This seems to be the sort of cue that is much more reliable in fiction than in real life. In real life, not everything that happens has to be foreshadowed.
And conversely, things are allowed to just happen Because the Author Says So in fiction. When watching TV, I’ll often ask “why didn’t person X just do obvious thing Y which would have solved all of their problems for the rest of this episode?”, to which my girlfriend’s perfectly valid response is “plot reasons” (TV Tropes calls this the Anthropic Principle)
This seems to be the sort of cue that is much more reliable in fiction than in real life. In real life, not everything that happens has to be foreshadowed.
And conversely, things are allowed to just happen Because the Author Says So in fiction. When watching TV, I’ll often ask “why didn’t person X just do obvious thing Y which would have solved all of their problems for the rest of this episode?”, to which my girlfriend’s perfectly valid response is “plot reasons” (TV Tropes calls this the Anthropic Principle)