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Sandbox / Theory Of Narrative Casuality Wick Check

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This trope has been the subject of some confusion regarding its scope and definition, so I decided to have a look at it.

The description seems a little ambivalent to begin with, which is never a great sign. The first main paragraph mostly just rattles off a long list of unrelated tropes that it describes this as being the cause of, but does eventually describe this as being what happens when there is some in-universe force or natural law that enforces tropes and causes them to happen ("Reality itself is mutable before the will of the plot. In stories where this is strong, Tropes may as well be laws of physics.")

The next few lines claim that to describe "Another way to look at it" but are actually talking about the Anthropic Principle — plenty of unremarkable people and stories exist, but of course the real-life work will focus on interesting things ("If they weren't remarkable people with remarkable feats and tales to their name, there wouldn't be a story about them and you wouldn't be hearing it in the first place").

Essentially, we've got two opposite concepts presented as if they were rewordings of one thing:

  • Amazing things happen to the main characters because they're the main characters — an in-universe force exists that causes story-like things to occur. Narrative tropes and character status have an in-universe presence.
  • The main characters are the main characters because amazing things happen to them — a meta principle where a story is by necessity going to focus on some interesting thing going on in its world instead of one of a thousand everyday things.

So what are the examples like?

    Trope-enforcing natural force 
  • Princess Tutu: Played with. Fakir is (apparently) capable of Rewriting Reality, but it's never quite clear if he's making things happen by writing them down, just writing down what would have happened anyway, or a little bit of both.
  • DoofQuest: Besides Rule of Funny toons function on this and given the setting they have a variety of different reactions to it. Some are uncaring and just live their lives (Goofy and Ludivine), some love it and play into it for fun (like the Phantom Blot), while some hate it and even successfully change their narrative (Wile E. Coyote and Max), while others take advantage of their sick senses of humor to hurt and kill people like Negaduck and Judge Doom.
  • Songs of the Spheres: This is one of the story's major driving points. Amongst other things, The Dark Tower exists within that multiverse, and so ka is a real and tangible thing. The Tower is programmed to need a good story, and so things often happen solely to fulfill that obligation. More than one character carries a ka sensor at all times just to see when the narrative is going to force itself upon them, and many react at the presence of the 'camera'. And that's to say nothing of the Flowers, who weaponize this.
  • Daniel Faust: The Enemy is the bad guy in some sort of cosmic cautionary tale that's been repeating itself over and over for millions of years. His goal is to break free from the narrative, which always ends with his defeat, but most of his powers are locked away by the plot of the story itself, so he has to enact parts of it to unlock the seals, usually by substituting Unwitting Pawns into the role of other characters in the play, whose skills he needs, that would otherwise die horrible deaths.
  • Harrow the Ninth: When the Sleeper is dominant in Harrow's bubble she renders necromancy impotent and herself invincible. Eventually they manage to call a spirit to contest her rules, but because he was summoned via an epic poem things now happen like the poem — her guns stop working and they have a lengthy one-on-one duel, inflicting superficial injuries and talking in meter, while everyone else stands aside because ganging up would break form and might give control back to the Sleeper. Near the end one witness does find a way to help in narratively appropriate fashion by throwing him a sword when he's disarmed.
  • Terra Ignota: The fourth and final book, in which World War III is fought, finds itself shaped into a semi-retelling of The Iliad due to the influence of a Reality Warper. Since said reality warper was a child with a child's understanding of the Iliad, only major events are replicated (mostly the deaths of important figures) and not necessarily in the right order (the main character undergoes The Odyssey concurrently with the war), and which side is supposed to be Troy shifts throughout the book, meaning the final outcome can't necessarily be predicted. The main character, realizing what's happening, tries and fails several times to save certain characters before their scripted deaths, and ultimately embraces his role as Odysseus to perform the infiltration that truly ends the war.
  • "Once More, with Feeling" forces the town to run on the rules of musicals. The characters are compelled to break into dance and/or sing about their private thoughts, misgivings, and secrets. Unlike in a normal musical, everyone around can hear their secrets. This forces characters to deal with problems they were repressing and moves the plot forward in leaps.
    "Life's a show, and we all play a part, and when the music starts — we open up our hearts." ~ Buffy
  • Disgaea: In general, the Fourth Wall is flimsy at best in the 'verse and major players are very aware of main character privileges, occasionally attempting to usurp the position. In the remake of Disgaea 2, this can even succeed and net you a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Neptunia: As the cast consists of personified game consoles and concepts and a cheerfully optional fourth wall, the game embraces and plays with this idea. It's at its most blatant at the start of Megadimension Neptunia VII: Neptune and Nepgear are dropped through a mysterious vortex and land in a post-apocalyptic hellscape with cracks through the very earth and sky, filled with monsters they've never seen before. Nepgear is frightened, and Neptune tells her not to worry... because she's the protagonist and this is the tutorial dungeon, so there's no way they'll lose.
  • Oculus Imperia: "The Daemon: A Treatise On The Nature of the Daemonic" makes clear that Daemons in general operate on this logic. They don't instruct their followers to carry out complex rituals and human sacrificies because "the sound of a human meat-flap" have any special power; what they have is narrative significance, emotional weight borne of millenia of story-telling; since Daemons are, ultimately, psychic creatures born from the emotions of sapient beings, they're shaped by the stories those beings tell. As the Historitor rather chillingly puts it:
    Occulus: They are stories... and they are stories that hate us.
  • Footloose is built around this trope, with the Plot being an active force in the universe that can be predicted by the Fae.
  • Mixed Myth: The villains use a filmic version of this. The elves worship a power called "Cynamatik" and use it to fuel their magic. As the name suggests, the elves have a limited ability to control this force, because it will always cause the most dramatically appropriate circumstances — so the elves are only on top for as long as it's dramatically appropriate, and, the instant the story calls for their defeat, it's impossible that they won't lose the battle.

    Anthropic principle – story ignores uninteresting people and follows interesting ones 
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus: Parodied in the "Science Fiction Sketch", where the Narrator begins by describing a perfectly ordinary couple, notes that nothing interesting generally happens to people like them, and leaves to go pay attention to someone more interest. This being Monty Python, they of course turn out to be very significant indeed.
    Narrator: It was day like many another, and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Brainsample were a perfectly ordinary couple, leading perfectly ordinary lives; the sort of people to whom nothing extraordinary ever happened, and not the kind of people to be at the center of one of the most astounding incidents in the history of mankind. So let's forget about them, and follow instead...

    Characters are genre savvy; whether or not something is actually enforcing genre conventions is unclear 
  • Austin Powers: Austin's father irritatedly lectures a mook about to attack him that he's an obvious Red Shirt who doesn't even have a name tag, and should just lie down right now. He complies.
  • Last Action Hero:
    • The Genre Savvy protagonist tries to exploit the rules of the action-movie universe he's trapped in to his advantage, playing chicken with the bad guy's car on his bicycle. Just in time, he realizes he's the Plucky Comic Relief, not the hero, and swerves out of the way.
    • One of the villains kills the manager of a convenience store and expects the police to arrive immediately. When they do not, he is puzzled.
  • The Last Unicorn: Cited by the Genre Savvy Prince Lir, when begged by Lady Amalthea (the transformed unicorn) to abandon the quest so that they can be together. He replies that in stories, things must happen at their due and proper time; he can't abandon his quest half-done, and the happy ending needs to wait until the ending.
    "The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."

    Fourth wall breaking/script reading 
  • Robin Hood: Men in Tights: After losing an archery contest against a master archer, Robin double-checks the script, confirming he's "not supposed to lose."

    A character engineers events to get a certain outcome, in-universe narrative thinking not referenced 
  • The Incredible Hulk: Early in his career, the Red Hulk punched Uatu, the Watcher, which made a vastly powerful villain take an interest in him. Much earlier than he was supposed to, which, according to another Watcher, changed the history to one where said villain would kill Red Hulk. Seeing this as Uatu's fault and violation of Watchers' oath to never interfere, another Watcher tried to fix it. When the villain came looking for Red Hulk, the Watcher hid him in a fake reality where he had similar adventures that the Incredible Hulk had during the Planet Hulk story and pulls him out later, so he that he can confront the villain when he was originally supposed to. Watcher uses this trope to justify why this isn't further interference — since the Red Hulk is a character derived from the original Hulk, it means something like that was very likely to happen to him in the future anyway.

    In-universe pattern recognition, in-universe narrative thinking not referenced 
  • Uncanny X-Men (2018) opens with the line "every X-Men story is the same", and has the characters riffing on how the latest mutant hating politician is so drearily familiar. Nate Grey, the Anti-Villain of the first arc and a Reality Warper with good intentions and a decidedly strange outlook, is entirely aware of it and cites it in the follow-up Bat Family Crossover, Age of X-Man, as why he created the titular reality — he was trying to free the X-Men from their constant self-destructive cycle.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: After the first couple of Friendship Missions directed by the Friendship Map, the mane characters realize that the map calls specific ponies because of their specific talents, abilities, and personalities. When Rarity and Applejack are called to Manehattan to solve a problem, they comment that the problem could have been solved quickly and easily with Twilight's magic, but the map must have good reasons for only summoning the two of them. The result is a community-building experience that wouldn't have happened if the more mundane matters had been fixed with a wave of a magic horn.

    Other/unclear/ZCE 
  • Final Crisis: Briefly discussed in the first issue. One Monitor says to another, "Behold: we monitors who were faceless once... We all have names now, and stories. There are heroes and villains... secrets and lovers." Translation: Nothing happened to us as long as they didn't write us into the stories. Now we're in them, and all hell is breaking loose.
  • John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme: Mocked with a sketch of the Three Little Pigs. The first two pigs have built houses out of straw and sticks respectively owing to narrative convention; the supposedly weak house turning out to have some element that will do the Big Bad Wolf in. The third pig has built a house out of bricks... because that's what houses are made of.
  • The Way of the Metagamer: Narrativium not only exists, but can be manipulated through use of a literal Plot Hole.

    Game mechanics that lets players reroll dice or get bonuses 
  • Dark Heresy and its related games have "fate points". They are refreshed every play session and can be used to gain rerolls or manipulate results in various ways. They can also be permanently burned to allow a doomed player to survive in some contrived fashion. Major enemies intended to be recurring foes get them too.
  • Some roleplaying games grant players the sporadic ability to outright alter the narrative of the game directly, such as by saying that there is some new feature or object in a room that wasn't there before which allows them to escape some difficulty. In some cases they can even make things harder on themselves by adding things working against them, for a bonus later. Perhaps the most extreme version of this is The Extraordinary Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, which is a game which centers entirely around this mechanic. Every player begins with a pool of coins or chips, and each player tells some story of their adventures, based on a question asked to them by one of the other players. The other players, during the story, may interfere by asking questions which add some sort of twist to the story and pushing forward a number of coins in challenge; the person telling the story must then incorporate some means of overcoming the challenge into the story (and thus take the coins) or push forward as many coins of their own and give them to the challenger, informing them that they are mistaken. At the end of the game, the players then must "vote" with their coins for the best stories; thus accumulating more coins gives you more votes at the end.
  • Serenity has acquirable "plot" points that the game master can distribute to players as reward, usually for doing things in a more creative way than expected. They exist out of character, and the players can choose to spend them to force plot conveniences or twists beyond the normal scope of their characters skillsets. For example, if a character who doesn't know machines very well is required to do repairs on an engine or die, a player might spend a plot point, and suddenly their character finds a handy user manual stowed nearby.

So what do we get?

  • A trope-enforcing natural force explicitly exists in the setting — 12/25 — 48%
  • Anthropic principle — the story ignores uninteresting people and follows interesting — – 1/30 — 4%
  • A character is Genre Savvy, without reference to an in-universe trope enforcement — 3/25 — 12%
  • Characters break the fourth wall — 1/25 – 4%
  • Characters engineer some outcome without reference to a narrative — 1/25 – 4%
  • In-universe pattern recognition — 2/25 – 8%
  • Other — 3/25 – 12%

As for the wick check, looking at 50 examples:

Wick Check

    A force exists in-universe that enforces genre conventions 
"Stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way round. Stories... have evolved... the strongest have survived, and they have grown fat... Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow... a thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed... stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats."
— Describing the Theory of Narrative Causality
Every wizard had a tower, even in twenty-first century New York. It was the expected, required thing, and magic had rules and bindings more powerful than aught else. It had to, made as it was out of words and will and belief. Certain things had to be true, or the magic crumbled to dust and nothingness.
— Painted Birds and Shivered Bones, by Kat Howard
  • Literature.Nursery Crime: Cowboy Cop: Jack, particularly in the second book, where his unconventional gambits increase in frequency and he relies on several questionably-legal gambits to solve cases. Downplayed in The Big Over Easy, where Jack is a By-the-Book Cop compared to Chymes, who outright falsifies many of his cases. Throughout the series he relies on unusual allies and narrative intuition more than conventional police tactics. 50

    Plot contrivances and artistic license, in-universe causation not referenced 
  • Artistic License – Cars: Towards the climax of the British movie Doomsday, the main characters find a getaway vehicle that was stored inside an underground bunker... because the plot said so. The car was stored there for at least twenty-seven years. Even if it were fresh off the assembly line, most of the car parts wouldn't work from lack of use. The metal would become stiff and the rubber in the tires would start to rot, among other things. The gasoline in its tank would also have gone bad many years previously.
  • Cast from Hit Points: The effects of this on the magic itself vary as well. A spell cast from HP may work normally, but more often than not the plot demands that the use of life itself must amplify the effect dramatically. If done well, this may represent the caster's Moment of Awesome.
  • Fridge.Yandere Simulator: The background details for all three of the current Befriend/Betray missions become this if you're in any way familiar with certain hentai tropes, compounded by both the Theory of Narrative Causality and how Troperiffic the Game's universe is:
  • YMMV.Magic The Gathering: The Phyrexia storyline from 2021-23 has also gotten this. Previously, Wizards of the Coast has specifically said that Phyrexia would never be able to travel between planes because that would simply make them take over the entire multiverse. Then they started compleating planeswalkers, and then they created the Realmbreaker, rendering that limitation null and void and leaving readers wondering why they don't simply spray every plane with glistening oil and let it run its course, other than that it would violate the Theory of Narrative Causality. Only the Author Can Save Them Now. (The numerous Idiot Ball and Too Dumb to Live moments in the Phyrexia: All Will Be One story have not helped the criticism in the least.)

    A character engineers events to get a certain outcome, in-universe narrative thinking not referenced 

    An in-universe cycle or pattern of behavior exists, in-universe genre conventions not referenced 
  • Graceful Loser: At the end of Age of X-Man, Nate Grey (the titular X-Man) realises that he was wrong about the concept of relationships of any kind being a bad thing and that in fact, connections to other people are part of what make us human. This is thanks to a mixture of slowly dawning realisation, developing hatred of the Mind Rape involved in maintaining the Age of X-Man, and being whacked in the face with the fact that he's Not So Above It All by a subconsciously created copy of his ex-girlfriend, Dani Moonstar. Accordingly, he restores the X-Men's memories and lets them go. Given that he was actually trying to help them (by breaking the endless cycle of conflict they're trapped in) and the X-Men admitted that he had some very good points, while he ended up reforming the AOX after they left ('no secret police' was the first change), it's debatable how much he actually lost.
  • ComicBook.Age Of X Man: Nate discusses this in great detail in the last issue of Marvelous X-Men and in Age of X-Man: Omega, noting how he tried to break the X-Men out of their everlasting cycle of conflict and heartbreak.
  • Headscratchers.Green Lantern: Might be multiple sets from different points in Earth's history coexisting. Seven Soldiers states outright that Earth has had several dozen Camelots throughout its history, with similar persons and events happening each time in a recurring historical motif. Cain and Abel were probably something similar — the first murder in any society or subspecies probably just kept following that motif of two brothers, one a shepherd and one a farmer.

    tl;dr Theory of Narrative Causality

    Other/unclear/no clear pattern 

    ZCE, sinkholes, and insufficient context 

  • A trope-enforcing natural force explicitly exists in the setting — 24/50 — 48%
  • Tropes exist, without reference to in-universe causation — 4/50 — 8%
  • Characters engineer some outcome without reference to narrative conventions — 3/50 — 6%
  • An in-universe pattern of behavior exists, without reference to narrative conventions — 3/50 — 6%
  • Other examples — 6/50 — 12%
  • ZCE, sinkholes, and insufficient context — 10/50 — 20%

In both counts, the primary definition — "an in-universe force exists that enforces genre conventions/narrative laws are treated as a form of physical law" — make up about half of the examples. Other uses, outside of the general accretion of zero-context potholes usually found in these things, includes concepts covered by other meta tropes like the Anthropic Principle, Genre Savvy, and Breaking the Fourth Wall, plus things like "characters engineer specific outcomes to happen", "characters have pattern recognition", "in-universe cycle of behavior", and "paracausal events", "game abilities that let players reroll or alter dice rolls", and "minor characters are not given names that the audience is told about".

The notable thing to me, more so that then frequency of any one kind of misuse, is the commonality and vagueness of misuse. There seems to be some confusion regarding what the trope is actually about, so that, approximately half the time it gets used, it's taken to refer to basically any situation where some metafictional thing happens, a trope is particularly notable to the audience, and/or someone notices or manipulates some in-universe thing or group.

I think that the issue is largely in the name, which favors making a fandom reference over conciseness. I would argue that a rename and a general cleanup effort are probably the best option here. The original thing that prompted me to make this wick check was a repeated cycle of arguments concerning the TLP draft Trope-Enforcing Magic, which strikes me as a clearer and more concise attempt to describe what this trope is trying to be, so I'm half-tempted to just commandeer that as a replacement name.

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