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Um, what? Are you talking about a work or a trope?
Could be an extreme Culture Clash, in which the characters totally fail to understand the world around them. Oddly enough, I cannot find the trope for those, either: a "normal" person exploring a completely "alien" world; an "alien" person (but not necessarily a true space alien) exploring a supposedly "normal" world as seen from the audience's POV.
^ didn't help, did I.
Hmm. Okay, perhaps this can be wrapped up as "extreme form of Culture Clash, in which a character completely fails to understand the world they're in, either because they've Time Travelled, landed on an alien planet, they're the aliens on our planet, they're in an Alternate Universe or whatever". Do We Have This?
Edited by SinusPi I wonder what this button does...
hm... Yeah, you are right... but is there a Culture Clash related trope about People from previous ages visiting present and thinking about everything in their own way?
For example: Cavemen fight cars, thinking they are mammoths, Medival people drinking mouthwashing fluid thinking it is a potion, Aztec people praying to policeman etc.
I've widened your scope there, from just past-to-present misunderstandings, to a general "failure to understand the world", for which we don't seem to have a trope: neither for cavemen fighting buses, nor for witches treating asphalt streets as rivers of tar in Hocus Pocus, nor for humans trying to chop down tree-shaped aliens on a distant planet, nor for Scotty talking to a 20th century computer in Star Trek IV.
We might use one, perhaps, though all this seems to boil down to various flavours of simply being an "alien".
I wonder what this button does...
A perfect hit, bravo! Do we, then, have a trope for generally finding oneself in a completely unfamiliar world, but not through time travel, just through an Alternate Universe leap or by landing on an alien planet? Which would be a super- or sister-trope for this?
I wonder what this button does...
woah, thanks nrjxll! Also, asking the same question as Sinus Pi, got pretty curious about that.
Are you talking about like a Wizard of Oz or Farscape or Narnia sort of thing?
I meant something much more bizarre for the protagonist. Oz, Farscape and Narnia have worlds pretty much familiar - maybe there are weirdly shaped aliens or talking animals, but the overall physics and everyday life mechanisms are not that much different. Off the top of my head I can recall a short sci-fi story in which the protagonist would get transported to an Alternate Universe each time they said the word "coffee", including worlds in which he could be in two locations at the same time, or worlds in which a foot trip from A to B would quite obviously take twice as much as a return trip from B to A.
I wonder what this button does...
So there are kinghts/cavemen etc, they come to future and they fight cars/lanterns etc, thinking it is a dragon or something. Sometimes it goes inverse, the machines come to their age with time travelers. What is this called?