Madacaek: I'm not sure I understand this trope. Does the meat packing plant slash nightclub from Seinfeld ("The Bizarro Jerry") count? That wasn't really a shop... is there a trope for other things that are there when a main character visits but the next day they no longer exist or have turned into something else?
Fire Walk: Not seen it, but things bizarrely not being there when you try to come back seems connected to this trope, if they have (Wiggles fingers)
mysteriously disappeared.
Madacaek: I'm pretty sure there was also something along these lines in
Early Edition at some point. Maybe it would be worth making another trope and cross-referencing, if people can find some more examples. Or perhaps broaden this one, though there are so many specific examples of "Store isn't there, then store is there, character gets item from store, store stops being there." that this probably still merits its own trope.
Hollow49: Cut the example:
- Literary example: The Captain's Table in the Star Trek book series.
and moved to the new
Inn Between The Worlds trope.
Damian Yerrick: Does this include other traveling salesmen who put up shop for one day, such as Crazy Redd from
Animal Crossing?
Sci Vo: No, that sounds like
Recurring Traveller. This is a specifically paranormal trope.
Looney Toons: Snipped from the examples because a) duplicates an existing entry, and b) obnoxiously long for no good reason. If the original contributor wants to mine it for nuggets to add to the
VG Ai entry already in the page, well, here it is.
- This was a part of the setup for the manga/anime Video Girl Ai, wherein there exists a shop that can only be seen by 'the pure of heart'. It appears, at first sight, to be a somewhat odd adult video store. Only when the girl in the movie begins first to be empathic to her watcher.. and then comes out of the TV, is the shop's magical nature made obvious. Of course, in the manga, this is then subverted(or at least played with) on a rather grand scale. Gokuraku (Paradise) Video exists not to ease the pain of the broken hearted, as is first implied, by giving them a kind female to soothe them for a while, but rather it exists to find the pure of heart and give them a girl designed purely for sexual ends. It runs on the horribly cynical premise that in a world such as ours, the pure of heart can't possibly survive, and possessing a video girl will 'save' them by obliterating their ability to love. Of course, when someone who isn't pure of heart gets ahold of a video girl, he winds up having sex with her until he nearly kills himself. And, after Ai's 'malfunction' removed her directive to destroy the main character's ability to love, the store clerk also rebelled against its God-like operators and opened up a new store, 'Neo Gokuraku', aiming to get to the pure hearted before Gokuraku Video can, and give them a video girl that will nurture and protect their nature rather than flatten it.
Twin Bird: ...weren't those stories fetish softcore?
Glidergun: Not all of them! Some of them were fetish
hardcore...
Or So I Heard.
