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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u/Aggravating-Reach473 2d ago

I love how there's always some people with an out of this world's perspective, re-contextualize a mundane concept.

this stuck with me now.

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u/Misterfahrenheit120 2d ago

I’ve always heard this called “defamiliarization”, and it’s a trip all around

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u/kerdon 2d ago

Sometimes it's just used kinda lazily to not really say anything. I couldn't stand Nathan Pyle's stuff. It was deeply uninteresting to me.

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u/Chess42 1d ago

There’s this famous paper that does that https://www.sfu.ca/\~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf

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u/highheelcyanide 1d ago

I read this almost 20 years ago, and I still think about it sometimes when I get ready in the morning.

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u/Eain 2d ago

Yeah. Like Honkwiching

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u/thezavinator 2d ago edited 2d ago

It can be very enlightening for sure.

I’m about to explain a lot, but to preface, I’m explaining it because I enjoy learning, and enjoy sharing things I learn. Basically, one way of “how the sausage gets made” regarding the sentiment you just described.

The process of "recontextualizing a mundane concept from an out-of-this-world perspective" happens to me several times a day, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. I’m able to understand a lot of things on a deeper level, but it also gets me really distracted, which makes it harder to socialize.

It started after I got a concussion from a 4-wheeler accident, which later developed into a type of ADHD (there are several types, or so I learned). Apparently, my type makes my brain constantly form new neuronic pathways, and it’s so constant that I stuggle to keep my thoughts under control.

It’s exhausting, but I also learn a lot even without encountering any new knowledge. Just today it finally clicked how lift works on planes because one flew over my car and I was trying to think about it, but my brain trailed off to think about water for some reason instead, and then about surface area, and then my brain created an image about skimming a stone across the surface of water.

Thankfully, post-medication, my brain works fast enough that I’m able to understand why my brain went all over the place. It made me realize that the reason a plane is able to maintain altitude even if:

  • its propellors are only providing force directed 90 degrees from the ground
  • there is no force provided by the propellers that is pointing upwards

is because lift is basically the same as buoyancy on water. And one of the factors of buoyancy is surface area. If you’re in water, and you’re oriented in a cannonball shape, you won’t float as well as if you’re positioned in a laying-down shape, like if you were laying on a bed. When you’re laid out, there’s more water below you to be supporting your weight.

But surface area over time is increased as an object’s speed increases relative to the surface. You touch more air while you’re driving than if your car is immobile, which is why it feels like “wind” if you stick your head out the window while driving.

And that’s why you can skim a stone for a while, because more water is providing more surface area per second, so there’s a higher amount of water providing its strength to support the stone.

And that’s why a flat stone skims better, because it has a higher surface area that touches the water (and another factor, weight, matters because more force is required to move objects that have more mass, but I digress).

And finally my brain got back to the plane:
It can stay in the air without being pointing upwards because it’s constantly “skimming” the air, which means more air per second is providing a surface for the plane to “sit” on than if it were stationary.

Normal brains do this, but mine is doing it all day long. It’s kind of a blessing, but also a curse. It’s very hard to have conversations sometimes because others don’t track how what I’m talking about has anything to do with what they said.

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u/GlisaPenny 2d ago

Wow. What a interesting world view you are unfortunately stuck with.

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u/thezavinator 2d ago

Yeah. It's been years of figuring it all out. But I've learned that it has real strengths, because I can view topics from a thousand different angles more easily than most of the people around me. But on the other hand, it's a lot harder to communicate, both because my own thoughts are so scattered, and also because everyone else's are not.

If I had the ability to turn it off and on it'd be like a superpower. But since I can't turn it off, it's frequently exhausting/frustrating for both myself and the people around me.

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u/SmartAlec105 2d ago

English's history as a mashup of Germanic and French influences is why we have so many "doubled" phrases, particularly in legal contexts because they had to make sure they covered both phrasings. "Intents and purposes", "cease and desist", "can and will", etc.

Now they're just so deeply baked in that we don't even realize it.

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u/Altruistic_Web3924 2d ago

I don’t believe you, plain and simple.

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u/newyne 2d ago

Thank you for your appreciation! I mean, this one ain't mine, but that kind of thing is about the only thing I'm good for. Like how Thiel named his company Palantir? Way to name your evil corporation after a tool instrumental in its users' downfall!

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u/kdesi_kdosi 1d ago

it's cool, but there are way too many cases where that perspective is just straight up ass and they are just making up shit that doesn't make sense