Offscreen Moment of Awesome

Sano: And my new special attack Magnetic Screw Choqa Zanbil didn't work at all.
Teammate: Yes, it was an amazing attack.
Subtitles: ((Please imagine the attack for yourselves))

—The Law of Ueki

Too bad you didn't see Agent 300's revenge, cause it was awesome!

—Niels

Something big is about to go down. Everyone knows it. The Big Bad is about to get schooled by the Old Master. A horde of mooks are about to be mowed down in an awesome fashion. Whatever it is, this will no doubt be one of the most awesome moments you will ever see.

Except you won't.

All you'll get (if you're lucky) is the characters talking about how awesome the scene was to behold.

Just like the expectation of something scary is more frightening than the actual scare, so is the expectation of an awesome scene. Except you never see the awesome scene, and are forced to imagine how it went down.

Compare Anticlimax. Not to be confused with They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, where the awesome thing in question never actually happened at all.

This trope used to be called "Missed Moment of Awesome". If you want to find a trope for a time when a character's Awesome Moment fails to reach its expected level of epicness, try Negated Moment of Awesome. Stories or events that don't turn out as cool as you expected might belong in either They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot (a YMMV trope) or What Could Have Been (a Trivia trope).

Examples of Offscreen Moment of Awesome are listed on these subpages: