Basic Trope: Spatial arrangements that cannot be explained by the ordinary laws of physics.
- Straight: Acute angles that behave like obtuse, triangles with three right angles, places whose qualities vary depending on the angle you are looking from...
- Exaggerated:
- Everything looks like a painting by M.C. Escher, or worse, an acid dream.
- Eldritch Location
- Downplayed:
- The structures do not break laws, they are just really, really weird.
- A place looks normal, until someone tries to make a map of it and realizes that two entirely different rooms should occupy the same three-dimensional space, but don't.
- Justified:
- It was built by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens or Eldritch Abominations.
- The geometry of the entire universe is different.
- Inverted: Even cosmic horrors have to obey physics.
- Subverted: It's just an optical illusion.
- The 'strange geometry' are in fact perfectly normal just because it doesn't match ignorant human intuitions or dogma doesn't make it wrong or sanity rending. Confusing at first but the only people 'driven mad' were really wearing a Mask of Sanity based upon their preconceptions of 'normal'.
- Double Subverted: But it shouldn't have worked as such in the first place.
- Parodied: The painted tunnel behaves like a tunnel... for some people!
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes the laws of physics work despite having been proven not to.
- Averted: Aliens simply can't break the laws of physics.
- Enforced:
- "Let's see how many sanity points we can make the reader lose while reading this."
- The Minus World is taking World 6's texture ID table as its sector linking table.note
- Lampshaded: "I told you we should have taken the stairs. All these temples have stupid hyper geometry."
- Invoked: "Oh, I thought Pi being not exactly three was a bit untidy, so I changed it."
- Exploited: Alien geometries are used to make technology that would be otherwise completely impossible.
- Defied: "In my dimension, we follow the law! The laws of physics!"
- Discussed: "It's bigger on the inside!"
- Conversed: "Just you wait, in a second the water is going to start running upwards and then the stairs are going to curve on themselves..."
- Deconstructed:
- The aliens are attacked on sight by humans, due to the fact that the sheer ability to defy geometry causes humans to fear and distrust them.
- Any human who sees the structures will be Driven to Madness by the breaking of how they thought the universe worked.
- Played For Laughs: The aliens create things that look like they were made by Doctor Seuss.
- Implied: In a series which gets the math rigorously right the stats of the alien ship appear to have deeply wrong numbers and Word of God is insistent that it is not a mistake in the book.
Please note you should really not play with Alien Geometries. They have the unfortunate side effect of summoning Cosmic Horrors.
