Just a Face and a Caption: For Want Of A Nail

Yes, the Laconic is "A single small change snowballs into a major change of events.". The knight shows how this snowball gets started including the next step.

I'll say that Tropes Are Not Narrow and the description should be widened.

This should also cover stuff like that How I Met Your Mother episode, where a whole series of events is traced back to Ted finding a rare penny.

edited 27th Aug '13 11:43:07 AM by m8e

Then it's ambiguous:

Small change could mean anything, like, could this be an alternate history, inflicted via a mad scientist, or a "change in the situation", like how you've interpret it?

Still think the trope's suffering from Missing Supertrope Syndrome.

edited 27th Aug '13 11:40:55 AM by KarjamP

This trope is about small changes having large effects. Kind of like the butterfly effect.

If we agree that there's muddy water between FWOAN and BOD, can somebody make a personal todo to open a TRS for it?

Currently the only distinction I see is FWOAN is realized in retrospect but can't necessarily be proven for sure^note ("There was nothing you could have done, had you been there. You'd have been killed too.").

edited 27th Aug '13 12:50:23 PM by Stratadrake

The tropes are quite different:

• Butterfly of Doom: Changing history has horrible side effects.
• For Want Of A Nail: A small change (often in a timeline) has a large effect.

But without actual Time Travel involved, it can't be proven, only argued.

I'm in favor of keeping the current for Visual Pun sake, just like What Happened to the Mouse?

Neither of those is a visual pun, though.

It seems to me that Stratadrake is on the right track.

Butterfly of Doom seems to me to be more about "the slightest change to the past, generally by time travel, generally produces unwanted consequences".

For Want Of A Nail seems more like "imagine how events might have played out if this one, tiny detail had been changed".

In other words, BOD is more about "we changed it and it broke" while FWOAN is more like "if that detail had been changed, everything would have been different".

Or even more generally, BOD is about detail changes which actually happened in-universe and had huge consequences, while FWOAN points out details which, had they been changed, would have had huge consequences. It's "was changed" vs "could have been changed".

Okay, I'm educated towards the actual meaning of those two tropes, but the horse pic STILL doesn't demonstrate the alternate timeline/elseworld part of the trope, unless we have a picture demonstrating said knight in the tournament alongside it.

And it seems like this's being confused for the latter with examples like these:

• The Legacy Of Kain games deal with the attempts of the immortal vampire Kain to change his fate and that of the world of Nosgoth, which are tied. Frequent use of time travel is made by Kain, Raziel, and Mobius the Timestreamer to advance their own agendas. For example: Mobius traveled back in time in the first chapter of the series "Blood Omen" and corrupted the King William the Just, turning him into The Nemesis, who threatened to conquer all of Nosgoth in the future. Kain inadvertently travels back to this time period, where he kills William the Just before he manages to become The Nemesis. When he returns to the present, Kain realizes that by killing William the Just he has sparked a genocide against vampires that left him the last in all of Nosgoth.
• Chrono Trigger features a scene where Marle, sent into the past, is mistaken for the missing queen Leene; they call off the search, meaning that the real queen stays missing and is presumably killed. This has the unfortunate effect of causing her present-day descendant, Marle, to cease to exist. The part is notable because later timeline changes don't suffer the same "paradox correction"; for instance, you can raid the Black Omen in one era, then travel back and raid it in an earlier era, and still keep the spoils from the previous raids (though if you raid it in one era and then try again in a later era, everything will already be gone). Apparently they had different writers with different ideas.

Notice it said "Time travel" in those?

And this example demonstrate the title instead of the trope, like the knight picture:

• Half the fun of Dwarf Fortress is caused by this sort of thing. A stray cat distracts a cyclops, causing it to avoid your traps. A dead butterfly props open the door, letting goblin ambushers in. A mechanism in a magma floodgate was made from orthoclase, causing the floodgate to fall apart and melt while the magma pours unchecked into the fortress...

Yeah, I think this trope needs a Trope Repair Shop discussion.

edited 28th Aug '13 1:20:59 AM by KarjamP

Alternate timeline/elseworld aren't part of the For Want Of A Nail trope. That's what I am arguing. @31 does note that it will have to be argued if there isn't elseworld/AT involved, which isn't a problem.

But the first sentence of said trope is "An Alternate Timeline or Elseworld (often in time travel stories) in which one small change has a ripple effect, resulting in massive changes. "

I think we need a trope transplant, with this trope being what you think For Want Of A Nail is, and have this trope (and Butterfly of Doom) as subtropes.

And most of the rest of the page (and most of the Internet) disagrees with you.

I really shouldn't be pulling up the Internet Archive in Image Pickin', but this trope is so old that it may be one of those overly-defined tropes that was shaped too much by the limited starting bank of examples. This one is a little different than most because the main problem appears to be the pre-existing term it was named with.

Meanwhile, there seems to have been confusion about this trope's definition as far back as BOD's YKTTW, and it turns out I'd suggested the two tropes might actually be the same before, not long after launch.

The trope just says where it got its name, not that that's what it actually is.

Good point. This needs a Trope Repair Shop discussion.

edited 28th Aug '13 4:02:10 AM by KarjamP

So, leave this discussion for now until the trope has been dealt with in TRS?

That's a good idea.

It never seems to be open for me anyway, though.

Hopefully, someone can catch a slot that opens.

TRS is up.

Cool. I'm going to go ahead and close this and tag the page to open a new thread once the TRS thread resolves.