alt title(s): Law Of Conservation Of Detail
"There's also a guy with a unique sprite there. So you know what THAT means."
We have 42 minutes. If we give a detail, it better be important.
Oh, sure, we can set up a
Red Herring or so, but we had better expect the viewer to attach importance to any detail we let loose in the plot. Shame on us, if we later expect the viewer to be surprised by the importance of the detail we let slip.
Although conservation of detail tends to be particularly heavy-handed in a "compressed" medium like a weekly television show, it
is a proper and useful tool for creating fiction in all venues, being used primarily to prevent jarring
Asspulls.
The law can also be applied to video games as well. If any particular detail of the game requires a significant investment of time to develop, it will always be a primary detail. One off NPCs rarely ever get anything more than a generic sprite/character model, given only the most basic walking animations. You can tell that a character will play some role in the plot when they have an unusually complex character model (or, specially in 2D games, a headshot on their dialog).
See also
Chekhovs Gun,
Chekhovs Gunman.
Examples:
Film
Live Action TV
- Parodied on the DVD commentary for the final episode of The Office (UK). Gervais and Merchant lampshade the "Secret Santa" game, commenting on its apparent insignificance to the plot, and how it definitely won't become relevant later.
Literature
- In Something Rotten, Thursday is showing Hamlet around the "real world" when she is almost injured/killed by a random accident. She explains to him that, while in the Book World (fiction), this would certainly turn out to be an important clue to something later on, in the real world, such events are meaningless.
- Of course, because Something Rotten is fictional, it does turn out to be an important clue to something later on. So many layers of meta here, this troper is not sure how to categorize it.
- In The Belgariad by David Eddings, the historical-perspective prologues of the very first book mention the High Places of Korim, which are no more in passing as the location Torak did some stuff... only for it to be the solution to one of the last mysteries of the sequel series The Mallorean literally ten books later.
- Not to mention a moment in the second book where Garion mentions in a throwaway line that a fortuneteller once came to Faldor's farm and told Durnik the blacksmith that he would die twice. Funnily enough, in book five, Durnik dies and is resurrected a chapter or two later. One down, one to go..
- Or the bit at the beginning of the first book, where the old storyteller brings out a story only to be told in the presence of royalty, even though he's in an ordinary (though pretty wonderful) farm, and glances at Garion. Lo and behold, at the beginning of the fifth book (I think, it may be the end of the fourth) Garion is crowned the Rivan King.
Tabletop Games
- This kind of thing is actually a very common mistake for new DMs, who will vaguely describe a room, but go into minute detail about one feature of the room. All Genre Savvy players will immediately gravitate towards this item.
Video Games
- Subverted with Ziegfried in Final Fantasy VI; the character is interesting and appears throughout the game, but is completely unimportant. This characteristic has its own entry on The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches:
Ziegfried's Contradiction: Just because someone is weird doesn't mean they're important.
- Subverted in Suikoden II. There's a character with a name and portrait but she isn't important to the story at all.
- Subverted in Chrono Cross. Of the portraits that characters have, 40 of them are playable characters, 5 of them are alternate versions of the playable characters, and 26 of them are NP Cs. Of the NP Cs, one is unimportant: a shopkeeper you meet early on. Throughout the game you become convinced she'll be important, but she never does, being the only one of the Loads And Loads Of Characters who isn't.
- Avoided in Metal Gear, Snatcher, Policenauts and just about anything Hideo Kojima does, because of his total and freaking obsessive-compulsive insanity. He cannot stand to not worldbuild. Pretty much the only people who care about the incredibly elaborate tragic backstories, sex lives and namedropping pertaining to characters who show up once and then die - not to mention the endless infodumps about guns and items and nuclear weapons and the future and useless metagame trivia - are going to be fanfiction writers. For the most part, backstory events will be mentioned inconsequentially to add a little flavour to a character.
Real Life
- It's a widespread belief among students that, on true-false exams, any particularly long statement will be true. The idea is that the teacher wouldn't go to the trouble of composing a detailed false statement.
- Can we start getting Troper Tales of this last one? This Troper has been fooled that way before...
- This troper took the opposite view. Higher chance of a Plot Hole, er... error, that you coudl argue in your favor if it did turn out to be true. Curse college prof.s to be smart enough to usually add "best" answer instead of correct.
- This troper has found that, on multiple choice questions, the longer answer often IS the correct one, as long as it isn't blatantly stupid. It's not always correct, but it's useful for hazarding a guess if you really don't know the answer.
- It depends on how smart/evil the teacher is, I have had teachers that loved really long statements that concealed subtle flaws in them.
- Perhaps it is worth adding that lies are often made more elaborate than the truth, simply because they're intended to sound convincing.
