Dramatic irony

Dramatic irony is the form of irony that "provides the audience with information of which characters are unaware, thereby placing the audience in a position of advantage" over the story's own people. Wikipedia treats it inside irony, "a juxtaposition of what, on the surface, appears to be the case with what is actually or expected to be the case," and analyzes it in three stages, "installation, exploitation, and resolution," also called preparation, suspension and resolution. Where verbal irony is a speaker's intended double meaning, dramatic irony belongs to situational irony, "irony in which there is no ironist"; tragic irony, the gap that dooms the character, is "a specific type of dramatic irony."

Novels run on the same gap: the reader watches a character walk toward what the reader already knows. Deciding who knows what, and when the reader is let in, is the work of character secrets and reveals; a serial stretches the three stages across publish dates, so each character's knowledge belongs in tracked canon, the job of character knowledge tracking.