The Higurashi example under Anime&Manga is not correct. Keiichi first had an idea of comitting a murder, and after that he had a discussion about mysteries with his mother. It inspired him how to commit the murder to not get arrested, but he already wanted and was determined to do it.
Edited by Dacjan90
Removed the following two paragraphs from the trope description because they're just lists of examples of the trope. Those go in the examples section. Putting them into the trope description just bloats the already overlong trope description.
For example, the whole premise of Slumdog Millionaire is about a character able to get on a TV quiz show and do surprisingly well, to the point that the show itself becomes Serious Business. For House to happen, Dr. Gregory House must be able to keep his job as a genius diagnostician despite being a major Jerkass with a drug problem.note You can't have Snakes on a Plane without somebody smuggling live snakes onto a plane somehow. It's easy to argue that the Eagles could have just flown the Fellowship to Mount Doom; Tolkien himself immediately applied the Anthropic principle before bothering to offer any in-universe suggestions as to why they couldn't.
The list goes on — for a Mazinger Z or Gundam series to happen, giant mecha must be possible to build, power, and pilot. And you cannot (to the frustration of many physicists and to the inspiration of many others) have a Space Opera without Faster-Than-Light Travel... and the resultant Cool Starships must have people on them (even if it's just because suitable machines can't be trusted) because it's hard to tell entertaining stories about unmanned probes.note For an Adventure Game or RPG to happen, there must be someone whom the player can guide through the Sorting Algorithm Of Villain Threat and eventually beat up the Big Bad. And in all of the above cases, if Adventures of those types can be had regularly, it is an Adventure-Friendly World.
The Lord of the Rings example at the bottom of the page doesn't belong on it: 'the huge birds could not have flown into a heavily guarded, undestroyed Mordor' is a sufficient explanation for why this could not have happened. Therefore it is not just something which conveniently did not happen for plot purposes, no matter how many people don't realise as such.
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The "giant birds into Mordor" thing comes up fairly frequently in forum discussions. That said, I don't recall the works indicating in any way that they wouldn't be able to get across the Ephel Dúath. So I oppose removal.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
The Summer King
The Summer King
"This scenario is actually the one currently favoured by a lot of physicists, since String Theory (apparently) requires the existence of something like 10 to the power of 500 different sets of physical laws. A similar argument explains why we find ourselves born onto the relatively congenial surface of a planet, rather than inside a star or deep space. (Looked at that way, it starts to seem less like rocket science and more like "and?")"
This article is particularly awful and fails to account that the Anthropic Principle is the subject of significant criticism. In addition, it attempts an "argument from design" and implies supernatural agency as responsible for the creation of the universe. As an instance of bias it should be struck from the wiki.
Additionally, what is the point of having examples here?
Edited by 121.45.13.251
Isn't the Monkey Island example (and possibly the others in that tree) just an artifact of the game's Framing Device? The issue with Guybrush dying isn't that it would be an uninteresting story, it's that he literally wouldn't be there to tell Elaine what had happened. Basically it's not so much that there would be no story (you can, after all, die perfectly well in Monkey Island 1) but that the framing device set up at the begining of the game wouldn't work.
Isn't this trope basically just "premise"? I don't see the difference.
I get why Koizumi's quote is at the top of the page - he's directly discussing the anthropic principle - but it really needs to be taken down. It's backwards. It isn't "humans observe, therefore the universe exists", it's "the universe exists (in the way it does), therefore humans can be around to observe". What makes it worse is that right after that quote he brings up the very problem that the anthropic principle solves, namely why things apear to be perfect for human life.
The reason I'm not taking it down myself right now is that don't have another relevant (and more accurate) quote to replace it with. Any ideas?
You gotta get yourself some marble columns
I don't think this really belongs on the page itself, but there was a piece in Cracked towards the end of 2010 about why a zombie apocalypse is impossible, and I remember thinking "well, zombies are already impossible, so there's no reason to assume whatever phlebotinum allows them the exist in the first place won't allow them to exist despite whatever."
The child is father to the man —Oedipus
I'm wondering if it might be worth amending the page instruction from:
to just:
Since the latter just seems to be begging for everyone reading the page to think "Well, my favourite show demonstrates it particularly well!" even if it doesn't.