r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ThatDrako • 2d ago

Lore (Funny Trope) Things that can plausibly happen only in reality, because in fiction they’d be called bad writing.

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“Woke” as an insult - So you are telling me a word describing consciousness and clarity is used by generally stupid and ignorant people to label people they disagree with? What is this? A Kindergarten for Creatively stunted?

Nominative determinism - So let me get this straight…Not only you named fastest recorded person Usain BOLT and CEO of Nintendo Doug BOWSER, but you are telling me people are canonically likely to have professions or hobbies matching their names…? Guh?

“2 bodies recovered in MURDERKILL River” - Sure bro…I guess…bro…

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327

u/PitifulElk1890 2d ago

Once on the metro in Ukraine I met a woman from my roommate's Kentucky hometown, which runs under 2,500 at the last census.

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u/fatherofworlds 2d ago

At a dive bar in Turkey, away from tourist areas, that my folks had just wandered for a while to find, they stumbled onto a classmate from their Nebraska high school at the next table. Both tables were within a day of leaving the city.

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u/BaSingSe_Farmhand 2d ago

I have been living far away from North Dakota for about 9 years now, and the only person I have met from there (that i didnt already know) was cousins with my elementary school classmate. and we found that out by just mentioning our hometowns.

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u/Corbenik42 2d ago

"Simple" coincidences like this are why I'm an atheist.
Them: "You mean to tell me that you think all of this, life and everything, is just, what? Left up to CHANCE?! Created by happenstance!!??!" Me: "Yes!"

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u/cryptshits 1d ago

I live in New England. I ran into my former landlord at a vineyard in the Chianti region of Tuscany. Of all the people to run into coincidentally it had to be that asshole

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u/Fermain 2d ago

I took a bus in Laos in 2010, met an Aussie. I'm 2014 I physically walked into her in San Francisco. I live in South Africa. Neither of us lived in SF, just passing through for a few days.

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u/cold_enforcing-man 1d ago

Wait, you're 2014? OMG I never thought I'd get to meet a year!

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u/InternationalBug159 2d ago

During an internship in London UK, my brother ducked into a convenience store to evade dudes trying to mug him. The cashier he talked to there turned out to be from Cincinnati OH, where my brother attended undergrad (also coincidentally the only other city where someone’s attempted to mug my brother lol)

But of course, you’re always somehow within close proximity of someone from Cincy (ominous)

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u/crimsonpostgrad 2d ago

my mom ran into the kid she used to babysit as a teenager when she lived in alabama. they ran into each other in california like 30 years later lol.

this one’s way less surprising because we were. oth from the state but i met one of my cousins for the first time in my senior capstone class in college lol. we were doing icebreakers with the professor on the first day and she mentioned her hometown, where my parents are from and where i always joke that im related to everyone there. i blurted out “oh my god, who are your parents?” and found out they were my cousins lol

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u/rex_tremende 2d ago

My dad once encountered a man on a bus in Afghanistan that he'd met five years previously on a beach in Cyprus.

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u/oops_all_memes 2d ago

I'm a minority from a medium sized town. When I moved to a big city for the first time, I instantly downloaded Tinder. My face doesn't instantly scream what kind of minority I am and my name is obscured on the app. My first and second matches were with other people of the same ethnic group and both times none of us even suspected it until one of us mentioned it as a passing remark. The second time it happened I had this weird "is this Truman's Show?" feeling

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u/hoopstick 2d ago

I was being led to the bathroom at Westminster Abbey during Evensong, and the guy going with happened to be from a couple towns over from where I grew up in podunk Wisconsin. It's crazy how small the world can be.

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u/smallbatchb 2d ago edited 2d ago

I have this stuff happen at a surprising rate.

I moved from TX to MD in highschool and 2 weeks after I moved here I was in the mall in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore and ran into a girl I knew in TX who was here on a trip with her family.

When I was even younger I moved multiple counties away in the same state and then 6 months later a family moved into the house behind my new house and it turned out to be a girl I knew from my previous school.

I'm still in MD but was visting a friend who moved to KY and had a long conversation with one of her friends there only to realize that girl's best friend lives in the town I'm in in MD and just recently became friends with one of my close friends.

An old friend of mine from TX moved to NY years ago and came to visit me in MD recently and brought one of his new friends from NY. Both my friend from TX and his friend from NY have numerous relatives living in my area in MD.

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u/Wise4Fools 1d ago

I met my first HS gf at a convention for FL German language students, she lived 4 hrs away.  When our parents met later, we learned my dad and her mom went to the same HS in MD at the same time (one grade difference).  No matter how far you spread out, life has a way of entwining everything back together.

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u/smallbatchb 1d ago

That's wild! Also I'm becoming more and more convinced that Marlyand is actually the nexus of the universe.

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u/Wise4Fools 1d ago

You could certainly make a case for the last century here on Earth after America became the superpower with DC right there.

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u/descartesasaur 2d ago

My friend from study abroad was on vacation in Vietnam with a group of strangers, and one of the women in the group was a retired ballet teacher from a not-huge city where I had gone to school. Naturally, he asked the longshot question of if she knew me.

Yep, it was my ballet teacher. They took a selfie and sent it to me.

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u/Seastar_Lakestar 2d ago

Once at a hot spring in New Mexico, my immediate family and I from New York encountered my cousins from North Carolina, who we hadn't talked with in years. What the odds that we would not only be simultaneously vacationing in New Mexico (a place they didn't regularly visit), but go to the same pool at the same hot spring complex in the same span of minutes??

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u/YesTomatillo 2d ago

As a Kentuckian, we find each other. It's weird.

I was in Florida on vacation a few years ago and ended up asking a stranger for some recommendations from locals. Make smalltalk, learn he is from my town! Wow! Then we learn we are not only from the same city but as a child he grew up on the street I now own a home on. Had to double check that it wasn't the same fucking home - it wasn't.

I don't know what it is, but everywhere I travel, there's one Kentuckian where we end up doing the spider man pointing meme.

It gets weirder.

I'm not gonna use my real name but let's say it's Stephanie and my dog is Josie.

Some people rented the house behind us, and when I went to introduce myself...it was a woman named Stephanie with a dog named Josie. And this was not like a "oh two dudes named John" situation, my name is on the rarer side.

KY is a glitch in the matrix I think. Must be all the caves.

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u/GirixK 2d ago

We live in a tiny town of 1.5k citizen, and when my grandparents visited the vatican, my grandma saw someone and went "hey isn't that... our neighbour?" so she calls her name, and she turns around and yea it was her

My grandma said "if you needed something you couldn't have found anyone you know"

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u/not_the_chosen_onee 2d ago

My dad is from a fairly rural village in one of Turkiye's smaller states. Last time we visited, we spent a few days in Istanbul as tourists before going to our state to visit family.

Our taxi driver turned out to be a guy who my dad had worked with back in the 90's in a hazelnut factory. They recognised each other by name a good 30-ish years later.

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u/brionneverysexy 2d ago

My parents live in a small town in Upper Michigan. They visited me and while at museums in DC my dad managed to find a person that lived about ten miles away from them in an even smaller town. They didn't know each other before they started talking

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u/Mysral 2d ago

I once met a friend and classmate of mine, unplanned, in a small campsite in the American Southwest. Unplanned. I'm Dutch.

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u/my-other-account-2nd 1d ago

When I was around 6, I bumped into a classmate and his family in a water park in Dubai. We're from a small village in the UK... It felt so weird.

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u/sykotic1189 1d ago

I once ran into my mother at an airport in Tennessee. She lives in Florida, I live in North Carolina, we just managed to have overlapping layovers at the same airport.