Basic Trope: God is depicted as one or a pair of hands.
- Straight: Alice prays for Divine Intervention to save Bob, and a giant hand appears from the sky to do so.
- Exaggerated: God is literally just a giant hand. That really is His full body.
- Downplayed: Bob is rescued by five hanging ropes making a rougu shape of a hand and hauling him out of the pit.
- Justified:
- To see the full form of God would cause Alice and Bob to Go Mad from the Revelation, but just seeing His hand is okay.
- God operates on multiple planes of existence at once and only two of his (how many?) hands need to be on ours.
- Inverted:
- God's full body appears, but His hands are hidden from view.
- Alice prays, and a giant foot appears and stomps on the bad guy.
- Alice prays, but the hand of Satan appears instead and just finishes Bob off.
- Subverted: A giant hand shows up to save Alice and Bob, then the rest of God appears immediately afterward.
- Double Subverted: But the rest of God's "body" just looks like a swirling mass of light and color.
- Parodied: The hand of God appears sometimes to entertain Alice and Bob with giant finger puppets.
- Zig Zagged: God appears as a giant hand sometimes. Other times He may appear as a burning bush, as a pillar of flame, as a person, or an invisible voice. Sometimes the hand appears, but it's not God.
- Averted: God appears in full, or as something other than a hand, or He doesn't appear at all.
- Enforced: In the middle ages showing the full body of God was considered the same as creating an idol to be worshiped and was therefore heresy. Some parts of the world still consider it improper to this day.
- Lampshaded: "Look there in the sky! It's the giant hand of God!"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Villainous Carol expects the giant hand to come save Alice, and so prepares with a giant-sized Clutching Hand Trap.
- Defied: Alice prays and nothing happens. The villain Carol asks, "What were you expecting; a giant hand to come down from the sky and save you?"
- Discussed: "I can't help but notice whenever God appears, it's just a big hand in the sky."
- Conversed: "You ever wonder what the rest of God looks like?"
Back to The Hand Is God.
