Basic Trope: An adaptation explains something that was left unexplained in the source material.
- Straight: In the novel Alice and Bob, Alice is afraid of swimming. The novel is adapted into a movie, which establishes that the reason for her fear is because she nearly drowned when she was a little girl.
- Exaggerated: The book is a total Mind Screw, and the movie's main purpose is to make sense of it.
- Downplayed: The film adds in a Dream Sequence in which Alice is drowning, seemingly implying this may be the cause of her fear of swimming, while not saying anything more.
- Justified:
- The movie is a prequel, taking place in Alice's childhood.
- Alice is more introspective and prone to looking back on the past in the movie, so a Flashback is more in-character for the Alice in the movie than the Alice in the book.
- Inverted: In the book, Alice's fear of swimming is explained as the result of almost drowning as a young girl. In the movie, she's still afraid of swimming, but there's no indication that the accident happened.
- Subverted: The movie shows Alice almost drowning as a kid, and it seems as though that's why she's afraid of swimming, but another flashback later in the movie shows that she was afraid of swimming even before she almost drowned.
- Double Subverted:
- That wasn't a flashback — it was either a Fantasy Sequence, a dream, or a real, present scene of Alice's niece Carol.
- The girl in the second flashback wasn't Alice — it was her sister Diane.
- The second flashback then shows that the only reason Alice was afraid to swim in this particular lake pre-accident was because Diane was teasing her about lake monsters.
- Parodied: Alice loudly announces the reason why she's afraid of swimming while doing an Aside Glance. Someone else asks her who she thinks needs the explanation.
- Zigzagged: The movie offers five potential reasons Alice is afraid of swimming — either it's because she almost drowned as a child, because her father died from a shipwreck, because the local bodies of water have dangerous animals, because someone scared her with horror stories of people drowning, or because she heard a song about a drowning as a kid.
- Averted: The movie does not explain Alice's fear of swimming, if it even crops up at all.
- Enforced: Readers had been writing to the novel's author, asking why Alice is afraid of swimming, but the author refused to give a straight answer, so the movie writers thought the viewers deserved one.
- Lampshaded: "Oh, that's why!"
- Invoked: "I bet you're wondering why I'm afraid to swim. Well, here's why!"
- Exploited:
- Defied: "Nope! Not telling why I'm afraid of swimming!"
- Discussed:
- Conversed: "Why is Alice afraid of swimming?" "Well, in the movie it's because she almost drowned, but they never say why in the book."
- Implied: The movie hints that Alice had a near-drowning in her childhood, but doesn't say it definitely happened.
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- Played for Laughs: It turns out that the reason Alice is afraid of swimming is because she fell hook line and sinker for a story Diane told her about some made-up monster who pulls people underwater.
- Played for Drama: The reason Alice is afraid of swimming is because her father drowned.
- Played for Horror: The reason Alice is afraid of swimming is because she's actually a demon whose Weaksauce Weakness is getting wet.
Back to Adaptational Explanation.
