Poor Communication Kills / Web Videos

---

• The Fear Mythos: The Choir alters audio, often leading to a literal example of poor communication killing.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog:
  • Played for laughs: when Dr. Horrible tries to warn Captain Hammer about the broken Death Ray, he interrupts, saying "I have no time for your warnings, Dr. Horrible". Then proceeds to toss off a one-liner before firing. It doesn't end well.
  • The whole musical is based around a more tragic instance, though. If Billy had just worked up the courage to tell Penny how he felt at the start, he may never have built the Death Ray, leading to her tragic death.
• Justified in Atop the Fourth Wall, where much mutual suffering is caused to both Linkara and Jaeris because the latter wouldn't just ask for help, instead taking what he needed by force. However, he had tried to ask for help in the past... and it failed miserably (and lethally, for the people trying to help).
• Noob has a couple of blatant cases.
  • In the first situation, the guild finds out that Gaea somehow got Fantöm to help her level up. Later on, they get confronted by Fantöm's teammates, two of which are his guild leader and the guild's recruiter. Omega Zell, who dreams of being the next Fantöm, somehow interprets the leader's "We're looking for a member of your guild. It's about Fantöm" as "We're looking for an understudy for Fantöm and we completely forgot about the bad impression Omega Zell gave our recruiter last Season". Omega Zell says he's the person they're looking for and it's only in the middle of strangling him that Fantöm's leader says "Actually, we're looking for the person who has been blackmailing Fantöm". After Omega Zell's Manchild guildmate asked what the strangling was about.
  • In the second situation, Gaea doesn't pay much attention to her place getting broken into but nothing being stolen because she thought that her impulsive and extremely strong roomate had simply forgotten her keys.
• Ten Little Roosters:
  • At least three members could have been spared deaths if they had spoken up:
  • In episode 3, Chris confronts Burnie and tells him he ran into the killer. Instead of answering Burnie's response ("You saw the killer?! Who is it?!"), he starts describing it more like a The Lord of the Rings-style thing, leading to Burnie's annoyed "The Reason You Suck" Speech , Chris' Heroic Sacrifice-slash-Stupid Sacrifice and Burnie's Ironic Death the following episode.
  • In episode 9, Adam, who is hiding in the mocap room, spots Miles rummaging through Monty Oum's workstation and inches his way to the window and whispers "Miles? Is that you?" instead of speaking louder. Because of this, Miles has no idea the killer is strangling Adam and mistakes a video file of it for "dot sex".
• Starship Exeter episode "The Tressaurian Intersection". During the final battle, damage enables the captive Tressaurian (a Gorn-like lizard) to escape the brig's Force-Field Door. Its subsequent actions jeopardize the mission and actually cause the deaths of several crewmembers including one we'd come to know. Pity nobody thought to tell the Tressaurian that the mission was helping his people..
• Critical Role: More than once Tiberius damages team members with his Fireball spell, which could have been avoided had he communicated better with the DM. Played for laughs when a fan sent him a set of area effect markers so that in the future he would be able to check his spell ranges properly, to make sure no one who's not supposed to is in the way.
• The Wizards Of Aus: Jack's troops communicate orders by horn. A single note for each order. The actual order being determined by the pitch of the blown note. This, naturally, leads to a few mishaps.
  Jack: Does our main system of communication rely on everybody having perfect pitch? Is... is that a thing?
  [...]
  Horatio: Hang on, no. This is the one for the escape. [blows horn]
  [a giant boulder comes flying past and hits some soldiers off screen]
  Jack: Did you just. Tell. The trebuchet men to fire?
• Aventures has a literal case, since Fred wanted to move along the campaign's plot what was supposed to be his character Théo asking the dying druidess if she has a last request or rites sounds like a death threat which shock the druidess enough to kill her on the spot.
  Théo: Do you want to die by the Church of Light or do you want to die by nature?
  Druidess: I don't want to die!
• A major theme of The Cry of Mann. Everybody just talks at each other, only truly holding conversation with the callers, who in turn struggled to keep up with the conversations and often failed to make things better. When Jouglat was killed, it was heavily implied that it could've been avoided, had the callers communicated with him properly.
• Vision of Escaflowne Abridged: Spoofed in the following exchange, which lampshades how it went down in canon.
  Allen: No Van, I won't let you kill him, he's my sister!
  Van: Your sister? That's crazy! You're crazy! Stop talking crazy, Allen!
  Allen: Rather than explain my seemingly nonsensical statement, I challenge you to a fight to the death!
  Van: Rather than ask for further clarification, I accept!
  Dilandau: Boys, boys, boys! Don't fight over me! Just FIGHT ME!

---