My sister is ADHD so she legit has real questions that I can totally help with despite having seen the same stuff so far. But of course she has no idea which stuff is intentionally vague and which stuff she hasn’t been able to connect that was intended to be solved so far. So if it’s an intentionally vague moment my answer is “we don’t know yet”.
I definitely get that it can be annoying if you have no idea why they are asking. But they wouldn’t have learned that behaviour if it didn’t occasionally matter. Since this behaviour is common, and ADHD is common, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s always the case. But it’s probably only some people with ADHD, depending on how theirs presented. And of course some people may have this trait of ADHD without enough of the rest of the traits to be able to get diagnosed.
But yeah, it’s one of the traits of ADHD that makes them feel like they must not be smart, despite any evidence to the contrary. Cuz they just don’t “get” what are obvious clues to other people. But it’s simple topic linking, basically their brains see everything in it’s own bubble, and they can be very good at figuring out everything in that one bubble, but if a puzzle in that bubble needs a part from a different bubble, that puzzle is never gonna be solved for them without outside help to find the bubble that has the needed part.
I’m sorry none of that has anything to do with ADHD. If anything ADHD is great for helping make connections from disparate sources as, for better or for worse, 15 things pass through your brain every second. And as someone with ADHD, trying to talk to me during a movie is incredibly annoying, because I’m either hyperfocused on the movie or working very hard to focus on it. If I’m not focused on it, I probably don’t care about it very much, so I’m not going to be asking questions to try to keep up.
All of this sounds like your sister has made “ask questions” part of her “try very hard to focus” routine but that is her quirk, not an ADHD trait. I can only imagine nobody has annoyed her in this way so hasn’t thought about it.
Oh, no. She is definitely great at making connections otherwise. It’s just one of her executive dysfunction symptoms. Like I said, not all people with ADHD get that one. She 100% hates having to ask questions and break immersion. But she also has a huge fear of being wrong, and it bothers her to a larger degree when she thinks she has missed how two things might be related.
She is almost 40 now, so she has had plenty time to at least get a decent sense of when a movie should be making more sense than it is. But there are still times where it is just as much as we are supposed to know by now.
I don’t, as far as I know, have ADHD. I did not notice foreshadowing and such until I took an elective in college that broke all that stuff down for cinema.
Now that I know, I notice it. It’s like hearing the Wilheim scream. Once you know what it sounds like, you hear it pop up a lot. A Lot. I never noticed it at all before.
Same thing with Hero’s Journey in storytelling.
Once you learn to recognize these things, you can’t not notice them. Sometimes it ruins things a little, sometimes it makes them better.
If you want to know how to read the clues, watch some youtubes on how to spot everything. People love making videos about it.
Or, just continue to enjoy the ride, but stop asking for it to be explained. If you want the explanation either learn the clues or just read a spoiler summary beforehand. Don’t risk ruining it for someone, who overhears your conversation by accident, when they just wanted to enjoy seeing the story unfold moment by moment.
That’s a completely different thing…
