Removed:

• In the play After Juliet, a relatively modern sequel to Romeo and Juliet, Rosaline is revealed to have been madly in love with Romeo from the very beginning of the first play, despite her constant rejection of him. How does this make any sense at all? Because she was trying to show him that she would not be easily won, which of course necessitated ignoring his every action and treating him as if he were absolutely worthless. Obviously. (This Troper actually burst out laughing in the part of the play when this was revealed, thinking that it was meant to be a joke; then she realized that it wasn't. In fact, the whole play struck her as So Bad Its Good, while frequently dipping into So Bad Its Horrible territory—though, to be fair, a lot of that was probably due to the poor acting that went above and beyond the realm of Narm.)

Isn't the idea of someone playing hard to get quite established? I mean sure playing hard to get is a stupid social structure but it's not really unrealistic and this instance it doesn't seem like a Hand Wave.

Since Beowulf apparently isn't an example (see below), I'm removing the following until someone possibly comes up with an example from a similar kind of thing that is.

• Monomyth-style adventures such as Beowulf sometimes seem to have a Big Bad who could conceivably be defeated more easily by some combination of protagonists other than The Hero, but for no given reason, the others hold back so that the hero can do it.
  • Fairly well-justified in Beowulf, though. Grendel can't be taken down by any of the Half-Danes, which is why they need Beowulf to show up and kill it for them. It's explained that Grendel has been made invulnerable to weapons, and only Beowulf has the pure strength needed to kill him. For Grendel's mother, it doesn't seem like any of the Danes have the stamina needed to swim for the better part of the day to the bottom of the lake or the strength to wield the giant's sword. As for the dragon, Beowulf is the king, and it's mentioned he just tells everyone to stay back.

Pulled this from the Real Life section because it was pretty clear the person writing the example meant "cerebrum" and just used the wrong word. (Also fixed the example as long as I was there.)

• The cerebellum is NOT the frontal lobe. The cerebellum is, in fact, on the opposite side of the skull, and is involved in motor control. Most modern theories agree that the role of the prefrontal cortex (which is in the frontal lobe) is to make decisions, not to come up with justifications for decisions already made in another mysterious part of the brain. Whoever told you that knows nothing about neurology or psychology.

In the novels of Robert Rankin, of which there are over 30, all riddled with in-jokes, one of the longest-running gags is that any miraculous technological device beyond the comprehension of the characters (and the author) is always said to operate by "the transperambulation of pseudocosmic antimatter".

A more recent example is the Chevalier Effect. This is named after the Maurice Chevalier song "I Remember It Well", in which two people remember things completely differently. Applying this logic to absolutely everything, it follows that all historical records are totally unreliable. This is used as a hand-wave for the inclusion in books supposedly set at some specific time in the past of anything from casual one-liners about modern events to appearances by real-life historical characters who are much older or younger than they should be. In "The Brightonomicon", the first book in which the Chevalier Effect features, one chapter takes place in a goth club, despite the whole novel being set in 1965.