I get what people are saying about terrible plots that depend on misunderstandings that make no sense, and it's my intuition that this happens because the creators of these works misunderstand what misunderstanding is--why it happens, and who benefits from it.

If one believes that misunderstanding is the result of people being too thoughtless and flighty to even think to talk to each other, of course their stories will reflect that and characters who have every ability and opportunity to communicate will suffer a frustrating and often out-of-character lapse of forethought just for the hell of it, "hell" being the author's often-good intentions. Yet we are also ushered toward the belief that these characters are actually caring and competent, which simply does not compute and I can understand why audiences wouldn't care for the experience.

In this sense, an answer for today's prompt saying misunderstanding plots work best for farces is very illuminating: If we're given to think these are in fact devil-may-care individuals who don't think past the next second of existence, we can enjoy the badly-done misunderstanding for what it is, a predictably terrible outcome between unserious characters.

But think back to serious misunderstanding-dependent plots that actually work, and the phenomenon of misunderstandings in real life. Misunderstanding depends on miscommunication, and who gets to speak their mind and who must keep their silence is not a politically neutral question. In Romeo and Juliet, mistrust and miscommunication are central to keeping the conflict between families going, with the conflict itself arguably being the only true "villain" in that story. Well, Juliet's violently patriarchal dad and the supercreep Paris are pretty terrible, but they're side players swept up in the overarching conflict like everyone else. The titular lovers' attempt to communicate across those lines lead to the deadly crossed signals that cost them their lives.

In Jane Austen's books, even the most outspoken and wittiest of her heroines do not dare to be open about matters of the heart, and those who so dare tend to be viciously punished by the narrative as an engine of the society depicted (Lydia from Pride and Prejudice, Marianne from Sense and Sensibility).

It's probably no coincidence that in some of Austen's signature works (P&P, S&S, Persuasion) it's the male leads' declarations that finally make it safe for the sensible, goo-girl heroines to be open about their own feelings. In the meantime, characters who pine for each other have to live through a book's worth of agonizing, delicious uncertainty and misunderstanding. A man could declare his love without as much fear of destroying his entire reputation and future, but even the men were taking great leaps of daring and trust with women whose discretion and honor they trusted in. This is why audiences have found these scenes so endearing. One does wonder, however, if these ladies would have been so trusted and admired by these gentlemen if not for their appropriate discretion about their feelings!

I go into these examples to show that a misunderstanding plot can't work if there is no good answer of "Why don't they talk to each other??" In life the answer is often structural (a toxic social environment that makes direct communication impossible), oppressive (women will be severely disgraced unless they are circumspect and discreet about romantic feelings--and also endlessly sweet and patient, as in the case of working-class women among the gentility like Fanny of Mansfield Park. I see you and your sneering disregard of Fanny's class marginalization, Austen fandom 👁️✌️👁️ ), or personal/circumstantial (deep-seated issue won't let characters speak openly, things truly went to shit in complicated ways). If the answer is "no real reason, just because (the plot demands it)", the story will be as hollow as that statement.

I think that hollowness is often what underlies the failure of plots that hinge on misunderstanding--the failure to dive into the frequently structural and oppressive reasons behind many of our silences, or the failure to convince audiences of the personal and other issues that make missed communications and missed understandings so compelled, and therefore compelling. The real story of a misunderstanding is its cause, and by ignoring the cause creators turn away from the heart of the story.

@ljwrites I think there are interesting ways of doing misunderstandings, but the default these days is "these characters are too proud or stubborn to do good relationship communication," and that's stupid and boring, not to mention worrying how much of the audience just assumes that's how you do relationships.

@ljwrites I can only speak for myself here - while I appreciate a well-written plot centering around misunderstanding, I find that a lot of them just... aren't. *Especially* in US television, but it's not exclusive to that.

In US TV there's often entire seasons of a show with an otherwise interesting premise that just gets bogged down in endless fights over romantic interests that could have been prevented if *anyone*, at *any* point in the several years during which the story takes place, had made even the smallest idle comment about that. Which even in the most dysfunctional real-world family, someone *would* have done, even if out of anger.

I just don't find that sort of 'misunderstanding' convincing, and I feel that it makes for boring, cookie-cutter plots that just drag on and on. There's so much other plot space that could be explored but that's left on the table.

I often shorthand this to "I do not like plots about romantic conflicts", even though plots with compelling romantic conflicts could plausibly exist - because in (popular) Anglophone culture, they are often so difficult to find. It seems to be better in books, but they're certainly not free of this issue either...