This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Cassius335: No examples?
Radien: I threw out two examples! They may not be the best, but now people have a place to put better ones.
zinfandel: I deleted the following example -- it is the exact opposite of a Justified Trope.
- It is never explained in Haibane Renmei why the angel-like Haibane share the same town with normal people when it's supposed to be some sort of purgatory, or what the heck lies behind the walls that the inhabitants are not allowed to cross. The floating metallic halos also might look cool, but never get any sufficient explanation.
Luc: This could be rewritten, to emphasize Tropes Are Not Bad.
Puck: It seems that Justified Trope differs from Handwaving and A Wizard Did It if the justification has been set up well beforehand, possibly from the beginning of the series, so that by the time the trope rolls around it makes perfect sense in context. It doesn't count if the justification comes after, or very shortly before, the trope occurs. If someone does a rewrite, this distinction should be emphasized.
Fast Eddie: Pulled all the examples. They were mostly off-point. This is a definition entry that works without examples. Pulled stuff...
Examples:
- Perhaps the original justified trope (or at least, the first example this editor ever ran into) is the lightsaber, which as far back as the late 80s had fans "explaining" that it was really a length of high-energy matter that functioned more than a little like a chainsaw.
- It may be possible to build a real lightsaber: quantum mechanics says that if you spin a conductive object so that the surface is travelling at a high fraction of the speed of light, it will emit virtual photons, and behave in a way generally similar to a lightsaber.
- Sluggy Freelance (and many other webcomics) make excessive tongue-in-cheek use of this trope, often in retrospect after a story arc.
- The multi-player video game Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles has a game mechanic whereby a crystal object must be carried along in order to move from one area to another. Stray too far from the object, and you receive damage. The camera always centers on the crystal, as well. The explanation is that the world is blanketed in miasma, and only this object can dispel it, but we know it's really just a way to keep players from splitting up and bumping heads over which direction to go.
- The original novel form of The Lord Of The Rings is probably the single largest source of justified tropes in any single work of modern fiction. Partially because Tolkien demanded of himself that he could come up with a motivation for the things he presented. There are moreover any number of things which occur for a sound reason in Lo TR, and didn't become tropes until they were repeated in every other fantasy paperback ever.
