I’ve listened to some YouTube videos that recap TV shows and that sort of thing. Sometimes they phrase events as “this would happen”. Maybe I’m wrong but to me that phrasing implies either a) it happened frequently b) it was planned to happen or c) it happened at a point in the story we’re not at yet. But sometimes I hear that phrasing used when it doesn’t mean any of those things. Sometimes I hear the narrator shift back and forth from “this happened” to “this would happen” and back to “this happened” while recounting events in chronological order. It just sounds to me like “this would happen” should be used when jumping ahead slightly and briefly mentioning something that will happen later in the timeline, but that isn’t how it’s being used.
I’m trying to think of a way to explain it better. When I hear the narrator say “this would happen”, I tend to think they mean it was going to happen but hadn’t happened yet at this point in the story. It throws me off when they use it while they are at the point in the story where this event they’re describing happens.
I interpret “this would happen” to be sort of the opposite of “this had happened”. The former is foreshadowing a later event, after the events currently being described, while the latter is describing something that had happened earlier in the timeline, before the events being currently described.
Can you provide a link to one of the YouTube videos you say was full of this awkward grammar? I wanna see.
Sometimes I catch myself switching tenses in the middle of a narrative and I have to go back and edit it all so the tenses conform with each other. I don’t know why I do that, must be a brain glitch.
The video I was thinking of was a 12 hour recap of Survivor. It was an otherwise well done video but the narrator kept going between “this happened” and then “this would happen” while describing all the events in linear order. Then at one point he was talking about someone having sneaked in a letter from home and was like “she would sneak in a letter at the beginning of the season” and he was halfway through recapping the season so I was like, shouldn’t it be “she had snuck in a letter at the beginning of the season”.
I also heard this kind of phrasing in several videos from a channel called DefuntTVland that recaps old obscure shows and the history of how they were made