: Re: Chekhov's gun, but it's just "useless" background info We all know how Chekhov's gun works: in short, it's the "rule" that whatever is explicitly shown to the audience should be important later,

@Sarah872

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As a reader, I would expect the mother's disappearance to be important even if the MC didn't notice the statue. If this is the last we see of these 2 characters, I don't really see the point of it, unless the woman's plight and seeing her mother's statue stirred up some similar feelings in the MC (reminded him of someone he'd lost in his own life, for example.)

If a writer included something like this that was irrelevant to the plot, I would end up reading the whole book waiting for it to resurface again, and if it didn't, I would be annoyed that the writer wasted words on something insignificant. If the woman is not important, why would the audience care what happened to her mother?

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