I'm trying to figure out Aluminum Christmas Trees...

Okay, so I'm staring at the description of Aluminum Christmas Trees. Then I'm reading the examples. Then I'm looking back at the description.

And I still have no idea if it's being used properly, or being used in lieu of Reality Is Unrealistic, or what?

I'm hopelessly confused. Can anyone help?

Aluminum Christmas Trees is an object in a story that is real but people believe to be made up.

Reality Is Unrealistic is a thing that is made up, exaggerated or fabricated and is nevertheless believed more than the real thing. The examples look a bit like Aluminum Christmas Trees though.

Well, there's a sub/supertrope relation here, so some confusion is inevitable, as every example of Aluminum Christmas Trees would also be Reality Is Unrealistic. Which means examples should be moved to the former if appropriate.

So would you say most of the examples on the main Aluminum Christmas Trees page are or aren't correct? Because I kept getting this feeling reading them that they were misuse, but I couldn't quite figure out if I was right.

ACT: Choco bars are a real thing. Audience believes them to be a fictional product.

RIU: ACT examples all apply here. Examples are often of "Using the real thing means the audience is disappointed".

The Daimler-Chrysler example? ACT (subtrope of RIU).

The Beer Commercials? RIU.

Reality Is Unrealistic is "People are so accustomed to seeing something presented one way in media that they don't believe that the reality is very different." For instance, most people who have never ridden a horse or been around them think that the clop-clop sound most often used is the sound a horse's hooves make, period. In fact that sound only occurs when you have a shod horse walking on a hard surface like brick, asphalt, or concrete.

Aluminum Christmas Trees in some ways is a bit broader than Reality Is Unrealistic, as it doesn't so much deal with something being "unrealistic" but that people don't realize that it is/was a real thing and not made up. The trope namer has a lot of Values Dissonance involved, as those kinds of trees were popular when the Charlie Brown special was made.

Reality Is Unrealistic is more about assuming factual errors when it is actually Shown Their Work, as Mad said it is assuming the Common Knowledge "truth" and balking when it is defied. Possibly when Reality Ensues.

In practice there is a lot of overlap, and truthfully ACT is one of the older tropes on the site before we started creating a better defined trope naming/organization system.

"This was a real product": audience assumes the product never actually existed.

So... The examples are good?

For the most part, yes. Some are switched around. If it involves a product, it probably belongs in the subtrope. If it isn't a purchasable product, it belongs in the supertrope or another subtrope (sister trope).

Another interesting aspect of Reality Is Unrealistic is that creators often must intentionally render something incorrectly, because that's what the audience expects to see, and if you do it accurately they'll think you made a mistake.

Aluminum Christmas Trees doesn't have to be a product or a physical thing.

Gladiator chose not to use scenes where the gladiators were doing what amounted to commercial endorsements because the director figured that people would think it was something he'd made up, even though Roman gladiators actually did do commercial endorsements. 1776 ran into the same thing with Adam's line about 'all we've done is push the problem of slavery off for 50 years.' The line was something documentable in his letters, but a lot of people assumed that it was something the writers had made up. Both of those are examples of Aluminum Christmas Trees.

edited 9th Jul '14 5:50:52 PM by Madrugada

Going by that definition, there's a LOT of misuse for the subtrope in Reality Is Unrealistic.

So it's sounding like Aluminum Christmas Trees is basically the Inverted Trope of Reality Is Unrealistic.

It's a complicated distinction, regardless. The simplest way to describe it is that Aluminum Christmas Trees is "No, this was not made up by the writers" while Reality Is Unrealistic is "Our preconceptions of reality steps on the toes of genuine reality."

No, ACT is more complex than an inversion of something else.

I guess it's not quite an inversion, since a lot of the stuff covered by Reality Is Unrealistic does actually exist in Real Life; it's just not as widespread or universal as fiction would have you believe.

edited 10th Jul '14 5:55:45 PM by RavenWilder