i’ve been reading a lot of bad ideas i lately and something i’ve noticed they’ll do is that they’ll try to have like, a sweet symbolic moment that is meant to give you the feels for how far the characters have grown. but they never set the whole thing up, so instead they’ll just bring it up out of nowhere and then say “yeah we set this up 10 minutes ago”. it’s like a reverse chekhov’s gun, where they fuckin shoot the gun in the third act and then right after that they were like “back in act 1 we brought this gun over and hung it up on the wall”