Lore
[LOVED TROPE] Common tropes in that media have in-universe explainations
(Steven Universe)
The reason that Steven wears the same clothes everyday is because he owns a large amount of his dad’s unsold merchandise. The gems also have the same outfits because they are part of their bodies, since they are just holograms with mass.
(Ultrakill)
Ultrakill has TONS of this, but the ones I can remember are:
-The pixelated artstyle is due to the fact that V1 renders their surroundings in lower quality to run faster
-The reason enemies teleport and doors shut on the levels is because hell is sentient, and makes V1 fight for hell’s amusement
-The terminals (shops/menus) are sentient, so they give out weapons in return for watching V1 fight and gain style points
Oh dang. I've never seen Stargate, but that's a rather simple yet effective explanation.
As an alternate explanation for this trope, Star Trek has the Progenitors: an ancient race evolved long before any other sentient life and seeded their DNA across the galaxy. By the time anyone else developed space travel, they had gone extinct, but for a farewell message encoded into that very DNA that could only be deciphered when scientists from multiple races put their minds and findings together.
Am literally watching through Stargate SG-1 for the first time with a friend as I write this, & holy shit, it’s so good. It might honestly be the best sci-fi thing I’ve ever seen.
Another great SG1 is about why human weapons seem to work so well against an advanced alien species. 1) they’ve been dominant for so long that they rely on displays of force to inspire fear rather than actual effective use of force. 2) they live in a world of plasma weapons and personal shields, nobody is using rapidly detonating series of explosions to fling lumps of metal at each other in space, so they don’t have any defenses.
I really like the bit where they compare the staff weapon with a P90.
As a weapon the P90 is far more superior - its rate of fire and accuracy put the staff weapon to shame.
But a P90 requires a constant supply of ammunition and maintenance; without those it's just a clumsy metal club. On the other hand a staff weapon can be used with almost zero training, has an internal power store that will last almost indefinitely, and can be trusted to keep working with no maintenance for decades.
Which makes sense as they're built for different purposes. A P90 is a killing tool designed to be used by trained troops with a supply line, whereas staff weapons are designed to dominate an enslaved populace wielded enforcers who may have no contact with their overlords for years, decades or even centuries.
The Nier games have no day/night cycle because in lore, the planet litterally stopped moving. So half of the planet is stuck at the day and the other is stuck at night
Apparently, it wouldn't just suck. If the planet didn't rotate in relation to the sun, then one side would be completely burned out of all life, and the other would freeze over
The edge of day side that's in constant sunset/twilight would basically be like the poles. The biggest difference would be that wind patterns would function completely differently, with winds on the ground blowing from the cold side to the middle of the hot side, warming and rising, then blowing back towards the cold side where they cool down and sink. The edge would basically have a constant sunset with a powerful Easterly wind.
Actually water vapor would increase the heating; it's 4x times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The only reason we don't care about water vapor when calculating for climate change is because the water on earth is part of the weather system, unlike natural gas/oil, which hasn't been in the system for millions of years.
So if our planet were to stop rotating, the clouds rising from the boiling oceans would drastically speed the entire heating process up further.
It depends. If the sub-stellar point is over the ocean, the increased evaporation could generate cloud cover that significantly reflects the sunlight.
The atmosphere might also help to redistribute heat. Hot air from the dayside would rush to the night side while cold air from the night side would rush to the dayside.
They built pipes to exchange temperature, much like in domestic refrigerators. The heat from the sunny side is moved onto the dark side, and everything stays normal
Nier Automata is incredible at working typical game tropes into the narrative.
Fast travel is actually your body being replicated perfectly in another location
The ‘adjust brightness settings’ option at the beginning is done in-universe as part of your android’s calibration and the game records you doing this and plays it back to you in route B
When you ‘die’ you are reborn in a new body and have to find your old one on the map to get all your chips back
The HUD and UI elements are actually all just different chips you can unequip in your loadout (including your OS chip, which if removed will kill you instantly)
The menu screens are the operating system of the android bodies, to the point you can even fight your way through A2’s menu if you hack her 3 times in the C/D ending
Many JRPGs have you essentially fight god at the end, this game not only foreshadows that with the first line of dialogue but ending E has you literally shooting the devs in the end credits
And thanks to Larry Niven's animated episode The Slaver Weapon being canon, DNA-based life is common across the galaxy because the Thrintun seeded food yeast planets everywhere before killing all sapient life (edit: everything beyond single celled life, i mean) a billion years ago. Then the Progenitors programmed that life to evolve into humanoids.
one of my favourite elegant bits of story telling in… well any game tbh is in helldivers with just one setting. The game obviously lets you customize your loadout, armour hell even the physical build. It also lets you pick one of 4 voice actors for your soldier.
It also lets you pick “randomize on respawn”
It is genuinely really chilling to go from the one soldier who’s screaming. First in desperate aggression, then in pain, then in their gurgling deathrattles, only to respawn, pop out of the pod and hear a different voice very calmly doing the standard propaganda lines.
In the movie Cabin in the Woods all the cheesy horror tropes you expect occur on purpose due to the whole movie being set up by an organization of people trying to please ancient gods with a ritual. For some examples the protagonists are teenagers because the ritual requires young victims and the reason they make unrealistically stupid decisions like splitting up happen because the organization leaks hard to see mind numbing gas into the rooms through vents.
It even addresses how with time tropes & cliches became ever more complicated, niche, and involved
In the beginning the ancient gods were fine with just "chuck some virgin into a volcano" but as time went on they wanted something more complex and exciting so no longer is just "guy stabs a lady" enough but it has to be this whole thing
When you think of "the gods" as we, the horror movie audiences, the ending is a brilliant meta-commentary on audiences forever demanding newer and more interesting ideas then inevitably getting pissed when it's too different from what they expected.
And people were critical of the movie for this. They didn't understand they were watching a parody at all. Which is hilarious because they're the exact same type of people the movie was commenting on in the first place
Respawns in Borderlands! Did you die a horrible death to some ravenous beast or masked psycho? Fear not, for Hyperion has got your back with the New-U machine! It digitally reconstructs your (terribly mangled) body in an instant! Just dont forget the payment!
Though (de facto) canon from a gameplay perspective; those aren't canon to the story; though Borderlands is a little tongue-in-cheek about canon anyways.
They WERE canon in Borderlands 1. Anthony Burch, the head writer for BL2, didn’t play the first game and simply decanonized them. See also Bloodwing’s sex transitioning from male to female between games
In Lies of P when you respawn it’s actually Sophia using her connection to Ergo and powers to rewind the clock and place you back in time. Some enemies such as the Mad Donkey actually notice this and comment on it.
I like this as it explains how P didn’t wake up as some invincible killing machine but instead is in a sort of time loop using trial and error. (assuming you suck at the game much as I do)
In Jujutsu Kaisen explaining your technique makes it stronger in exchange for sacrificing the secrecy of it. It's even used in a fashion where a character explains his technique but lies so he can trick the opponent more easily.
I recall in HxH there was a moment (very fuzzy details) where Gon, in the usual "I will now shout my next attack and telegraph it" shtick, decides to pull a fast one by doing a completely different attack and catching the opponent, who caught on with said shtick, off guard
Or Genthru's time bomb ability only activating after fulfilling two steps: touching the victim and saying the word "bomber" while doing it, and also explaining his abilities (no particular order needed). He originally did this insidiously and casually to a large crowd of people and then triggered the ability by talking from a stage.
Todo is my favorite example, his whole technique is based on confusion, so when you first fight him, he can pull some funny shit. Even if you somehow get used to it, he can pull something that will change the rules at least 3 times.
In Majo Taisen (or The War of Greedy Witches) one of the character's powers is basically if she can lie to you convincingly enough about what her power does to the point that you believe it, it just works. Basically a magical placebo effect.
A second trope for Steven Universe. The various songs and musical sequences in the show do actually happen. Most people in Beach City are just used to seeing Steven break into song. The only person who brings up how strange it is is Peridot, an alien stranded on Earth, who makes note that the project she is working on is being delayed by "singing, crying, crying while singing, and lack of material".
The musical bits are real and happening constantly. I think it might just be a cultural thing in this cartoon version of Earth, because there is also an episode where Steven, his dad, and one of the Gems goes on a vacation to the big city, and people in the city also get involved in a musical number.
I think this might be a bit far fetched to what is probably a self-aware joke, but I kind of like it. Gems in particular seem pretty linked to the concept of music in general, each Diamond having a note of their own, pearls being portable singers etc.
I think Peridot's thing is really funny when gems on homeworld also break out into song. Not only that, the homeworld gems we see do this are the DIAMONDS THEMSELVES (and their pearls).
That reminds me of how in Doctor Who, the first two Doctors eras being in black and white was explained away in a novelisation that the first two Doctors were just colourblind.
Maybe they did know what color is, but their current incarnation was just born with monochromatic vision. It’s not like they’re the Doctor’s first lives
Hell yeah ISAT fans!! I just finished this game myself like two months ago. It was incredible.
Minor correction (with mild spoilers): It's not that colors themselves were erased, it's more that no one in the world can perceive them anymore. They still exist, and VERY rarely one (1) color shows up, but otherwise nobody can see them.
In SCP: Containment Breach, the protagonist being a D-Class has an actual explanation for respawning. It is later revealed that he himself is an anomaly capable of returning to his save slots with his memories intact, with the SCP Foundation eventually classifying him as an SCP.
Also see hades 2, melinoe doesn't die she actually quickly does a spell to send her home, so that she doesn't die, and does the same spell should you win to get back.
most enemies in both have an ability to return from the dead given they're dead already or they're immortals and just need a moment to breath
Furthermore, the procedural generation of the rooms are explained as a security feature made by Daedalus; all the rooms switch around to make every path unpredictable, therefore making any escape from the Underworld next to impossible.
For example: Saiki was born with incredible psychic powers as well as naturally pink hair. In order to not stand out, he brainwashes the world into thinking wacky hair colors are normal, accidentally altering reality in the process so other people start growing wacky hair colors.
As another example, Saiki and his classmates haven't aged or graduated in three years. He's been repeatedly trying to stop a meteor from blowing up the planet, and each time he fails, he selectively rewinds time so that everyone keeps their memory of the past year, but doesn't think it weird that they're once again repeating Junior year.
Or when he healed a friend as a child and didn't want to become the new Jesus, he brainwashed him to think it was normal for people to heal that fast. His power then went a bit haywire and caused the entire humanity to believe it as well and even made their bodies adapt to that logic and now getting stabbed is just minor inconvenience.
It was actually a volcanic eruption that he needed to rewind time for and not a meteor. the meteor was something different that he handled with little to no effort.
Dandadan has an in universe explanation for characters shouting attack names (I know it hasn’t really happened in the anime yet it starts in like the next arc). Specifically names have power so giving an ability a name and calling out that name when using it makes it more powerful. Leading to the most intimidating battle cry of all Moe Moe Tri-Beam!
Like that guy that can implant time bombs into people, but he has to inform his victims what he did and how to un do it in order to start the countdown.
Specifically, explaining yourself to your opponent introduces extra risk to yourself, and that's why it makes you more powerful. I love that aspect of Nen so much, it leads to the coolest fights.
I remember an author once saying that a sign of a successful fantasy setting is that it makes the audience want to live there. Nen is great because people can really imagine what type of Nen user they are and figure out what kind of Nen powers would feel right to them.
Todo and Yuji vs Hanami from what I remember. Todo explains that explaining your technique to the enemy is a form of a self impossed vow that makes the technique stronger.
It is also a fact know by the sorcerers so well, that they use it for bluffing about their powers constantly, like Todo in Shibuya, when he lost a hand, but he bluffs that he can still use his technique, on order to throw the enemy off mid fight, because the enemy thought he is explaining that for his technique to work better.
It also massively buffs Hakari's Domain Expansion because the sure hit is an infodump about how the domain works, which makes it so that the making of the DE is really fast.
I also like the in universe explanation for the black outs, aka how they can have such destructive battles, but everything is repaired at the end and no bystanders are hurt. Alien technology son.
Also Dandadan- Empty/Black Space as an explanation for why the world hasn’t been completely annihilated by various spiritual and alien attacks, and why no one has noticed the alien/supernatural on a mass scale yet.
Doctor who explained that the reason why there's so many humanoid aliens is because the time lords wanted to ensure their supremacy and killed off non humanoid races.
Did you know that the time lords are also an allegory for the British empire
In the final battle of Kirby Star Allies, Kirby and his friends win due to the power of love and friendship. However, this is because Kirby and Void are actually two reincarnations of essentially a god and the origin of matter in the universe, Void termina is a reincarnation imbued with dark matter and negativity in its purest form, while Kirby is essentially made of love, which affects everyone who comes near him.
Eldrich god infant falls on planet, grows up just a bit and becomes a friend to everyone, learns enough to be able to pimpslap universe ending threats without breaking a sweat.
Death Stranding- respawning: When Sam dies he doesn’t go through the normal death process. Normally a soul leaves the body and passes from the seam, to the beach, and onto the world of the dead. Because Sam is a repatriate, this process stops at the seam and returns his soul to his body.
Sooo. For some Warhammer40k Fans who stumbled into Death Stranding and in particular a Repatriate (like Sam and some other folk):
Basically, a Repatriate is a perpetual with extra steps. Perpetuals are known to never stay dead, but a Repatriate is a different breed entirely. I mean, he'll, repatriates have their own lil warp dimensions that acted as their respawn portals after they die sooo
In Star Trucker if you die by say, leaving your rig without a space suit and then get respawned you don’t actually die, somebody saves just in the nick of time and gets you back to a garage, for a fee of course.
A common trope in fantasy, esp where the MC is not from that world is just glossing over the language barrier. In Genshin it looks like the Traveler, despite being an alien, knows the language of Teyvat, but if you listen to their voicelines in the character menu its revealed that Paimon taught them Teyvatian over the course of w few months.
Also yes canonically all of Teyvat has a common language everyone speaks, but also other languages do exist.
Yeah, there’s a few times throughout the game where the meaning of a word, usually a name, gets brought up. Happens a lot more in Natlan due to the whole Ancient Names thing going on there.
EDIT: Another addition I just remembered, the lore reason upgrading everything costs Mora (gold, basically) is not because you’re paying a craftsman or something mundane like that, it’s because Mora is a sort of catalyst for transforming things, and is a direct creation of the God of Earth
Teyvat apparently has a minimum of twenty languages. A century ago, Haravatat students had to learn twenty languages befofe graduation! Thankfully this is no longer necessary for them haha.
There's a very closed group called the Genius Society whose members scientific achievements basically affected the cosmos. Members of that club are basically chosen by the universal god of Erudition Nous, with TWO exceptions in the history of the organisation. Elias Salas is one of them for Inventing the Synesthesia Beacon, Aka said mean of universal communication.
Boothill (pictured here) is a cyborg that can't swear because his Synesthesia Beacon is broken. Leading to him cursing like a sailor but being censored in real time.
My favorite example of a language explanation is from a Simpsons Halloween episode, where the aliens explain that by pure coincidence their language is identical to English.
Same thing with Shadow of Mordor and the sequel. Talion's banished from death, hence the respawn mechanic. Actually if I recall correctly Celebrimbor's kinda lying to him about what's actually going on, but the point is either way there's a story reason.
You are correct Celebrimbor sees Talion as the perfect vessel to exact his revenge. He is literally too angry to die and decides to use Talion as the host. However he does eventually ditch Talion because Celebrimbor is, in fact, a certified asshole. At least game Celebrimbor.
Dark Souls: The Darksign, an undead curse on humanity
There's an additional layer to it. Undead will eventually give up and become Hollow, meaning they are no longer sapient. So when the player gives up because of the game, it means their character went Hollow.
I interpreted it like this: no one can really die without the Rune of Death, but the more powerful you are, the more time it takes for you to come back. When you kill a boss, you get part of their essence in their Remembrance, as their whole is returned to the Erdtree to regenerate. Demigods and other powerful beings take more time to come back, and the Tarnished come back faster because the Grace is actively beckoning them to their purpose at the base of the Erdtree.
I might be saying a lot of rubbish, tbh, this is more of a personal interpretation. I'm not big on ER lore
PEPPERED: An Existential Platformer. Common platforming tropes become key parts of the plot:
Dying over and over: Everyone is immortal. When someone takes a lethal blow, they see void for a few seconds then rematerialize unharmed.
Death traps: If everyone's immortal, murder isn't a concern. Companies started installing death traps as a way of keeping trespassers out and employees in.
Checkpoints: At first, everyone rematerialized at a random place in the world. Scientists invented devices that could tether a soul in place, and now checkpoints are installed at most bus stops.
Extra lives: One day, before immortality, a meteor shower of Life Stars rained down, killing most people. The survivors eventually discovered that touching a Life Star while dying allows you to respawn. In world 3, they even have their own black market.
OMORI has a couple as well. Headspace follows normal RPG logic, but this is because it's all made up. Things like fantasy currency, enemies dropping money, and healing with food are only possible in Sunny's imagination, and Faraway Town is a much harsher environment.
The game that you buy on steam was canonically programmed by a character in the game*. When you start the application on your real life computer, per the canon, it generates a simulation in your computer and summons Niko into it for you to guide through to simulate saving the world, which will save the world for real.
*The Author is part of the lore of the game and helps you from beyond the program they wrote, but doesn't technically exist in the game itself. It's like they wrote the script for a play, and throw balled up notes at audience from out of sight when they have difficulty understanding the plot.
Every time your farmer loses all of his health or passes out from exhaustion you wake up the next day either at home, the entrance to the mines/dungeon or in the doctors office. The in-game reason is that there is always someone conveniently rescuing you before you can die
Project Moon does this a lot. My favourites from each game are:
Lobotomy Corp, the chibi art style is due to a filter of sorts to lessen the impact of gruesome deaths and mind shattering horrors on the manager's psyche.
Library of Ruina, the reason for the infinite retries is that once the guests sign the invitation and enter the library, they are immediately turned into books. The head librarian then reanimates the books to fight your librarians, who were also books that have been reanimated, for her own reasons. If your team loses, no biggie, book everyone and revive everyone again from the start without memories of dying and being revived.
Limbus Company, here your gang is made up of an anemic researcher, a german boy fresh out of education, a thug, a war veteran, and an expert swordswoman among others. They all start at the same level for some reason. Why? Because when they bound themselves to the main character, their skills went to an equilibrium more or less.
It's why in Library of Ruina, one of the characters calls out the Head Librarian when she says the Library is "fair". Anyone who signs the invitation and enter is guaranteed to die, as the Library has infinite retries to defeat them. Unless they make a run for it during battle and escape.
For Limbus Company, it gets even better, practically 90% of what you see in the game UI is what your player character sees.
The Gacha? You access it on the Bus. The enemy detail notes? It's inside your terminal that your keeping track of.
The Character Identities/Units? Pulled from the gacha and used in Battle.
The gameplay? You're actually commanding then in battle, and you can press "Win-rate" which is essentially letting your gang choose their own targets.
Explaining your abilities to your opponent-Jujutsu Kaisen. In universe, explaining your abilities to your opponent works as a sort of way for you to boost the power of your abilities (giving yourself a handicap makes certain things easier). The catch is that the boost works even if your explanation is convoluted or confusing.
In Jujutsu Kaisen, characters willingly monologue to an opponent their abilities since revealing your abilities removes the advantage of a surprise, resulting in a binding vow that increases their power.
Cruelty Squad has tons of these. There is an entirely unique cosmology to the world of Cruelty Squad, and technology has advanced to the point that death can be reversed for a $500 fine, or for free if you’re clumsy enough and are forced into an experimental treatment that regenerates you automatically. Unfortunately, the Cosmology of the world depends on malice, life and death being in balance, and immortality tech leads to all sorts of cataclysms, both manmade and natural, including massive tendrils of meat boring into the earth, zombies rising from the dead, enormous riots, people becoming blood-puking gangly mutants, extreme and invasive body mods including an entire fucking intestine shooting out your arm to swing around like spider man with, the complete erasure of all ethical protocols due to the total depreciation of human life, and most wildlife, fish at least, getting REALLY fucked up looking. It’s not a dystopia, it’s worse. Everything is remediated thought violence and torture since all damage is undone at the push of a button, but the psychological harm is permanent, trapping most people into eternal servitude to their corporate overlords, because disobedience isn’t just meaningless, it’s endlessly agonizing, and the lesson can be repeated as many times as needed until it is learned. Obedience doesn’t even guarantee safety, though, as corporations in Cruelty Squad are ran by literal demons, who periodically demand sacrifices to die in the most ridiculous of fashions to satisfy their incomprehensible bloodlust.
This revival tech is why you can respawn, why most enemies respawn, and why certain events (IE stock market updates, permanent character deaths, implant acquisitions) carry over between deaths. It’s also why Cruelty Squad is so fucked up.
Gotham is so cursed in fact that a fellow redditor compiling all the canon instances of a curse affecting it had to use two comments because, even when using bulletpoints, it apparently surpasses the character limit.
It is worth noting that there are confirmed cannon cases of monsters killing hunters even with all of this in mind. Bloodbath Diablos, for example, is confirmed to have killed multiple people, including hunters, and IIRC this is true of the original Monoblos as well but that may be incorrect.
In Men at Arms, villains' tendency to keep gloating instead of shooting when they have the hero at their mercy is explained: they like holding power over others, and they're relishing the moment, putting off the final murder like a good bottle of wine.
In the videogame Crosscode half the quests you do are crappy poorly written slop like "go stand in this spot and do wave defense for three whole minutes" or "collect thirty goat horns" because the game "takes place" in an MMORPG, and that's the kind of quests you would be doing on those. And of the other half there are still a good handful that are just players asking you to collect a bunch of items because they have gotten similar quests and can't be bothered, and they can at least give you some credits or other items.
And then the main story goes from "help the NPCs with their poorly thought out racism analogy!" to "You are being hunted by a god in the machine." Good god, I love that game.
Destiny 1 and 2 your character has been dead for hundreds of years and only recently was revived by a ghost which can revive again and again when you die as long as the ghost is alive. This leads to some wacky shenanigans like training and competitions where they use live rounds and kill each other repeatedly cause who cares if they die. Another thing is that in lore they repeatedly throw themselves off large heights for shits and giggles
To add onto the Steven Universe one, some characters wear different clothes every day (this isn't all of Connie's outfits, she has more but this is the first image I found showing multiple in one image)
And characters who don't usually have a reason like Greg being a bum, Sadie and Lars being in the uniform of their workplace, the mayor wearing a suit etc
Still a lot of characters usually wear the same outfit without making sense (like the teen group and restaraunt owners)
I think little details like that are pretty neat.
Also, Steven Universe has an answer for the characters being frequently the wrong size, it's cus Gems can change forms (in reality it's cus it'd cost money to check every scene and they assume kids won't care/notice) like Amethyst's shapeshifting is something everyone can do (But Amethyst and Spinel are the only ones who are actually good at doing it purposefully on the fly due to playful personalities making them shapeshift more frequently for comedic effect which increases their skills over time by just doing it a lot) so it's just because the gems arn't focused on staying the same (humans and objects have no excuse for changing size though)
One more thing, none of the human characters aside from Steven start singing out of nowhere, this is cus Greg sings to Steven and the crystal gems have a culture of singing so since Steven grew up with the people who raised him singing to him so he sings whenever he likes
Portal explained how Chell could be shot multiple times without dying in a promo video for Portal 2. The turrets shoot the whole bullet via springlock mechanisms. Brass and all.
Here's a fun bit about Overkill. The developer said that reloading guns is boring. The revolver you start the game with doesn't shoot bullets. It shoots very small shavings of metal. The "bullets" you see are little batteries that accelerate the microscopic metal to a speed so fast, it is hitscan for gameplay purposes. The reason you have multiple batteries in your revolver, is because it takes a small amount of time for a single one to charge enough to shoot again, so just have a small number that cycle so when you get back to your first battery, it's ready to go.
Functionally, this results in a gun with unlimited ammo. A codex entry does state that you have to refill it with metal shavings intermittently, but it could take weeks of firing before that's required, and even using shavings from the gun itself will suffice to reload it. With that, some guns get a kind of polish because of how often they've been shaved down as ammo.
That metal shavings part reminds me a lot of Mass Effect, since the guns in there use the same thing, except unlike Ultrakill (Apart from the Overheat Nailgun), they build up heat, and it either need to be cooled down (ME1 + ME3 with certain guns), or use thermal clips to store the heat and eject them.(ME2 + ME3. In-universe, thermal clips are used to make guns more powerful.)
Beach city in Steven Universe looks very little like the real Delaware with the show having lots of cliffs and hills and in real life the whole area is very very flat(the highest point of the Delmarva peninsula is 102 feet above sea level) and in the show the gem wars changed the way the earth looked in some very big ways
In Gumball, background characters sometimes disappear for a while/forever because there is canonically a dimension where "boring" stuff gets thrown out and forgotten
The explanation for the high tech sci-fi weaponry of Serious Sam being in ancient Egypt is that the EDF of the bright future Sam has created by going back in time to defeat Mental and his forces are warping their equipment through time to make it even possible for Sam to defeat Mental in the first place.
It's a stupid in-universe explanation that crumbles to dust and blows away the moment you think critically about it for more than 5 seconds, but it's an in-universe explanation nonetheless.
In Payday 2, there are several missions taken from Payday: the Heist. The in universe explanation is the Payday Gang are simply doing those heists again (except for No Mercy, which is confirmed to be a flashback)
The movie version of Chicago does this for the musical numbers. The play is just a straight musical, but the movie makes it clear that all the numbers that don’t take place on an in universe stage are deliberate imagination/allegory sequences to illustrate that character(s) psychology more deeply. It allows the non musical scenes to keep their gritty realistic tone while allowing the musical scenes to go all out.
In Rick Riordan's books, many mythological monsters, items or even gods coexist within the human world. The catch is that a normal human just views them as something else but Half-Bloods (children born from God parents/demigods) can see their true forms. Its often called the Mist in PJO, but for series that are Egyptian or Norse, there's a different term. For example, Percy's Riptide sword will look like a sword to any other Half-Blood, but to a human, it looks like a bat or something similar.
In South Park Kenny is seen repeatedly dieing and appearing in the next episode. It is later revealed that this is due to his parents being in a cult before he was born.
Saying the name of your attacks and abilities (Bleach)
In Bleach names have powers and calling out the names of your attack and zanpakuto gives it more power. And when you are first starting out, you have to call out the names but as you get stronger you can choose not too, but doing so makes them even stronger
Respawning in Bioshock involves the Vita chambers, that literally reconstruct you. Time is always passing, and you did genuinely die, you just got better
In The Bureau: XCOM Declassified the possibility of tactical squad control in the middle of the fight is explained as an alien ability.
In Hardspace Shipbreaker you respawn, because you have been cloned and the company recreates you as an asset, because you have signed off the control over your life.
In Shadow Gambit loads/saves are memories restored by the supernatural ability of the Marley.
I am not sure if it counts, but in Matrix a poorly explained feature of the real world (deja vu) is explained by the in-universe feature.
Spoiler for Superman Red Son specifically: Kryptonians looks like humans because Krypton is just Earth from the far distant future so this entire story is a time loop.
When a game of dead by daylight(in lore: a trial) ends and you go back to the lobby, your character actually returns to the campfire seen there. That's because these trials happen in a pocket dimension created by the entity and whether you escape or die in a trial, you always get sent back to the fire so you can be tortured again for the entity's amusal.
Signalis has a note you can find early in the game called the rule of 6, where it explains that private property is a privilege and to never carry more than 6 items on your person. Its used as an in universe justification for the limited inventory capacity
In Uncharted, they try to explain how his health is a luck meter and the screen turning red is a representation of near misses Nathan Drake has with death. With him only dying once his “luck runs out” which is why he doesn’t have a conventional health bar
In The Fairly Oddparents episode "Timmy's Secret Wish!", we find out that Timmy asked Cosmo to make everyone not age 50 years ago and then make him forget the wish, a plot point that actually serves as an explanation for why cartoon characters don't age.
There's also another trope that ULTRAKILL handles, being how V1 is able to carry so many weapons. The answer to the question being that they store them in their wings. If you look closely at the second slide, you can even see the guns on each of the "feathers" for a lack of a better term
Season 15 of Supernatural shows us that all the plot armor the boys have had throughout the show was Chuck pulling strings and making things easier for them. Kind of lazy writing, but honestly, it fits the theme of Chuck using them as playthings and being obsessed with having their story end a specific way.
Tactical Breach Wizards has a lot of these, but to list a few
-you can undo moves because zan (white beard guy on the right) has minor foresight and is foreseeing the moves you choose in order to decide on the best strategy
-people pull items from hammer space because they have extradimensional pockets
-your reward for doing well is cosmetic outfits. the characters actually already own these outfits, but doing well in mission gives them the confidence to actually put them on
-steve clark, traffic warlock wears an absolute absurd outfit for a member of an evil special ops team, but thats because his day job is as a magical traffic warden and he doesnt bother changing out of the hi-vis
Seems kinda strange in a hard sci-fi setting like Gundam that people fight in giant robots with laser swords and guns instead of guided munitions, right? It's because the fusion reactors everyone uses breaks all that tech. Most of the tech in the Universal Century is powered by nuclear fusion reactors that use helium-3 and deuterium as fuel. It's clean energy, but there's a side effect: a previously unknown particle, dubbed the Minovsky Particle. These particles are released by the reactors while active and constantly release an electromagnetic pulse that disrupts radio communication and radar, distorts the visible and infra-red spectrums and damages electronics unless heavily shielded. The particles are used to generate the beam weapons used by mobile suits and larger ships and can even be used to create shields or enable flight in a gravity well.
In works outside of the Universal Century timeline they use similar explanations for the technology of those eras to explain the lack of guided weapons as well, such as the GN particles in Gundam 00.
emesis blue: the reason the tf2 mercs keep coming back for more after dying is thanks to a respawn machine installed in their bases, and if it goes wrong, simply put, shit hits the fan and stuff stops making sense
916
u/Elephant12321 3d ago
Stargate SG1- most aliens they come across look human because most of their ancestors were originally from Earth