All The Tropes

Fine Structure: Difference between revisions

Page Discussion

Fine Structure (view source)

Revision as of 03:57, 8 August 2014

14 bytes removed ,  9 years ago
m
revise quote template spacing
VisualWikitext
m (cleanup categories)
m (revise quote template spacing)
Line 1:
{{work}}
{{quote| ''There was a war in Heaven and the debris fell to Earth.''}}
 
{{quote| 1. ''Every year, a randomly chosen person on Earth is struck by [[Lightning Can Do Anything|lightning]] and gains superpowers.''<br />
2. ''Each new superhuman is twice as powerful as the previous one.''<br />
3. ''This has been going on for ten years.'' }}
Line 32:
* [[Apocalyptic Log]]: [http://qntm.org/failure Failure Mode] is interspersed with one.
* [[Area 51]]: Not ''the'' Area 51, but the base where the Power experiments are carried out is certainly the next best thing, a fact of which Ching is quite aware.
{{quote| A desolate air base smack in the North American heartland, surrounded by a sixty-kilometre ribbon of electric fence and razor wire hung with intimidating red, yellow and white signs warding off photographers, trespassers and enemies of the state respectively, plus incomprehensibly secret experiments going on within? It's a little greener, vegetation-wise, but Kuang Ching-Yu thinks you might as well call it Area 51 and save yourself five pages of description.}}
* [[Big Bad]]: Oul, a [[Omnicidal Maniac|mindlessly destructive]] [[Eldritch Abomination]].
** Justified, as he is in fact a weapon and was programmed to do exactly this.
Line 48:
* [[Clarke's Third Law]]: "[http://qntm.org/indistinguishable Indistinguishable from magic]", in which Mitch makes his first appearance, is named for this.
* [[Comes Great Responsibility]]: Mitch [[Invoked Trope|invokes]] this in his first appearance.
{{quote| ''I seem to have acquired a set of powers which-- which are ''open to abuse'', but I've read the odd comic book. Great responsibility et cetera.''}}
** Then he proceeds to rob a bank. He returns the money when Seph catches him easily and gives him a scolding.
* [[De-Power]]: Every [[Flying Brick]] is depowered by the cloistering of the solar system from the rest of [[The Multiverse]].
Line 121:
* [[Teleporters and Transporters]]: Teleportation works by swapping two areas of space. The very first teleportation experiment results in Anne Poole being sealed in a coal seam. The consquences only get worse from there - later, four scientists are simultaneously killed. Finally, an entire building is teleported underground, and ''teleportation is excised from the fabric of the universe''.
* [[The Glasses Gotta Go]]: [[Subverted]]. One minor character, Srin Shapur, is described like this explicitly:
{{quote| She has the kind of hair that's ideal for pinning up in a tight bun and then shaking down in slow motion halfway through the movie, and even has the thick, [[Nerd Glasses|nerdy glasses]] to take off dramatically too. Unfortunately, this will never happen, because she needs the glasses to see.}}
* [[The Stars Are Going Out]]: In [http://qntm.org/?astronomer The Astronomer's Loss]. This turns out to be a good thing though.
* [[Time Abyss]]: Anne Poole lives around 20,000 years, and experiences every minute of it, including the centuries buried alive.
{{quote| Sometimes the discovery becomes massive and everybody in the world finds out at once and I end up on a pedestal. Sometimes they make me their leader, sometimes they call me an abomination, sometimes I get arrested and studied, usually it's all of this at once. I've been everywhere. I've done everything, spoken every language, built a pyramid, survived re-entry. History goes in cycles. If you watch it for long enough you can see the tipping points coming and be there when they happen. I invented fire, the wheel, the electric motor, antibiotics, you name it, every era, every country. Fought in X number of wars. Once, I actually ruled the whole world.<br />
I've walked on the Moon barefoot. }}
* [[Time Skip]]: Even disregarding the [[Anachronic Order]], the story spans over 20,000 years and most of that time understandably doesn't get examined in detail. In detail it only really covers from 2000-2020 or so, and a few brief segments in between, before jumping to the end.
* [[Time Travel]]: With automatic anti-paradox protection going backward. Each direction only gets used once. It's used by one of Oul's slaves to blow up Manhattan.
* [[Title Drop]]: In the very first story. A few of the individual chapters do this as well.
{{quote| Then it's over, Heaven number seventy-nine dopplering into our wake, torn bodily from its extradimensional moorings, fine structure bucking, scattering and shattering.}}
* [[The Atoner]]: Arika, after Jason's death. At that point she's killed or caused the death of 223 people since she got her powers. A few years later, when she loses her powers, she's in the middle of saving her 223rd life.
* [[Unperson]]: The result of applying an anti-memetic weapon to a human being. Such a person cannot be remembered or recorded. As far as anyone is concerned they ''don't exist''. This happens to {{spoiler|}}, and as a result, we, the readers, cannot ever know why<ref>It's implied he realized what Mitch really was and/or realized he was brainwashing the others</ref>!
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1094121"