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Theory Of Narrative Causality
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"And once again, Probability proves itself willing to sneak into a back alley and service Drama as would a copper-piece harlot." — Vaarsuvius, The Order of the Stick
All fictional realities have this underlying principle to one degree or another.
It is the reason Plot Technology and Plot Armor work. It's why the hero always succeeds where many before him have failed. It's why it seems like the world's out to get the protagonist. It's why the reasonable explanation is almost never true. Reality itself is mutable before the will of the plot.
In stories where this is strong, tropes may as well be laws of physics.
Named for the principle laid out in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, in which this phenomenon is not only an explicit physical law, but has been codified, studied, tested, and may be the local equivalent of the strong nuclear force. In fact, it's also an element, narrativium. For example, if three brothers set out on a quest individually, and it claims the lives of the first two brothers, it is impossible for the third brother to fail.
(Incidentally, you know how we've said that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life? Compound this theory with reading too many Tropes and one can get downright paranoid...)
Warning: This law may not apply if you've found a missing shaggy dog.
This is at the base of things like Genre Savvy, Wrong Genre Savvy, Invoked Tropes, Million To One Chance and Tempting Fate, to name but a few.
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Examples
- Briefly discussed in the first issue of the DCU Crisis Crossover Final Crisis. One Monitor says to another, "Behold: we monitors who were faceless once... We all have names now, and stories. There are heroes and villains... secrets and lovers." Translation: Nothing happened to us as long as they didn't write us into the stories. Now we're in them, and all hell is breaking loose.
- In JLA: Earth-2, Grant Morrison's Post-Crisis reimagining of the DC Universe's Mirror Universe (Earth-3), the twist was that even narrative causality was inverted, so that all good deeds were doomed to failure in the mirror universe (just as evil was doomed to ultimate failure in the regular DCU).
- A sequel had the Earth-2 supervillains realizing that the narrative causality law had failed, giving them a chance to win in their alternate's world. Of course the heroes, once they quickly figured it out, went on the attack themselves on Earth-2.
- In Marvel 1602, Reed Richards attempts to formulate this theory. "Benjamin Grimm won't be changed back into a man, since he is much more interesting as a monster."
- Morpheus in The Sandman, as Anthropomorphic Personification of dreams and storytelling, is obviously aware of it.
- This is subverted in Galaxy Quest, where the man who played a Red Shirt in the original program is terrified that he's going to get killed horribly at any moment. Not only does he not die (was also the only one who wasn't shot during the Big Bad's rampage), when the tv show starts up again he becomes a full-fledged character.
- The Genre Savvy protagonist in Last Action Hero tries to exploit the rules of the action-movie universe he's in to his advantage, playing chicken with the bad guy's car on his bicycle. Just in time, he realizes he's the Plucky Comic Relief, not the hero, and swerves out of the way.
- Like Discworld, the world in Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms series is governed by this trope (named "The Tradition" in this instance). The characters are aware of this and spend a great deal of time trying to manipulate/subvert/redirect this force as needed.
- Also from the Discworld novels, is the assertion (frequently demonstrated) that one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten. (This crops up in the video game, where to complete a task, you have to determine, and then implement, the right set of circumstances that will give you an exactly one in a million chance of succeeding).
- It's the Lady. She knew they knew the odds, and she left.
- In the Science of Discworld books, the wizards of Unseen University examine "Roundworld" (i.e. Earth) and are surprised to learn that it contains no Narrativium — this being scientifically impossible, by Discworld standards.
- Also neatly subverted in Guards! Guards! when Nobby and Colon get all Genre Savvy and try to adjust the odds such that they achieve a Million To One Chance; it doesn't work. They had a 0% chance of hitting the male "voonerables" of, what was later revealed to be, a female dragon.
- Lady Lilith de Tempscire, the Big Bad from Witches Abroad, tries to rule a whole city-state according to the laws of fairy tales—such as "all toymakers must be jolly fat men who sing and tell stories to children, on punishment of death." With herself as the good fairy godmother. Nightmare Fuel ensues.
- For exploiting Narrative Causality, no one tops the Silver Horde, Cohen the Barbarian's well-armed, battle-experienced (if geriatric) warriors, who simply live by "The Code." It culminates with The Last Hero's climax, where the Horde are ready to finish what they'd decided to do, and they won't let anybody stop them...when they realize that it's six of them, against one single, heroic-looking young man, ostensibly a simple city guard, armed only with a worn sword, and wasn't there a rumor about the lost heir to the throne being a simple city guard? And he's smiling. The Horde realize they don't have a chance and give up.
- In Guards! Guards!, Vimes is about to be arrested. The several armed men who come to do so immediately notice that he is a) unarmed and b) smiling. They conclude he's very bad news and refuse to take him, assuming he'd start to swing on the chandeliers and break things at any moment. Luckily for them, he agrees to come along quietly.
- And, of course Night Watch sees Vimes, following a magical accident, land thirty years in the past, looking almost exactly like the sergeant who taught him to be a good policeman thirty years ago—when the real sergeant in question has just been murdered by the other person who fell back in time. The History Monks regard this as an interesting experiment in temporal theory, as well as a bloody nuisance.
- And don't forget Rule One: "Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man!". Especially if you're armed, and they're not.
- Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time: The three main characters are said to be ta'veren, which indeed roughly translates as "Main Character". This is (part of) the in-universe reason given for all the Contrived Coincidences that keep happening to them.
- Craig Shaw Gardner's The Cineverse Cycle, although in this case the universe is suffering from a breakdown such that you can't rely on the rules to work properly.
- Christopher Stasheff's Wizard In Rhyme series has this as an explicit law of the setting, which natives must remind the Trapped In Another World / Ordinary High School Student protagonist of on a regular basis. Of course, this is a setting where magic is triggered by spoken verse (with the implied extension that All Myths Are True), so it actually makes sense in context.
- Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle makes a point of narrative causality at the beginning (Sophie, as the eldest of three daughters, is expected to never succeed in anything, while her youngest sister is sent off to accrue her "inevitable" fame and fortune), and then steadily works at subverting it.
- No such use of this in the movie, unfortunately.
- In large part, I think, because Japan has different narrative traditions and so some of the bits might be rather hard to understand. Then there's the whole thing with the poem...
- In The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross, a powerful spell of compulsion means everything has to happen exactly the way it would in a James Bond movie. That still leaves room for a couple of twists, though.
- In Babylon 5, Marcus knows exactly the right time to hide and set up an ambush before some guards appear. When asked how he knew, he says it would have been the most inconvenient time to be discovered, so of course that's when it would happen.
- The Fair Folk from Exalted live their lives according entirely to what's dramatically appropriate. Their Shaping Combat works entirely by "rewriting" someone or something else's story. The Wyld even has paths known as "waypoints" which operate not by distance, but by where a person is in a particular story.
- Creation works like this in some ways, too. Many Sidereal effects work by setting someone in a particular role in a story... a role that happens to fit with the Sidereal's plans.
- Why do things keep getting worse in Warhammer 40000? Aside from massive inertia, mostly because the writers say so.
- The Discworld GURPS Role Playing Game actually has rules for invoking this: A spell that lets you twist narrative tropes, as well as a caution that just because you set yourself up as the Hero Who Saves the World From The Evil Troll doesn't mean you're not actually One Of The Dozen Hapless Characters Who Get Killed By The Troll Before The Hero Shows Up or, if the story is being told from a troll perspective, The Human That Gets Smooshed by the Troll.
- "Troll stories aren't very subtle."
- Changeling The Lost features the art of Talecrafting. A savvy enough changeling with a proper knowledge of legend and lore can call upon the motifs and themes of stories to ensure victory in his efforts (e.g., setting it up so that if the first two attempts failed, then the third time has a much better chance to succeed).
- Actually, Changeling (and by extension, the entire World Of Darkness) embodies this trope, as the Wyrd, which is the life's blood of all things fae and of which Faerie and the True Fae are essentially manifestations, is the fundamental narrative force of the universe, incorporating time and fate, destiny and chance, predestination and free will. The above-mentioned Talecrafting works because, due to the Wyrd, the World of Darkness runs on tropes.
- In 8-Bit Theater, Thief tried using this trope
 to blackmail a dragon.
- Explicitly referred to in this Irregular Webcomic, by a character who presumably is himself familiar with the concept from Pratchett (being a present-day fantasy and science fiction fan).
- Most of The Order of the Stick works this way, and the characters know it. And more often than not, try to exploit it.
- The webcomic Footloose is built around this trope, with the Plot being an active force in the universe that can be predicted by the Fae.
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