One of the absolute biggest reasons my current comic has gone much smoother after passing 100 pages than other comics I've done has been something I learned from the writers of Steven Universe
A lot of the foreshadowing early on in that show was just shit they shoved in the background to fill them out, with the idea that they could ascribe meaning to it later if they thought of something.
So the cleverness of the foreshadowing wasn't planning ahead, it was going backwards and connecting dots.
They refer to it as "breadcrumbing" instead of Checkov's Shotgun
@idesofmerch and it's a storytelling style that works rally well, when done right.
For example, we might have gotten a 1 hr episode about what was in the treasure chest in lion's make instead of about Bismuth, because the stuff in lion's make was just thought up as they were going along.
