is about to give a speech defending Galileo to a crowd that includes the Pope and many senior cardinals. We hear him begin the speech... and then we cut to him stepping down, where he can't remember what he has just said. However, the speech was apparently powerful enough to get Galileo off, and to convince the Pope that Mazzare was truly a priest of the Catholic church before promoting him to a cardinal, as the Pope had already decided that Galileo was not strictly a heretic.
• The Bible, John 20:30. 'Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.'
• Played as a kind of running gag in the Blackcollar series. Team member Mordecai is described possibly the best hand to hand fighter to come out of the Blackcollar program... which considering that the Blackcollars were already insanely dangerous Super Soldiers, he may be the greatest to have ever lived. But team newbie Caine has the running bad luck that he keeps missing Mordecai in action, like glancing down a hall for a few seconds, only to turn back and see that Mordecai has taken down four men without making a sound.
• Bret King Mysteries: Sheriff Buxton's raid on the hideout in The Mystery of Ghost Canyon. Bret, Buxton's son Andy, and their friends hear lots of gunfire before capturing the gang's leaders while guarding an escape route (due to being too young to legally accompany the main posse). They are later told that Buxton and his men tied their flashlights to long sticks that they hung off to the side, causing the Mooks to shoot at them and give away their own position, with two men on each side being wounded before the robbers surrendered.
• Done deliberately in The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal: The main character joins up Napoleon's army dreaming of heroic deeds and epic action, but when the battle of Waterloo takes place, all he sees is smoke and confusion. The whole thing is a huge anticlimax for him, and, symbolically, it marks the passing of the Revolutionary era.
• Constance Verity Destroys the Universe: While Connie and Byron were at Tia's wedding, Chestnut the Wonder Dog (who, aside from being smarter than the average pooch, is just a regular dog) somehow managed to beat and hogtie a commando sent to kill her.
• Two of the main villains from The Death Gate Cycle are Xar (a Magic Knight badass who is quite possibly the most powerful wizard who ever lived) and Kleitus (an undead, omnicidal necromancer who is magically weaker but makes up for it by being almost impossible to destroy). They meet, fight, and Xar manages to force Kleitus into being his (grudging) servant. Unfortunately, this all takes place off page — the reader is even told that the fight was spectacular, albeit brief, but never gets to see it. Now, seeing it wasn't plot-centric or anything, knowing what happened, but still — that would have been awesome. Not to mention how Alfred turns into a giant dragon and opens a can of whoopass on the creatures of the Labyrinth, including at least one evil dragon of the kind that had only ever been defeated once by aforementioned Xar. The fight never gets described.
• In The Divine Comedy, Virgil often references when Christ broke into Hell, shaked it to its foundations, and broke out several Old Testament figures to take them to Paradise. It was so intense that even into the Eight Circle there's loads of structural damage, but Dante never describes it outside of proxies like Virgil and the rest of the damned.
• In the After the End book The Dog Stars, Higs returns from his trip to find that his farm had been ambushed by a large squad of raiders, and his partner Bangly had made a Last Stand to defend it. Higs eventually discovers that Bangley is actually still barely clinging to life, having killed the entire raider band.
• The escape of Jonathan Harker from Dracula's castle in Bram Stoker's novel easily qualifies.
• Less understandably so, however, is the two-part series by Mark Acres, Dragonspawn and Dragonwar, presumably he is terrible at writing large battles as that's the only real explanation. The only large military engagement one sees is when Bagsby the thief rides in and blasts Ruprecht's army with his two dragons, shortening the fight considerably.
• The Dresden Files has had several major cases of this. In Dead Beat, Harry is told by Morgan, Luccio and Ramirez about the recent series of battles they fought in against the Red Court in which ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY SEVEN Wardens and thousands of vampires died. To give you some sense of how big that was, there are only about 200 Wardens in all. The next book Proven Guilty nearly matches that with a massive battle at a Venatori Umborum base in Oregon in which Morgan nearly kills the Red King and Michael singlehandedly saves 40 Warden trainees at Luccio's boot camp.
• Dune:
  • The novels suffer from Frank's annoying tendency to skip some amazing moments of awesome which... are actually rather crucial to the story. The Fremen/Sardaukar battle at the end of the original novel, for example, was alluded to in less than a page (fortunately the duel between Paul and Feyd-Rautha in the last chapter was dealt with in full); the massive jihad between the events of Dune and Dune Messiah is never covered... even the destruction of Arrakis at the end of Heretics of Dune, for example, was skipped over between chapters. Though what crowning moments of awesome are included more than make up for it.
  • It's not merely the the destruction of Arrakis that the fans miss out on; it's the epicness of the battle Bashar Miles Teg must have fought in order to provoke it. This is especially galling given that Herbert put a lot of effort into driving home to the reader just how much of a cranked-up-to-eleven badass Teg is. We finally get to see that at the end of the next book, but even then the gritty details of the combat are glossed over and only the broad scope is covered. One is led to suspect that writing scenes like these was not Herbert's strong point and he was doing his best to move past them as quickly as possible.
• The Pardal plot in the last Empire from the Ashes book ends abruptly during the climactic final battle, with only a brief transmission in the last scene to indicate that they succeeded and did not, in fact, die horribly. Sean finding the right access code to bring down the defenses? Bringing the full might of Imperial technology on those sorry zealot asses in a well-deserved Curb-Stomp Battle? Taking total control of a global theocratic empire? Nope.
• Happens a bit in Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, though as a Trope Breaking semi-parody of fantasy and fairy tales in general, it was to be expected. Dealing with the evil fire witch and the averted epic battle between the dragons and wizards are two such moments.
• Harry Potter mostly shows only the POV of the title character, which is no problem in the earlier books; in the later books, however, there is a war being fought largely out of view, with the other characters doing various things to fight it that the audience doesn't get the chance to see.
  • The Final Battle is probably the most jarring example, as there was a lot of action going on with many characters involved. Even the part where Ron and Hermione break into the Chamber of Secrets and destroy a Horcrux with a Basilisk fang happens offscreen. In the other books, the characters involved in the action were usually the trio if at all, or an extended group which Harry was a part of.
    • This was a deliberate decision on J. K. Rowling's part — in real life, battles are messy, unpredictable affairs, and the "good bits" don't wait until plot-relevant characters are there to watch them.
  • In the fourth book, soon after Voldemort returns, Snape goes out to meet Voldemort. He persuades Voldemort that he is willing to serve as a loyal Death Eater, when his real motivation is to serve as a mole for Dumbledore. Bear in mind that Voldemort can nearly always tell if someone is lying. Bear in mind that Snape had hindered Quirrell and Voldemort's attempts to steal the Philosopher's Stone three books earlier. He continues to deceive Voldemort in meetings like this one over the next few books. No wonder Harry called him "probably the bravest man I ever knew".
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the champions apart from Harry facing their dragons. While Harry is waiting for his turn, he can only hear the action and commentary. After Harry has faced his dragon, Ron describes what happened with the other three.
  • Ron's finest hour as Gryffindor Keeper, when he helps them win the Cup in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is never seen as during the match Harry and Hermione are in the Forbidden Forest with Hagrid meeting his giant half-brother Grawp. Needless to say, a lot of fans wish it had been featured onscreen, to both give Ron focus and allowed the Quidditch scenes to be more diverse.
  • The final Quidditch match in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which would also be the last school match mentioned in the series. It ends with with Gryffindor winning by a whopping 310 points and them taking the House Cup, but we know absolutely nothing about it because Harry was in detention at the time.
  • In between Books 5 and 6 Death Eaters tried to take out Amelia Bones and Voldemort himself had to come out of hiding to take her down.
  • Another one in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Death Eaters went after Augusta Longbottom to get her grandson, Neville, under control. As Neville himself said, "Dawlish is still in Saint Mungo's and Gran's on the run."
  • The actions of Dumbledore's Army under Neville's leadership in the same book.
  • Dumbledore and Grindelwald's duel in 1945 which eye-witnesses proclaimed was the greatest wizarding duel of all time.
• The Amber Spyglass has a large proportion of the sentient beings from the entire multiverse lining up for war against all the other sentient beings led by God, or the Metatron in the name of God following a coup several millennia ago. Do we get to see the epic clash of arms that would put even Norse myth to shame? Nope, two kids run across the battleground, dodge some cavalry, see an old friend and promptly leave for a different universe. There were enough POV characters involved in the battle, couldn't we have stuck with one of them for a bit?
• After spending the entirety of The Hobbit running around pissing everyone off and fleeing the bad karma before they can get what's coming to them, Bilbo and friends are finally cornered, with everyone turned against them and each other. The book climaxes as huge armies of men, elves and dwarves are about to begin fighting a humongous battle when Gandalf comes out of nowhere and tells them to stop, because huge armies of goblins and wargs with bats are coming at them! They quickly strike a truce to fight the common foe, and an enormous battle rages! At the brink of defeat, sentient eagles suddenly show up out of nowhere to help! The "Holy Shit!" Quotient is off the scale! Oh, wait, Bilbo just got bonked on the bean by a rock. At least he gets to hear about it later.
• Honor Harrington:
  • Sometime between The Honor of the Queen and The Short Victorious War, Admiral Hamish Alexander, Earl of White Haven, spectacularly won the Third Battle of Yeltsin, a decisive Manticoran victory that critically shaped the opening phases of the war. We don't see it.
  • While Abigail Hearns (plus a bunch of Marines) was busy killing pirates on the surface of the planet Refuge in "The Service of the Sword", Captain Michael Oversteegen won a three-on-one engagement with a trio of Solarian heavy cruisers, out of whom he blasted the complete crap despite having only a single similarly-sized ship himself. We don't see it, or in fact him until he re-enters the story by blowing the fourth heavy cruiser out of space with a single salvo. Unsurprisingly, "Tiberian" thereafter becomes Oversteegen's Remember When You Blew Up a Sun? moment.
• In The Horse and His Boy chapter 13 is entitled “The Fight at Anvard”. Shasta, who has been our POV character for most of the book so far, is involved in the battle. But the narrative voice says, “But it is no use trying to describe the battle from Shasta’s point of view: he understood so little of the fight in general and even of his own part in it. The best way I can tell you what really happened is to take you several miles away to where the Hermit of the Southern March sat gazing into the smooth pool beneath the spreading tree, with Bree and Hwin and Aravis beside him.” The Hermit then describes the battle, as he sees it in his magic pool, to the others.
• The Hunger Games:
  • The story is told in first-person, so much of the action in the arena happens "offscreen", including what is implied to be an epic two-day battle between the two strongest competitors in the arena. In the rain.
  • Peeta has a real badass moment that we never get to see, when he kills Brutus during the Quarter Quell in Catching Fire.
• Happens so many times in The Iliad. There are prophecies delivered multiple times that if Achilles kills Hector, both Troy will fall and Achilles will die soon after, but both Troy and Achilles are still standing at the end of the book.
• The Stephen King short story "In the Deathroom": Fletcher is a New York Times reporter who starts out in a South American Banana Republic State Sec's interrogation room. He overpowers the agents in the room with him, then realizes he's still deep in enemy territory with a minuscule chance of escaping to the United States. The last scene of the story reveals that, somehow, he makes it home.
• In The Island of Doctor Moreau, Moreau grudgingly offers a fragmentary account of how a limbless, writhing thing he'd created had killed one of his human servants and several of his other creations before being hunted down. Although this event sounds like it might make a decent adventure/horror tale all by itself, no details about the creature or its actions and demise are offered, and it's never mentioned again.
• In The Jungle Book story "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", Rikki's battles against Karait and Nag are described in great detail, but for his final fight, he pursues Nagaina into her burrow. Several hours later, he emerges, exhausted but victorious.
  • This was one of the reasons why The Last Colony eventually received a P.O.V. Sequel, Zoe's Tale.
• The Kane Chronicles
  • In The Red Pyramid, it's revealed that Bast, Egyptian cat goddess and Aunt Kitty to our Kid Heroes, battled Apophis, the literal embodiment of all of chaos with the intent to destroy him, and destroy herself in the process for millennia, until Ruby and Julius Kane intervened.
• The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy has three time skips. In the first, twelve years have passed since Vanyel's Traumatic Superpower Awakening and subsequent reckoning with his responsibility as a Herald. In that time he's taken several levels in badass and replaced five fallen Herald-Mages each of no small power in a war with Karse. He has a lot of resulting nicknames and is very Famed In-Story. None of these incidents are explored or expanded on outside of Mercedes Lackey's official Filk Songs... which can no longer be legally found anywhere due to a rights dispute.
  • In Magic's Promise Vanyel mentions that time Bard Chadran allowed himself to be captured by bandits only to rescue their hostages and fight his way free and tells the story... offscreen.
  • Vanyel's participation in the Karsite war is revisited in Chance, a short story in the first Valdemar anthology Sword of Ice, but as that is an official Hurt/Comfort Fic, some unknown assailant simply kills the rest of the encampment of soldiers and cuts up Vanyel's clothes, then leaves him and the other survivor alone to have an After Action Patch Up and a Hot Springs Episode.
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. So much. A huge battle between Aslan's forces and the White Witch's army is set up...cut to Lucy and Susan saving Aslan and riding him to the battle, where we see it mostly ended and Peter tells them "Hey, we just had a really cool battle, you missed most of it though".
  • The 2005 Walden-Media film rectified this, even giving the girls minor but pivotal roles at the battle's very end.
• In The Lord of the Rings:
  • Gandalf's journey to Minas Tirith to study the One Ring, his imprisonment in and escape from Isengard, his battle with the Nazgul on Weathertop, Boromir's last stand, the Ents wrecking Isengard, and the Dead Men driving off the Corsairs at Pelargir are described in detail by those involved in flashback. The Film of the Book depicts these events in real time.
  • Gandalf's battle with the Balrog in Moria also appears in flashbacks, though he only described it in the book; in the film the first and last parts of it are actually shown.
  • After the Ring was destroyed, having fought off several attacks by Sauron's forces, the Elves of Lothlórien marched on Dol Guldur, Sauron's fortress in Mirkwood, and captured it. Then Galadriel came forth and "threw down its walls and laid bare its pits". We never get to 'see' this firsthand.
  • Also, in the Appendices it is stated that the largest battle of the war was not the Battle of Pelennor Fields (which gets a half-dozen chapters focused on it) but actually the Battle of Dale, which took place around the same time and involved far more combatants, but is only alluded to in the text. This is kind of justified though by the main theme of the book — that the war cannot be won by force of arms, and that only by destroying the Ring can Sauron be defeated.
• Gordon Korman's Losing Joe's Place averts and plays it straight in the same chapter. The three main characters see fellow roommate Rootbeer decimate six pro wrestlers one by one in an exhibition, only to have all six gang up on them in the parking lot later, As this fight is about to begin, the narrator is knocked out, only to come to and see all six wrestlers beaten and spread out across the pavement. One friend says, "It was like the end of the world, and you missed it!" while Rootbeer just says, "Those guys — they had bad luck."
• In Yahtzee Croshaw's first book, Mogworld, this happens twice, for exactly the same reason each time... the main character, Jim, intentionally walks away from the horde of invaders threatening the mage's school where he's studying, and watches it from afar/death...
• In "The Most Dangerous Game", the climactic, much-anticipated sword fight is completely skipped over. It's only mildly implied afterwards that the protagonist won.
• In The Last Colony, the third book in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, an item that just so happens to be exactly what the Roanoke colonists need to secure their victory over the attacking Conclave forces is attained offscreen. While the events that led to its attainment were quite exciting, they are only discussed after-the-fact, and not in much detail. Due to the lack of context, many readers were left with the impression that Scalzi had taken the lazy route and pulled a Deus ex Machina.
• In the first book of the Queen's Thief series, the main character singlehandedly trounces an entire group of men on horseback, while he is on foot and armed only with a practice sword. The narration is vague and cuts away from the fight almost as soon as it begins. All the recap of the fight we get afterwards is all the onlookers later telling him how shocked and awed they were at his unexpected performance (despite that he technically lost the fight). This reaction is largely also true for the readers, who previously had no idea he even knew how to hold a sword. Possibly justified in that the narrator was trying not to be sick during most of the fight.
• Robert Heinlein lampshades this in The Rolling Stones: Hazel Stone wanted out of her contract to write the absurd action serial "The Scourge of the Spaceways", so she wrote the last episode of the season to end with the hero in a completely inescapable deathtrap. When the serial was renewed, she couldn't think of a way to rescue him, so she opens the next episode in a new location, with the hero explaining his escape to a girl. The next action scene interrupts his explanation, and the audience never actually gets to hear it.
• This trope is used masterfully in China Miéville's The Scar: the book's largely about a narrator 'lost at sea' in a city that's often outside the bounds of her knowledge and understanding. The story builds up a rivalry — and an intriguing past acquaintanceship — between two overpowered badasses, and they finally get their showdown a couple of chapters from the end...but then the fight scene gets skipped entirely, and instead we get to see the aftermath at the start of the next chapter.
• Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty have an epic Battle of Wits that lasts either four months or a few years (the Sherlockian canon isn't known for its consistency.) We only catch the final week of the conflict after Holmes has backed Moriarty into a corner, and one incident in the prequel written twenty-one years later which, while very dramatic, doesn't appear to have much impact on the battle at large. Pastiche writers don't seem to want to fill in this gap, which is strange given how many of them have the requisite chutzpah to write Holmes-versus-Moriarty to begin with.
• Shogun ends just before the decisive, climactic battle that the whole book was building up to. A battle between hundreds of thousands of samurais that historically decided the fate of Japan.
• A masterful example in Skulduggery Pleasant: Kingdom of the Wicked where Skulduggery and Valkyrie have just dived out of a plane without parachutes and landed in the snow to fight yetis. Honest-to-goodness yetis. Valkyrie pulls on her newly-acquired mask, the readers get ready for a massive beat-down... and nothing. The chapter ends, and the aftermath is shown with Valkyrie complaining about the yeti's breath.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • The series only has certain characters points of view, notably never including any kings, which results in many things happening off screen, only for a point of view character to hear about it later.
  • Blacksmith Donal Noye leads a defense against a group of giants while Castle Black is under siege. The readers only get to see the aftermath: all the combatants and Donal and the giant king Mag killed each other.
  • Virtually all of Robb Stark's campaign in the Riverlands and Westerlands during the War of the Five Kings. The closest we get to "seeing" a battle is Catelyn listening to the battle of the Whispering Wood from a distance. The only times we see Robb "onpage" in the second and third books is when he's showing his father's aptitude for politics.
  • In A Storm of Swords, the conquest of Meereen, accomplished by breaking down the ships and using them as rams to batter down the gates, is described in retrospect when Daenerys recalls it a week later, having taken the city's throne.
  • In A Feast for Crows Loras Tyrell retakes Dragonstone but is badly injured in the process of the battle, which sounded awesome. We only hear about it second-hand from Cersei's POV.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Thrawn Trilogy alludes to a duel between Yoda and a rogue Jedi on Dagobah. And to anyone who's seen Yoda get dangerous, it couldn't be anything but awesome.
  • Unlike the film, the novelization of Revenge of the Sith shows only the beginning of Anakin's masterful crash-landing of Grievous's flagship, at the end of Part One; Part Two picks up with his already having succeeded.
  • Honor Among Thieves: In what must be one of the actions that creates Rogue Squadron's legendary reputation, Leia sends Luke and his understrength group of X-wings against an Imperial Star Destroyer and its wing of TIE fighters. They shoot it down. Somehow. Luke doesn't check back in with Leia until afterward.
  • Kenobi: A shootout begins between Jabba's men and the angry settlers as Ben and A'Yark chase down the Gaults when they take Annileen prisoner. When Ben and Annileen return to where the settlers are, they've chased off Jabba's men.
• Treasure Island: In a flashback, Captain Flint goes ashore with six crew members (all of them hardened pirates) to bury his treasure; later he comes back on board alone, having singlehandedly killed them all.
• In Twilight, Bella passes out before we get to see the fight between Edward and James.
  • In Eclipse, most of the Newborn Battle is ignored in favor of relationship drama between the main trio, as Bella demands that Edward stay with her out of harm’s way, and Jake stays to protect and warm her.
  • We hear that Leah told off Bella for being mean to Jacob, perhaps the only time in the series when anyone calls her out on anything, but never see it.
• In The War Gods: Oath of Swords, while the narrator is watching Bahzell busy fighting Harnak as champion of Tomanak to Harnak's champion of Sharna, Brandark is caught in a melee against four hradani simultaneously — and kills three of the four before going down.
• In the final chapter of the Warhammer 40,000: Gaunt's Ghosts novel Sabbat Martyr, the narrator speaks of a week-long battle supposedly more intense than any other recorded in the narrative, but we do not get to read it. Admittedly, it came on the heels of the final confrontation between Saint Sabbat and the Magister, but still...
  • It's also at the end of the book, just after the climax. Also... perhaps it's best not to dwell on a heroic battle that occurs after someone tells the people getting slaughtered that they might want to try fighting back.
• In The War of the Worlds we see the HMS Thunder Child fight and defeat two of the three Martian machines threatening the paddle-steamer the Narrator's brother is on. The ship rounds on the third one, badly damaged by two heat ray shots, but still prepared to fight to the death. Then the Martian heat ray hits the water, causing a wall of steam to hide the epic battle. All we know is that afterward, neither the third Tripod nor the Thunder Child can be seen. But then, Ramming Always Works.
• The Wheel of Time series often has large, plot-central battles being stated to occur, but the only "on-screen" action being the commanders discussing the battles before, after, or away from the field. The most egregious example would be the fight between Mat and Couladin. Not only does one major character kill another offscreen, it actually narrates Mat preparing for the encounter, then cuts to the victory celebration. To be fair when battles are described, they are both epic and empty of Hollywood Tactics. However, if the TV show does get to book 5, they had better include that fight onscreen.
• In The Wishsong of Shannara, Jair Ohmsford and his companion, Slanter, leave the area before we can see more than the beginning of the duel between Garret Jax, the Weapons Master, and the Jachyra, a maniacal Fae being, one of whom had previously slain Allanon. When they come back, Jax is dead and the Jachyra gone, but no one knows how the fight actually turned out.
• In Worm:
  • The Siberian is The Juggernaut and a well-known Hero Killer, to the point that the Protectorate actually avoids engaging her because they've never been able to make any headway. After the Undersiders discover and publicize her weakness, however, Dragon hunts her controller down and kills him offscreen.
  • Later, there's Heartbreaker, who throughout the entire story has been built up as a scary background villain, a mind-controller who can permanently force his victims to fall in love with him and uses this power to build up an entire family of utterly loyal parahumans. At some point during the Time Skip, Imp — Grue's kid sister — murdered him. This is not as jarring as it might have been because Imp's power prevents anyone from noticing her and her actions and is therefore a perfect counter to Heartbreaker. He can't mind-control someone he doesn't realize is there, and none of his minions would be able to notice her either, so the whole scene would have been fairly anticlimactic. Imp would have been able to simply walk up to him completely unopposed and slit his throat with one of her trademark knives.
  • Golem got one when he fought at least ten members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. And apparently won.

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