| rdfs:comment | - So you want to have a secret. You may not even be sure what the secret is. You are pretty sure, though, that you want everyone to know that there is a secret. That you have. That everyone else doesn't have. Because it is yours. And you have it. Sometimes ostentatious secrets are eventually revealed, and sometimes they stay that way forever. This can be just a Running Gag, or it can be source of dramatic tension as a MacGuffin. In fact, their primary use is as a MacGuffin, reserved for use in a B-Story, or possibly even a "C"-story, a narrative thread that is around just to build continuity.
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| abstract | - So you want to have a secret. You may not even be sure what the secret is. You are pretty sure, though, that you want everyone to know that there is a secret. That you have. That everyone else doesn't have. Because it is yours. And you have it. Sometimes ostentatious secrets are eventually revealed, and sometimes they stay that way forever. This can be just a Running Gag, or it can be source of dramatic tension as a MacGuffin. In fact, their primary use is as a MacGuffin, reserved for use in a B-Story, or possibly even a "C"-story, a narrative thread that is around just to build continuity. One problem is that secrets tend to build up to a Secret Critical Mass. After this point, the obsession of others to discover the secret far outweighs any potential dramatic payoff from The Reveal, and it requires some extremely deft Playing with a Trope to avoid an Anticlimax. The Ancient Tradition and the Ancient Conspiracy are often ostentatious secrets: their existence can be widely known, and membership may also be, though it's less common. Contrast the Open Secret and The Not-Secret, both where not only is the existence of the secret well-known, but everybody knows the secret itself. Examples of Ostentatious Secret include:
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