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Peter Venkman: What? So they don't make them like they used to. Ray Stantz: No, they never made them like this... your girlfriend lives in the corner penthouse of spook central. — Ghostbusters
The justification of the Weirdness Magnet. A normal person living a normal life will likely not get involved with adventures unless it comes upon them. To explain why these things happen week after week a device will be created, often multiple devices, that polarize the weirdness in the direction of the heroes.
Many times the device is uncontrollable, or the hero acts as a certain guardian of it, protecting it from misuse or limiting the damage it can do.
It can be considered a standing, perpetual Chekhovs Gun, Plot Coupon or Mac Guffin. Usually a good excuse for why they have a City Of Adventure. See also: Regular Caller.
Typical versions include:
Compare Green Rocks.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
- The Brand of Sacrifice borne by Guts in Berserk draws demons to him like a lightning rod, making his life (and the life of his lover Casca, who also bears the Brand) a literal living Hell. The two of them are only alive because Guts is an unstoppable demonslaying Badass.
- The shattered Four Souls gem in Inu Yasha. At least in the beginning, Inu-Yasha and Kagome are trying to collect the scattered shards of it... and running into a lot of monsters and assorted beasties who are also trying to collect the shards.
- The main character himself in Bleach, who attracts the demons he fights due to his exceptionally strong spiritual presence, as well as Karakura City itself, which for whatever reason has an unusually high concentration of spiritual energy.
- The Dragon Balls in Dragon Ball always draw a lot of characters essential to the plot together, especially near the beginning of the series. For example, Bulma first meets Goku, because she is searching for a Dragon Ball that he owns. This also works especially well as a Magnetic Plot Device, because there is more than one Dragon Ball, which allows for a more seamless move together of a higher variety of characters.
- A Log Pose really is magnetic.
Comics
Films
- Ghostbusters actually made a plot point about how busy they were being related to an apartment building that attracted supernatural energy. This building was specifically designed as a dimensional portal to bring in Gozer the Gozerian, an ancient god not seen for the last 7,000 odd years.
- The river of slime in the second movie also filled this role.
- The new game also does this as it's revealed Ivo Shandor, the cult leader/architect who rigged the apartment building, also rigged the library and hotel from the first film, and the museum from the second, as nodes for this city wide apparatus meant to fuel Gozer's Destructor form, with the apartment building being the door. His old estate was a castle/laboratory where the slime river was first made before it was pumped into the sewer. Also it was revealed one of Ivo's henchmen killed Eleanor Twitty, who became the librarian ghost.
Literature
- A perfect example is in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series in which the main characters are ta'veren. The ta'veren are people who inexplicably create outrageous coincidences and shape the world around them simply by existing.
- "Outrageous coincidences" are putting it VERY mildly. The ta'veren have been known to attract hellhounds, bubbles of evil, and kill random people within a large city by anything as innocuous as a handkerchief. Mat Cauthon, however, uses this to his advantage; he takes bets on being able to do impossible things, such as putting a knife through a very tiny block of wood as it's being thrown through midair, and does them.
Live Action TV
- The Hellmouth of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They only actually go into the Hellmouth in the first and last seasons, but everything in between is still blamed on it.
- And justifiably so, as it shoots out enough evil-ness to attract demons from miles around. Plus, the town being built expressly for demons to come and eat the squishy humans.
- The title of Slayer. Demons sometimes run off to see how they would match up against the legendary demon killer, a la Spike.
- Wolfram and Hart of Angel. A multi-dimensional demonic law firm. The possibilities practically drip off of that sentence.
- Similar to the Slayer, Angel has 200 years of old enemies to deal with.
- And The Powers That Be got directly involved with Angel's life to ensure it was never calm.
- And with the help of Doyle/Cordy's visions when trouble doesn't come to Angel...
- The Rift in Torchwood
- The TARDIS from Doctor Who. Seriously, how often is the Doctor actually looking for the plot of the episode? Nearly every time, he trips over the plot while sightseeing.
- The Stargate of Stargate SG-1. Understanding the Stargate's potential for weirdness, the military installed the iris to limit what could come through.
- The city of Atlantis in Stargate Atlantis. There always seems to be some Ancient experiment that they discover that messes with the team from time to time.
- The actual ships in the various Star Trek series. It allowed them to find a Planet Of Hats and a Negative Space Wedgie.
- The holodeck. A lot of fans have wondered that with the holodeck so prone to malfunctions and become dangerous, why is it left on?
- Even besides its tendencies to malfunction, the holodeck allowed for almost any story to be told. Film Noir, sure. Sherlock Holmes, why not? The Wild West, yippe ki yah.
- I think special mention should go out to Deep Space 9 and the Celestial Temple/Bajoran Wormhole, as it was responsible for everything that went on there.
- The non canon Next Generation novel, Q-squared, lampshades the Enterprise D's constant encounters with time travel and other anomalies and attributes all (or, at least, most of) their problems to Q messing with them.
- Star Trek Enterprise introduced the "Temporal Cold War" story arc to both stir things up with the ship and crew but also to make things a little more surprising for the audience because the show was a prequel.
- The Nexus in Charmed.
- The status of the Charmed Ones also made them a frequent target for nefarious plots.
- The anomalies in Primeval.
- Inverted with The X Files. The files are a constantly growing folder of the unexplained, meaning the characters themselves are searching out the unexplained. This in turn adds to the X-Files.
- On Lost, it's the island itself.
- Literal magnetism is involved as well. A huge magnetic discharge from the Swan station caused Flight 815 to crash.
- For Smallville, the Magnetic Plot Device is not the Green Rocks, but instead is the Kryptonian influence of Jor El. The Green Rocks were just a side effect of that.
- A big criticism towards House is the number of medical mysteries that get thrown his way, mentioned at being about one a week. The show has made some remarks in that regard, giving most patients a unique set-up as well as Doctors all around the region would send patients to House because he was just that good.
- A Magnetic Plot Device is conspicuously
 absent throughout the entire series of Murder She Wrote, considering the high rate at which Jessica Fletcher's friends and relatives kill each other, often with the string of homicides following her as she traveled. Given twelve seasons and four movies of corpses and premeditated slayings, it is a wonder that Fletcher's sanity remained intact throughout, and that the police never followed up on her perpetual proximity to this countless chain of crimes.
Tabletop Games
Web Comics
- Sparks in general in the Girl Genius universe are prone to having very weird stuff happen. Even more so if they happen to be of the Heterodyne family.
Western Animation
- In Ben10, as soon as Ben gets the Omnitrix a lot of aliens show up specifically to take it from him.
- The Allspark from Transformers Animated. Even with its new Gotta Catch Them All status, it certainly keeps things interesting for everyone.
- Of course, said status mostly stopped during the third season, but enough weirdness had already happened for the third season to involve the return and development of earlier weirdness instead.
- Code Lyoko's entire plot is about the Supercomputer and XANA's plottings. The computer is near magical enough to make whatever story you want to tell happen.
- After capturing so many ghosts, The Real Ghostbusters eventually had ghosts coming to them, for better or for worse (the "worse" usually being freeing some other ghosts from the containment unit).
- Jonny Quest's father, Dr. Benton Quest, is a scientific genius and professional Magnetic Plot Device.
- Beast Wars had the presence of the Vok, aliens with some vested interest in the planet. The Maximals and Predacons stumbled upon a lot of ancient artifacts and called attention to themselves. This mostly provided a third party to mess around with things, including leaving around bizarre technology and including having a doomsday weapon that eventually led to the transmetal upgrades.
- The ghost portal in Danny Phantom kept releasing ghosts into the human world, at which point Danny would have to deal with them. It's also the source of the Freak Lab Accident that made Danny half-ghost.
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