This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
ralphmerridew: Sounds like the "One Porcupine" rule.
Andyroid: The what now?
ralphmerridew: I've seen it as "You can make the reader swallow one porcupine, but you can't make him swallow two." or "Any author can make the reader swallow one porcupine, but it takes a lot of skill to make him swallow two porcupines."
- Is that the same as "You only get to use the Tooth Fairy once"? —Document N
Gorgon: Holy crap, Yue Fairchild! How can you expect to add your stuff via the worst run-on sentence EVAH and not think you are going to get busted?
Yanking ...
- , and finally, when someone attempts alchemy on humans, they end up sent to a gate connecting to the Real World and usually killed by the guardian of said gate unless they offer up a part of their body to be sent back. When we're introduced to some near-omnipotent alchemists toward the end of the series who can bend or break numerous of the above rules, the effect is roughly that of an all-powerful wizard next to a drugstore chemist. Even the Philosopher's Stone, used by said near-omnipotent alchemists, is subjected to the rule of equivalent exchange - but in a far more disturbing, Soylent Green manner.
... as being "Holy Crap! I ran out of breath an hour ago!"
- In the sci-fi show Heroes we at one point see a character who can create illusions, Candice, knocked unconscious, causing her illusions to disappear, and her to revert to the form she's usually seen in. But it was revealed in a promotional comic that this form is also an illusion, and that she in fact is a short, overweight, stereotypically ugly woman. Why didn't this illusion disappear too? Could it be she has been hiding behind this face for so long that it has become second nature to her to keep it up at all times, even when not thinking about it at all? Nope - it's a matter of no one telling the director.
- Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth series is pretty much one huge constant rules breach. Occam's Razor is broken so often, that at one point there's an actual conversation that's basically a magical version of "but the gnomes wear gas masks" argument.
Citizen: Started another rename YKTTW
, but it failed.
Shadow of the Sun: Y'know, this isn't really anything to do with discussing the page, but also the trope, but I like the philosophical implications of this. It really makes me think of the rules of mathematics - note to self: do something with that- and as a part of that, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Effectively, there can be no magic system that is complete and consistent, even though it is probably fallacious to apply mathematical logic to magic.
Burai: Regarding ...
- Read Or Die sets the arbitrary yet consistent rule that only the most skilled paper-manipulators may use paper that gets wet.
BritBllt: Depending on how strictly it's used as a plot element, I could see it being Magic A Is Magic A. If nobody in the show breaks that "wet paper is really hard to use" rule, then it might count. I haven't seen enough Read or Die to know how it's used, though...
BritBllt: Removing this entry...
- The first Pirates Of The Caribbean film had undead skeleton pirates. And we accepted this, because it was self-consistent. The second film had Davy Jones captaining the Flying Dutchman trying to claim Jack's soul and keep his own disembodied heart safe, but far away from him. We accepted this because it was still magic and fairly consistent. The third Pirates movie had a sea goddess, the "edge" of a world we had no reason to think was flat, another world that you get back from by being underwater, and pirates who had magic of their own (to bind the goddess). Also, it broke the logic of the previous film on at least one count. (Specifically, the "heart" problem.)
BritBllt: Removing this one too...
- Averted in Highlander, where the nature of the Immortals, the Quickening, and the Game they play seems to change between incarnations and continuities of the movies and tv series, and even from episode to episode within the series.
There's a bunch of Continuity Tropes that already cover Highlander's situation: it'd only be a Magic A Is Magic A aversion if the characters themselves thought the rules were changing. Even then, Averted Tropes generally shouldn't be listed; for this trope in particular, the line between "aversions" and Bad Writing is so blurry that it'd probably be better to just not go there.
BritBllt: Per Conversation In The Main Page and Thread Mode, moving this quantum filibuster here...
- "The laws of physics" "failing" at high speeds/high energies/small scales is a bit of a misnomer, as you were just using wrong physics. It's better to think of it in terms of "laws B reduce to laws A in limit L; B is more fundamental than A." It just means that things people think are true are actually approximations to the real theory, for example the most common formulation of Newton's Second Law, F=ma.
- Unlike the previous point, there are currently-accepted physical theories that do actually contradict one another - General Relativity (gravity) and the Standard Model of quantum field theory (high energy physics AKA particle physics). In the regime where masses are very large (black hole-sized) AND things are going very fast (comparable to the speed of light) AND the system is very small (comparable to atoms), nobody knows how it actually works. Nearly all physicists believe that the Standard Model is to blame; the problem is that general relativity describes how spacetime bends in response to matter-energy, but the Standard Model is built at the very core around a flat spacetime (but in a flat spacetime, it has been a wildly successful theory, as much as F=ma was before Einstein tore it down with special relativity). Many attempts are under way to replace the Standard Model with a theory that does work (chiefly superstring theory, which unfortunately is a far worse example of this trope: it describes something like 10^500 universes, and it isn't even known whether our universe is one of them or why we would be in that particular universe (universe A is universe A)).
It's interesting and well thought-out enough to warrant saving, but it simply can't fit onto the main page. Hopefully the conversation will be picked up in here instead.
BritBllt: Real Life just attracts all the natter. Most of it's fairly useful, but removing...
- It's not that the rules are inconsistent, it's just that we don't understand them yet. When we find the Grand Unifying Theory the rules will be consistent and make sense, at least to those lucky people who have I Qs over 150.
If we don't understand them yet, then they are inconsistent for the time being. The faith that some scientists have in string theory, GUTs and so on has always bothered me: it's kinda like religious faith, a human need to believe that the universe is organized and makes sense. Maybe a GUT will someday explain it all. Or maybe the universe is just playing silly buggers with us. At any rate, removing from the main page since it's a Justifying Edit that doesn't really negate the example, but it's a good enough counterpoint to keep as Discussion.
