Basic Trope: A "magical" incident is retroactively explained as not being magic.
- Straight:
- Agnes finds that there is a secret passageway to the room where a "ghost" appeared, and it contains materials to fake the luminous glow.
- A character stands outside a home, plays a pipe, and summons three golden fish statues inside to him. They do vanish, but the detective deduces they were removed earlier by mundane means; the "summons" was to distract.
- Exaggerated: An entire high fantasy world is revealed as an elaborate live-action role-playing game with good special effects.
- Downplayed:
- Baldwin says that a ghost told him where an accident occurred. Charlotte observes that he might have seen evidence earlier and only put it together in his sleep, but this is not established as the truth.
- Danilo, who had appeared as a fae and uncanny creature, magical by nature, is revealed as a merely human wizard, who obtained his magic by study.
- Justified: Anything that we don't yet know the true science of would certainly look like magic at first.
- Inverted: Doing in the Scientist
- Subverted:
- Eileen shows that the mirrors would reflected strange patterns that would have looked ghostly in the room. But when the windows that were the light sources are covered up, the strange lights still appear.
- The explanation turns out to be a lie to uphold The Masquerade.
- Double Subverted: Eileen was just mistaken about where the light came from.
- Parodied: A stage magician insists that he has debunked the wizards whenever he manages something vaguely like their spells; the wizards ignore him and go on casting spells as convenient.
- Zig Zagged:
- Some fanciful elements are revealed to actually be the product of science and some are genuinely magical.
- It becomes ambiguous whether or not something is scientific or magical in nature, with various dropped hints supporting both possibilities.
- Daniel's abilities were explained as nanomachines and not magic, simply a strain of rogue Grey Goo and Ice-9. Except real life discredits them. Antimagic fields later disrupt them. It is stated that nanomachines don't work on the actual principles suspected but actually involve unwittingly stumbling upon symbolic magic. Except later technology is found which meddles with the same forces as magic. Both mages and current scientists are described as partially right but hopelessly wrong when it comes to understanding the whole.
- Averted: Nothing seen as fanciful is given a logical explanation.
- Enforced: "We're getting complaints that our show is too unrealistic. Maybe we can appease their criticisms by retroactively giving scientific explanations for the magical elements of the series."
- Lampshaded: "Gee, if it weren't for your sound observations, I probably never would've realized that this dragon was just a robot with a built-in flamethrower."
- Invoked: Agnes seeks out mystical incidents to prove they are hoaxes.
- Exploited: A stage magician has show-downs with local shamans and comes off victorious. Then he shows how it's done to the people, to undercut their power.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Played For Laughs: Hiro the Miles Gloriosus has his magic related exploits explained in ways that reveal him to be a deluded and depraved loser. The "mermaid" he slept with? Turns out she was a manatee. The dryad he slept with similarly was just a tree he humped while stoned out of his gourd.
- Played For Horror: Alice's encounters with the supernatural are revealed to have been delusional. With heavy implications that the murderer she is pursuing is actually herself while under a psychotic episode.
Back to Doing In the Wizard.
