History Main / MusicalWorldHypotheses

** ''WesternAnimation/TheLittleMermaid'': It's unclear for most of the songs, but "Kiss the Girl" is Diegetic, since Sebastian deliberately wrote the song to attempt to get Eric into a romantic mood.

* ''VideoGame/BrutalLegend'' is explicitly a Musical Alternate Reality. [[MagicMusic Musical performances are analogous to spells,]] from practice chords conjuring fireballs and lightning bolts, to three-bar solos that cause, for example, kickass hotrods to be conjured to zeppelins to crash into things. Performing a concert is to impose your will on Reality itself, with the style of music being played expressing a faction's worldview. Heroic Ironheade plays epic music that embodies freedom, the villainous, [[TheLegionsOfHell outright demonic]] Tainted Coil plays [[ObligatoryBondageSong seedy]] music that embodies authoritarianism, and the [[EvilVsOblivion nihilistic]] Drowning Doom plays spooky power metal that speaks of a desire to [[MilesToGoBeforeISleep lay down and die, but not before]] [[SuicdalCosmicTemperTantrum they help everyone do it first]].

* ''VideoGame/BrutalLegend'' is explicitly a Musical Alternate Reality. [[MagicMusic Musical performances are analogous to spells,]] from practice chords conjuring fireballs and lightning bolts, to three-bar solos that cause, for example, kickass hotrods to be conjured to zeppelins to crash into things. Performing a concert is to impose your will on Reality itself, with the style of music being played expressing a faction's worldview. Heroic Ironheade plays epic music that embodies freedom, the villainous, [[TheLegonsOfHell outright demonic]] TaintedCoil plays [[ObligatoryBondageSong seedy]] music that embodies authoritarianism, and the [[EvilVsOblivion nihilistic]] Drowning Doom plays spooky power metal that speaks of a desire to [[MilesToGoBeforeISleep lay down and die, but not before]] [[SuicdalCosmicTemperTantrum they help everyone do it first]].

* ''Fanfic/TheDragonAndTheButterfly'' goes with the "all in their heads" interpretation, due to most scenes being shown from Hiccup's POV. "Pressure" is just Hiccup watching Mirabelle and Luisa having a long and heartfelt talk, while "What Else Can I Do" is him minding his own business in the smithy when, without warning, Isabela unleashes the plantocalypse on the town. It's in fact played for a good measure of horror - with a child being trapped in a house by vines, among other things - as the townspeople clearly can't deal with the sudden horticultural assault. The song "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is instead "We Don't Talk About Hiccup", but instead of being sung it's the Viking teens and Berkian townspeople explaining why Hiccup was viewed as a disgrace (with the narrative stating that it's "almost like they're singing"). "Welcome to the Family Madrigal" gets the same treatment, with the song instead being Hiccup telling the Madrigal family history (but with reworked lyrics to reflect how the family has changed since the events of Encanto).

* ''Fanfic/TheDragonAndTheButterfly'' goes with the "all in their heads" interpretation, due to most scenes being shown from Hiccup's POV. "Pressure" is just Hiccup watching Mirabelle and Luisa having a long and heartfelt talk, while "What Else Can I Do" is him minding his own business in the smithy when, without warning, Isabela unleashes the plantocalypse on the town. It's in fact played for a good measure of horror - with a child being trapped in a house by vines, among other things - as the townspeople clearly can't deal with the sudden horticultural assault.

* '''The Musical AlternateUniverse Hypothesis''': The musical is set in an alternate world, or magic has been worked on the ordinary world, in which [[CrowdSong people]] really do burst into [[SpontaneousChoreography spontaneous song and dance.]] If the world has always been this way, singing is simply a normal and commonplace form of human communication in this universe. If the world is not normally this way, expect it to be some sort of an uncontrollable compulsion to sing at emotional moments, perhaps induced by the actions of TheMusicMeister. In this interpretation, since the singing is an in-universe phenomenon, the characters are aware of the songs and may explicitly comment on their musical style or specific lyrics. There may be [[MusicalNumberAnnoyance characters who don't like singing]] and refuse to participate or [[MusicalisInterruptus try to stop others from starting to sing]] when the music begins to swell, or characters may say things in song that they wouldn't otherwise or regard statements that are sung differently from spoken statements. This is most common in comedic works or as a [[MusicalEpisode one-off occurrence]] in a normally non-musical world, since it [[LampshadeHanging draws attention to the weirdness of the concept.]] In particular, almost all {{parodies}} of musicals treat them as being AlternateUniverse, even when the musical being parodied is not.
* '''The All In Their Heads Hypothesis''': There is no singing; the songs are an artistic rendering of the characters' fantasies, with the format of song in a way serving to distinguish between what really happens and what is only in the characters' heads, much like a [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespearean]] [[ThinkingOutLoud soliloquy.]] Naturally, this means that no characters are aware of what goes on in another character's song: there may be duets, but then they are {{Distant|Duet}} {{Counterpoint Duet}}s where the two characters do not know of one another's participation. This makes the musical more palatable for some, since there is obviously no literal singing involved in-universe. TiredAfterTheSong contradicts this because there's no way you can tire yourself out by imagining singing.
* '''The Diegetic Hypothesis''': The characters are performing actual, literal songs for one another as they might in RealLife, with the songs having been written and practiced beforehand in a realistic way. This can overlap with Alternate Universe if writing and performing a song is treated as analogous to writing and giving a speech. Fully diegetic musicals are distinguished from non-musicals that happen to feature musical performances only by the number of such musical performances that are given the viewer's full attention. See the DiegeticMusical.
* '''The Adaptation Hypothesis''': Derives from the LiteraryAgentHypothesis: the songs are merely a dramatic reconstruction of what ''really'' happened. For instance, if two characters converse in song and come to some sort of conclusion, it is assumed that the characters ''really'' just had a normal, non-musical conversation that came to the same conclusion, but because it's a musical, it has here been adapted into a song for drama (or comedy) purposes. This is the most common interpretation in stage musicals, and the way most of them are written: almost AllMusicalsAreAdaptations, after all, and the source material generally doesn't have any singing. Many musical songs ''only'' make sense in light of this interpretation: they may be essentially montages of a much longer time period, for instance, while still featuring dialogue or interactions between the characters that rules out the song being a fantasy.
* '''All-Maestro Cast''': If it is explicitly shown or implied (other than by the mere fact of their singing) that all of the characters in a musical who sing have great (by RealLife's standards) skill at improvised music, it is at least plausible that these characters really are capable of coming up with tunes and rhymes on the fly, and do so during the musical. This is easier to justify with a smaller cast. Given the needed plot support, this case is rare. This case differs from the Diegetic Hypothesis in that the songs are improvised in-universe.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheLorax'': "Thneedville" could be any of the hypotheses, but the songs sung by the Onceler during the flashback are Adaptations. The Once-ler is singing to Ted, since Ted explicitly asks if there'll be another musical number, but due to a lot of time passing over one song in "How Bad Can I Be?", he can't have been singing at the time. In "Let it Grow", the crowd are definitely saying something, since the song convinces the other citizens, and Marie struggles to find a rhyme for "tree" due to her young age, so they probably really were singing, but may have been speaking in rhyme.

* ''FanFic/TantabusMarkII'': The reporter finally realizes she's in a dream because rich ponies never spontaneously burst into choreographed Bridleway songs--that's something ''commoners'' do.

* ''Film/GuardiansOfTheGalaxy'' and its sequel aren't musicals ''per se'', but nonetheless they include a lot of songs which they get from Peter Quill's mixtapes, which usually end up being either Diegetic (when he's playing his music) or Adaptation (a song is playing, with the implication that it exists on his tapes, but it's clearly not happening in-universe). The first film starts with Quill dancing to "Come and Get Your Love", but since he's got headphones on, it's functionally the same as an All In His Head song. ''Film/AvengersEndgame'' lampshades this: [[spoiler:Nebula and War Machine time-travel back to this point, but they can't hear the music and only see Quill dancing and singing off-key to nothing like an idiot.]] At one point in the second movie Rocket has an ally play one of Quill's songs for the explicit purpose of accompanying the following fight.

* ''Comicbook/TheLeagueOfExtraordinaryGentlemen'' takes place in a universe where every work of fiction is true (poems and musicals being no exception), so this naturally comes up at one point. In one section of "The New Travelers' Almanac" in the second volume, we learn that the events of Creator/LewisCarroll's poem ''Literature/TheHuntingOfTheSnark'' were just a hallucination that unfolded in the mind of one Dr. Eric Bellman, a psychiatrist who went insane after trying to lead an expedition into [[Literature/AliceInWonderland Wonderland]]. The dialogue in that poem is said to be in verse because Bellman's deteriorating mental state left him incapable of speaking in coherent prose.

* ''FanFic/TheDragonAndTheButterfly'' goes with the "all in their heads" interpretation, due to most scenes being shown from Hiccup's POV. "Pressure" is just Hiccup watching Mirabelle and Luisa having a long and heartfelt talk, while "What Else Can I Do" is him minding his own business in the smithy when, without warning, Isabela unleashes the plantocalypse on the town. It's in fact played for a good measure of horror - with a child being trapped in a house by vines, among other things - as the townspeople clearly can't deal with the sudden horticultural assault.

** ''Film/TheMuppets'' is mostly Alternate Universe (The reprise of [[CrowdSong "Life's a Happy Song"]] ends with the crowd collapsing from exhaustion; the Muppets are baffled by Tex Richman's rap), while the songs performed during the fundraiser are diegetic (just as they would be in RealLife).

* One of Alex Borstein's characters on ''Series/{{MADtv}}'' was a redhead named Theatre/{{Annie}} whose spontaneous musical outbursts were stated to be a stress-triggered mental illness.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball'' typically falls under AlternateUniverse,and even has a few instances of characters reacting to background music that in-universe could only be "sung" by a nebulous "narrator". [[MusicalEpisode "The Singing"]] is entirely ''about'' characters suddenly bursting into song for no real reason other than because the nature of the world they live in meaning they ''can''. That said the series most well-known song " Weird Like You And Me" is implied to be diegetic.

* ''Machinima/RedVsBlue'''s MusicalEpisode ''Red vs. Blue: the Musical'' is Adaptational, since [[spoiler: it's actually a play Donut wrote about their adventures.]]

** 'WesternAnimation/{{Aladdin}}'' is all over the place. Both of Genie's songs ("Friend Like Me" and "Prince Ali") are Diegetic - he's a LargeHam, pop culture junkie, and RealityWarper; of ''course'' he's going to start a showstopping number when he gets half a chance. Both songs also occur when he's going all-out trying to impress people, as well. "Arabian Nights" may also be Diegetic, as it's perfectly normal for a traveler to sing on the road, and it's implied "A Whole New World" is as well, considering Jasmine hums it to herself after her date with Aladdin. "One Jump Ahead" and Jafar's DarkReprise of "Prince Ali" are Adaptations describing actual events, though Aladdin's half-verse reprise of "One Jump Ahead" is uneventful enough that it could be All In His Head.

** In ''WesternAnimation/{{Aladdin}}'', both of Genie's songs ("Friend Like Me" and "Prince Ali") are Diegetic - he's a LargeHam, pop culture junkie, and RealityWarper; of ''course'' he's going to start a showstopping number when he gets half a chance. Both songs also occur when he's going all-out trying to impress people, as well. "Arabian Nights" may also be Diegetic, as it's perfectly normal for a traveler to sing on the road. The rest ("One Jump Ahead", "Whole New World", and Jafar's DarkReprise of "Prince Ali") are all Adaptations describing actual events, though Aladdin's half-verse reprise of "One Jump Ahead" is uneventful enough that it could be All In His Head.

** ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyEquestriaGirls'': The shorts and specials make common use of all four types, with the switch from longer movies to shorter specials bringing with it the main series' constant use of Alternative Universe. ''[[WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyEquestriaGirlsForgottenFriendship Forgotten Friendship]]'' in particular has both its songs lampshade this. Each one is immediately acknowledged by other characters both during and after they were sung, with the second song even having two characters use the villain being distracted by their own performance to continue enacting their plan.

** ''WesternAnimation/{{Moana}}'' acts as a Musical Universe, but [[LampshadeHanging calls attention to this nature]]. Maui continues humming "You're Welcome" to himself even after the song is over (and later brings back the tune for a MadnessMantra of sorts), and "Shiny" is explicitly done "in song form" with Tamatoa asking the heroes if they liked it afterward. Maui also comments at one point that if Moana breaks into song, he's going to throw up. "We Know The Way", on the other hand, could be All in Moana's Head as she's given a spirit vision of her ancestors; but then again, it's a Musical Universe so her ancestors might well have actually sung that. Likewise, "How Far I'll Go" may or may not be All In Her Head giving voice to her internal struggle, since she only sings to herself and nobody else takes notice. The only one that ''can't'' be justified by the Musical Universe is "Where You Are", as it's an AgeProgressionSong and therefore an Adaptation.

** ''WesternAnimation/{{Encanto}}'': "The Family Madrigal", at least, is either Musical Universe or Diagetic where the song is actually happening. When Mirabel tries to end it before she gets to an embarrassing bit, the camera cuts to a previously-unseen band who keeps the music going and urges her to continue, forcing her to scramble to improvise.

* '''The All In Their Heads Hypothesis''': There is no singing; the songs are an artistic rendering of the characters' fantasies, with the format of song in a way serving to distinguish between what really happens and what is only in the characters' heads, much like a [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespearean]] [[ThinkingOutLoud soliloquy.]] Naturally, this means that no characters are aware of what goes on in another character's song: there may be duets, but then they are {{Distant|Duet}} {{Counterpoint Duet}}s where the two characters do not know of one another's participation. This makes the musical more palatable for some, since there is obviously no literal singing involved in-universe. TiredAfterTheSong debunks this because there's no way you can tire yourself out by imagining singing.