skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-02-screenplay-dialogue/symptoms-subtext.md

# Subtext complaints

Part of the symptom router. Open this file when the complaint is about subtext. Each complaint below is followed by the cards that repair it, best first; `LOOKUP.md` says which file holds each card.

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### "There's no subtext"

Subtext is generated, not sprinkled. Three conditions must hold or nothing you add will stick.

1. Run the three-conditions test first
   `sub.three_conditions` · `sub.want_statement_gap`
2. Then pick a generator: shared history, a social prohibition, or a power gradient
   `sub.shared_history` · `sub.social_prohibition` · `sub.power_gradient`
3. Give the scene a second subject to be conducted on
   `sub.second_subject` · `sub.talk_to_avoid`
4. Make sure the audience already knows the stakes
   `sub.audience_knows_first`

### "Nobody can find the subtext"

1. The named failure, and the cause is always a missing condition
   `sub.buried_subtext` · `sub.three_conditions`
2. Withholding alone is not subtext
   `sub.mere_withholding` · `sub.subtext_vs_vagueness`
3. And confusion is not depth
   `sub.confusion_as_depth`

### "The subtext is too obvious"

1. Someone is announcing it
   `sub.subtext_announced` · `sub.no_parentheticals`
2. Omit the mass, but leave it reconstructable
   `sub.iceberg_omission`
3. Circle the word instead of saying it
   `sub.circled_word`
4. Check the setting is not agreeing with the scene. Rain for grief closes the gap the dialogue was built to leave open; the working version is a room that disagrees, or a character who notices the agreement and resents it
   `sub.weather_does_the_feeling` · `open.weather_open`

### "The silence isn't landing"

1. There are three grades and they are not interchangeable
   `sub.graded_pause` · `sub.silence_as_content`
2. Where the pause falls changes what the line means
   `sub.pause_placement` · `sub.say_it_then_cut`
3. Let the body contradict the mouth
   `sub.behaviour_contradicts` · `sub.hands_business` · `sub.object_as_confession`

### "Subtext in a culture, a language, or for children"

1. In high-context cultures the indirection is the norm, not the device
   `sub.high_context_indirection` · `sub.across_languages`
2. Prose and screen carry it differently
   `sub.prose_vs_screen` · `sub.narrator_self_deception`
3. For children, physical, three times, never explained by an adult
   `sub.kid_readable_subtext` · `sub.dual_audience`
4. In comedy, politeness is the carrier
   `sub.comic_politeness`
5. Audit your own draft, where it is hardest to see
   `sub.draft_subtext_audit`

### "There are three of them in the room and it plays as a two-hander with a witness"

1. The gap comes from geometry rather than concealment — A speaks to B in order to be heard by C. Decide which two are allied when the scene opens and flip the alliance exactly once
   `sub.triangle_scene` · `rel.triangle`
2. The most loaded position belongs to whoever is never addressed; give them one line late, or none, and let them end the scene
   `dial.spoken_about_present`
3. Past four in the room the audience cannot hold the vectors and the scene needs a different discipline, with the triangle isolated inside it a page at a time
   `rel.ensemble_scene_legibility` · `dial.three_hander`

### "The toast is going well and one person in the room is meant to hear something else"

Not the triangle above, and not `scene.public_scene`, where both parties conduct a private conflict under a social surface. Here only one person is speaking, and the etiquette that forbids an answer is a weapon rather than a constraint — which makes it the most efficient subtext machine in the form.

1. Write the room's version of the speech first, complete and unobjectionable. Then find the one sentence only the target can hear correctly
   `scene.aimed_through_the_room`
2. One aimed line, not three. A second makes the room start looking around, and once the room has noticed, the weapon is gone and you are in a different scene
3. Give the target no line at all. Their silence in public is the pressure, and any reply collapses the structure
   `dial.who_is_silent`
4. Decide who else in the room understands. A single third person who looks at the target instead of the speaker is worth a whole audience of the oblivious
5. The speech forms themselves are held in Dialogue
   `dial.the_toast` · `dial.the_eulogy` · `dial.earned_speech`
6. It spends information rather than delivering it, so it fails wherever the audience does not yet know what the aimed line refers to — and it needs an occasion whose etiquette forbids interruption. In a room where anyone can answer back, the aimed line gets answered and you have an argument, which may be better but is a different scene

### "The monologue has nothing underneath it"

1. Alone, or straight to camera, the gap moves: it is no longer between what they say and what they want from someone else, but between what they tell us and what telling us is doing for them. Give the address an occasion and a clock, and design the one moment they will not look at us before writing a word of the rest
   `sub.direct_address`
2. For the register of speaking to the audience
   `voice.confessional_to_camera` · `voice.addressing_the_reader`
3. And check the speech is earned rather than a slot the plot needed filling — a monologue carrying information does the second job badly, and the audience reads the withholding as yours
   `dial.earned_speech`

### "The sitcom room is four people being pleasant"

1. Give every character in it exactly one thing they must not be found to know, then design the ordinary business so it threatens each of them at a different rate. The comedy is the staggering, not the shared panic
   `sub.group_comedy`
2. The reliable biggest laugh is one person reacting to a threat the others have not noticed yet, on an intact polite surface
   `comedy.wrong_reaction` · `sub.comic_politeness`
3. If they all share one secret from an outsider instead, that is a suspense structure and not a comic one
   `rel.group_secret`

### "The messages and letters on the page are flat"

1. A document is composed, so its subtext lives in its form — the delay before the reply, the answer to only the second of two questions, the greeting that quietly changes, the kiss dropped. The draft written and deleted is worth three sent messages
   `sub.written_document`
2. On screen, one message at a time. A thread the audience has to read is a reading task, not a scene
   `dial.text_on_screen`
3. For the register of the letter itself
   `voice.the_letter_voice`
4. And if the document is the plot's evidence, it has to be unambiguous — loading it with a second meaning gets the audience arguing about the clue
   `info.the_document`

### "I need class and money in the scene and nobody may name it"

1. The tell is in the deviation, not the item: establish the ordinary choice first, then break it exactly once. And the choice has to cost something — "he ordered wine" is nothing, "he ordered the second cheapest" is a biography
   `sub.consumption_tell`
2. What they cannot afford, and who pays
   `char.money_specifics` · `char.cannot_afford` · `char.deserving_setting`
3. Never stack them. Three garments and a grocery list in one paragraph is a costume note

### "Nothing on the page registers that the relationship just shifted"

1. Change what they call each other. Establish the default once, then change it exactly twice in a whole script — once to close distance, once to open it. More than that and it is a tic
   `sub.address_form`
2. The aggressive version, and choosing the names in the first place
   `dial.name_weapon` · `char.name_as_design`
3. Or play the shift as a status transaction and mark who gained
   `char.status_transaction` · `char.status_flip`

### "The scene is either explicit or nothing"

1. Desire carried entirely on a permitted surface, where the charge lives in turn-taking rather than vocabulary — one answer a half-beat too fast, one a half-beat too late
   `sub.erotic_code`
2. The surface topic must be one they could plausibly be discussing in front of a stranger, and technically coherent
   `sub.second_subject`
3. But coding what the story is now free to state reads as evasion. Sometimes explicitness is the honest choice
   `tens.honest_explicitness`

### "The interrogation is two people shouting"

1. Run it in the order real investigative practice uses — free account first, uninterrupted, then the challenge with the withheld evidence. That makes the production of the evidence the scene's turn instead of a shouting match
   `sub.interrogation` · `scene.value_turn`
2. The strongest move on the page is the question already answered, asked again, unchanged. And an interrogator who waits beats one who raises their voice
   `tens.waiting_as_weapon`
3. If the scene exists to hand the audience a fact, it is exposition with a table and two chairs
   `expo.exposition_under_pressure`

### "A reader missed it — do I plant more, or plant earlier?"

1. Decide first which one they missed. Subtext hides something true *now*, suppressed by a character; foreshadowing hides something not true *yet*, suppressed by you — and the two repairs are opposites
   `sub.vs_foreshadowing`
2. Missed subtext means a precondition failed, and the repair is a cheap plant placed *before* the scene
   `sub.three_conditions`
3. Missed foreshadowing means the plant was too light, and the repair is more placements *after* it
   `info.rule_of_three_placements`

### "They have been not saying it for three seasons"

1. The named failure: they have stopped being people who cannot speak and become people the show will not let speak
   `sub.stretched_unsaid`
2. Legitimate running subtext changes every season while staying unsaid — a new reason it cannot be said, a new cost to saying it, a new person who now knows
   `info.between_episode_memory`
3. Convert it at the point where holding it would require somebody to behave stupidly. The conversion beat is one short line, said to the person it concerns, paid for by the person saying it — writers reliably inflate it into a speech, which turns release into performance
   `sub.conversion_beat` · `dial.confession_speech`
4. Then write the harder thing that comes after. Two people who have said it speak more plainly, faster and in shorter lines, and the tension moves to what they now do with it
   `sub.retired_subtext`

### "The improvised material is alive and unusable"

1. Generate the subtext before the text — one private instruction per performer, a secret or a want or a prohibition — then transcribe the surface only and put the instructions in a drawer
   `sub.devised_subtext`
2. Status is the most reliable generator there is
   `char.status_transaction`
3. Never write down what the improvisation *meant*: that note becomes a line in draft three
   `sub.subtext_announced`

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