Discussion Main / Handwave

The movie Star Trek: Insurrection takes place during the same time as the seventh season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, when Worf should be fighting the Dominion, but the producers wanted him in the movie. He shows up on the Enterprise and starts to explain his presence but Captain Picard talks over him and the movie just goes on...

I feel that a lot of the Real Life stuff should be linked to articles and research better explaining/backing up what is being said. I know we are not Wikipedia but, for example, this entry:

• Even when the brain is whole, people are capable of awesome hand waves. When confronted with moral decisions, people make them almost instantly (unless they're really tough, like whether it's okay to sacrifice four people to save five others). Essentially, three things happen when we make a moral decision. One portion of the brain feels empathy for those involved (oh, wook at da baaybeees). Another portion of the brain seeks a much more utilitarian solution (kill the spares, collect all the food, live as a king). Depending on how strongly these two fire, we reach a decision, usually some kind of balance between the two. Then the final act happens: our prefrontal cortex (the part of the frontal lobe responsible for, among other things, logical thought) justifies the decision we've reached. In other words, all those books you had to read in philosophy 101 about morality and the justification for various ethics? So much handwaving for decisions stuffy German men had already made. But very, very sophisticated handwaving.

This is potentially interesting stuff but also seems to oversimplify a very complex process and I have no idea how relevant/recent/correct the assertion is. As someone whom is interested in such topics, I'd love to follow up on this, but I have nothing to go on. A link or two to articles exploring this more in depth would be very helpful.

I'd argue that the example given about Charlie in the show Series/Supernatural is not a Hand Wave; it was pretty clear that they meant that Leviathans couldn't copy complex/passionate skills like hacking which was why they kept Charlie around. The "spark" in question was nothing supernatural or mystical, it was just referring to an advanced understanding of a technical skill

So this trope is a form of justification?

Am I the only one that sees a lot of these "examples" as just people complaining about plots they don't like?

STANDARD FANNON HANDWAVES: These are catch all handwave excuses that can be used in many different stories adn genres:

A Wizard Did it, already discussed on the tropes page, however for it to be a plausible handwave, saving suspension of disbelief, wizards MUST be an established part of the genre.

Temporal Cold War - If time travel has been entered into the cannon then any minor continuity gaffs are in fact NOT continuity gaffs, they are fall out from a temporal incursion that has stabilized into standard continuity.

Even aliens have ethnicities - The aliens were introduced in the firsdt incarnation of the show, and have now later appeared in the modern version (not a re-envisioning) and they look different. A cynic would say this is because make up budgets and character creating have changed over the years, suspension of disbelief tells us the truth. Just as humans have slightly varied gene-pools among it's population resulting in humans with slight variations in skin tone, eye color, and other morphological features,so why can't aliens. It's not different make up, it's another ethnic group from the species. If it is a change in an individual character from one generation of the show to another then perhaps it is a case of maturation, just as humans look different when they age, perhaps other races spontaneously sprout or loos headridges, eye stalkes, cranial lumps, etc, as they age.

Infiltrator - did a character do something completely out of character, or better yet screw up some piece of knowledge, such as continuity gaff or really bad delivery of a line, it wasn't them! They were replaced by a shape shifting infiltrator that succesfully completed it's mission without blowing it's cover and moved on with out ever being caught...just being more genre savvy than the actual characters in the show, we the audience noticed something fishy.

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.

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.

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.

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, It's 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.