The Law Of Conservation Of Detail - Television Tropes & Idioms

Parodied in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, when the narrator sarcastically points out the importance of a conversation in his story.
Harry: "I’m so sorry. That was a terrible scene. It’s like, why was that in the movie? You think it’ll come back later? Hmmm..."
Used very well in Back To The Future, which disguised its plot points as jokes.
Used to create tension in the final battle of Iron Man. When Tony creates his original power generator, he observes that it could run "something big for 15 minutes." When he is forced to use his original generator after Stane steals his improved model, there is a literal deadline for Iron Man — if he does not beat Ironmonger in less than 15 minutes, he will run out of power and his heart will stop.
- Also, the "icing problem."
Chris Farley's unusually knowledgeable security guard in Wayne's World.
The Incredibles: the moment Edna Mode starts making a big deal about capes being caught in things, you know that someone else is going to experience a very fatal wardrobe malfunction by movie's end... unless you've read Watchmen, in which case you might write it off as a Shout Out.
Playing with this trope is arguably the main conceit of Citizen Kane: it's a movie about the impossibility of finding the right details. "Rosebud" is an example, as is the famous "girl in the white dress" speech.

Subverted in the second episode of Death Note, Light spends a good chunk of the episode setting up and explaining an elaborate safety mechanism to hide his notebook, and it never comes up again. Instead, the pay-off is more immediate: it gives the audience a quick introduction to Light's personality.
- In the manga, when he notices that someone (the people who installed the cameras) entered his room from the state of his no less elaborate door safety mechanism, he infers that they didn't find the notebook because the fire trap didn't go off.
Football manga ''Eyeshield 21' does this with every team the main characters go up against. Except for the protagonist's team, every team consists of a few dozen generic nameless players (whose faces are usually hidden behind their helmets) and two or three important named characters (who are inevitably the stars who make all the big plays.)
- You can tell how important a team will be to the story by how many players get names; the first team they play, for example, gets one named player, and after that game they never impact the plot again. Meanwhile, important recurring rival teams get five or six named players, plus coaching staff.

In Jasper Fforde's 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.
- The Thursday Next books are intentional parody of literature and literary tropes. I mean, "and a shot rang out" was a glass ball until it fell, shattered on the floor, and a shot rang out and everyone turned to see who fired it (Well of Lost Plots).
In The Belgariad by David Eddings
- In the historical-perspective prologues of the very first book, Pawn of Prophecy, 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 Malloreon literally ten books later.
- At the beginning of Pawn of Prophecy, the first book, 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, halfway through the fourth book Garion is crowned the Rivan King. Of course, the old storyteller, being Belgarath himself, knew the entire time.
- Also in Pawn of Prophecy, Garion mentions to Belgarath 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..
Lots of "masterful" literary works are called so due to complete aversion of this trope. The lady passing on the street is described in extreme detail and is never seen again.
If someone is invited to a banquet in Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, then chances are that it's part of a plan to kill them. Most of the banquets without murderous intent go unmentioned, leaving modern readers to wonder why anyone would be stupid enough to go to a banquet in the first place.
Douglas Adams is famous for mentioning things in throwaway lines which later turn out to be what the entire plot hinges on. However, he does a fantastic subversion in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (which is itself an entire book of this trope) - there's a scene where the protagonist is looking into a bathroom, and Adams spends several paragraphs describing the contents of the room, the panelling on the walls, the scuffs on the floor, and so forth, in intricate detail, only to end with "There was also a large horse in the room, taking up most of it."
Subverted in the book series Personal Effects. The main gimmick of the series is that it encourages the reader to follow up on details mentioned in the books - calling the phone numbers gives you voicemails, and all the websites actually exist. The first printed book even comes packaged with a bunch of handwritten notes and pictures.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling inadvertently bit herself in the rear because of this once. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry refers to a Muggle boy named Mark Evans while arguing with Dudley. Because of Rowling's use of this trope to mention in passing characters that would be important later and the fact that "Evans" is Lily Potter's maiden name, fans jumped on this believing Mark Evans might be some long-lost relative. No. Rowling just made a mistake.
- A mistake? With the huge number of people in the world, almost all people have someone who shares their last name despite having little or no relation due to sheer chance. A justified breaking of the One Steve Limit, and a case of the fans being too Genre Savvy for their own good.
  - Still, Rowling felt the need to apologize. (She's nothing if not polite.)
Tom Clancy tends to fight this tooth and nail. Paragraphs will be spent describing things other authors would just gloss over. Of course, he does love his Technology Porn.

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.
In an episode of Charmed Prue finishes talking with someone in her office, that person leaves and then the coffee girl (who we've never seen before) arrives, gives her coffee which had apparently been ordered, receives a compliment, and the scene ends. Yeah. The feeling "why did they just show us a scene of someone receiving coffee" was pretty strong, but it did help remember the coffee/sandwich girl character for when it turned out that, without her knowledge, she was actually the mother of the person who will eventually find a vaccine for [[spoiler: demons.
Played straight during an entire series of Star Trek Deep Space Nine regarding the Dominion, which was mentioned in passing in the first episode it showed up in and was on the verge of taking over the Federation a few seasons later.
In one episode of Goosebumps we see the parents of a kid protagonist working on something. It turns out it was a device to expose invisible people and the plot had an invisible friend.
Used judiciously on Monk. Just about every single random detail comes into use. Character pronounces a word differently? Clue. Has only an aunt for family? Clue. Orange juice jug empty? Clue. Bike comes with a lock? Clue.
A fan theory regarding the identity of the mother on How I Met Your Mother relies on this trope. In season 3, Ted literally bumps into a girl at a party that he reveals the mother was at. The scene is at most 3 seconds. Ergo, due to conservation of detail, she is the mother.
Seinfeld did the opposite and focused on silly things(like the parking spots mentioned above), yet it was still funny. Curb Your Enthusiasm after it, however, was completely made up of small details and barely had anything else, which is why it is awesome.

A very common mistake for new Dungeon Masters 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.
- This can also be used intentionally, by only describing a certain part of, or item in the area, you can ensure that everyone notices it.
One RPG group went by the tenet that 'Any woman or plant the GM bothers to describe is a trap.' The GM caught on and ran them through an adventure that could roughly be described as 'The Magic Greenhouse Land of Amazons'.
Similarly, whenever the DM makes a hidden roll or asks for a spot or listen check (that they fail), the players will assume something is going on and, if they're bad metagamers, try to act on it. Incidentally, few things unnerve a player as much as rolling really well on a spot check and being told, "No, you don't see anything of importance..."
- Paranoia recommends that G Ms occasionally roll the dice for no reason other than making the players nervous.
  - Risus too in order to help with improvising off what the players speculate the roll was for.

In El Goonish Shive the author had intended for a one off character(the principal of a school specificaly) to have a massive scar and eyepatch. Due to this law he chose not to since he had no explanation planned for them.

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.
- She has a portrait and name (Eilie) for one reason. In the quest that's unlocked if you load Suikoden I data at the start of the game, Tir McDohl joins your party while Gremio occupies a Convoy space. However, if you failed to resurrect Gremio in the S1 file you loaded, he'll be dead in this game, and Eilie will take his place in the plot, occupying the convoy and speaking his lines instead.
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.
- Hey you have to respect a man who puts in that much work. And at least in Metal Gear Solid Kojima-san was nice enough to let players skip all that and go right to the neck-snapping if they want.
The entire Ace Attorney scene is all over this, up to the point of being Anvilicious. Every piece of evidence - besides the lawyer's badge, etc. - is always used at least once. The problem is using the right one, because you need to use them as a sort of sentence fragment to answer questions.
- This can get to the ridiculous extent of saving before a particular point you don't know how to get through, and just trying out every single item.
  - And profiles, in Justice for All and Trials & Tribulations.
  - And even the lawyer's badge gets used once or twice outside of the courtroom.
One Sega CD role playing game would say things like "Who would talk to a cow" if you talked to the cow, as all role players will do. Also mentioned "Wow the guards and castle are laid out exactly the same in this castle as they were in the last one. Maybe that is to show how the two kindgoms are very closely tied, or maybe the programmers were just lazy."
Near the beginning of The Legend Of Zelda Majoras Mask we find a masked character that manually opens doors unlike every other NPC in the entire game. This tiny fact foreshadows just how long his particular sidequest will go on for and how much of an NPC he really is...
Subverted in Mega Man ZX Advent due to its attempts to avert You All Look Familiar, where pretty much everyone you meet has different designs and personalities, except for the guys in uniform, who still act different. In other words, trying to rely on this trope to see who is important is completely pointless for this game.
Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies mission "Deep Strike" is set in an area with a ravine leading from the target area back to the RTB line. After splashing the targets, you get notice that Stonehenge is firing your way and have to take your plane below 2000 feet in order to make it out of the area. The only way to do that? Why, the ravine of course. It also shows up in the "Megalith" mission. Those other missiles within reach aren't just for show.
- X: Skies of Deception is also in love with this. It's particularly obvious after you play both halves - or, in one case, all three thirdths - of a Remixed Level. Most of them.
In Fire Emblem, almost all enemy or NPC with unique sprites and more then a few lines of dialogue is either a boss or recruitable. Which is understandable, considering how many enemies you end up facing.
The Godfather game subverts the hell out of this. There are various places that appear different on the map, many a locked door... While some of them are indeed significant, quite a few of those are Red Herrings that aren't of any consequence whatsoever, even in sidequests.

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.
- It is actually a studied idea that True False tests will have more true then false because the teacher wants students to be right, thus the false have longer information to ensure they look "wrong".
- Same can be said for "All of the Above" because again, teachers generally test what the student knows and as such wants success.
Common among MMO forums, at least by the fan base, such that almost anything a developer says will usually be taken as absolute fact (or lie) and obsessed over for every possible meaning. Even if the developer is simply being chatty about nothing.

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