Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Difference between revisions

** In ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' flying is the art of deliberately (ab)using this trope. Specifically, throwing yourself at the ground and missing, and then making sure not to think about the fact that flying is impossible, or else gravity will notice you.▼

* '''Creeping Gravity:''' Also known as Gravity Waves. Gravity will affect a character's body in sections i.e. legs, then torso and finally head. The character will demonstrate neither tissue damage nor pain as a result of this distortion, only on hitting the ground.<ref>This ''does'' happen in the [[Real Life|real world]] and is [[wikipedia:Spaghettification|pronounced]] near small, dense bodies of high mass, such as black holes. In such cases it's a force more worrisome than that of eventual impact.</ref>▼

* '''[[Variable Terminal Velocity|Varying Gravity]]:''' Characters will fall faster than a heavy object -- ensuring that the object lands on them. ''Everything falls faster than an anvil''. In fact, on more than one occasion in WB shorts, a character who was falling to earth gently via parachute was handed an anvil... by another character who was falling at the exact same rate... and immediately went into a terminal velocity plunge.▼

** Sometimes gravity will even shift around the relative positions of objects. For example, a character and an anvil are falling side-by-side, when suddenly the anvil starts falling a bit slower and moves laterally so it is now directly above the character's head. Wile E. Coyote is intimately familiar with this variant.▼

* '''Dramatic Gravity:''' Gravity can be suspended for just enough time to give one last comment to your opponent. For example, Yosemite Sam, after being tricked into falling off a diving board by Bugs, rose back up for a moment to say, "Ah ''hate'' yew," before plunging again.▼

** Gravity can also be suspended while a badly spooked character bobs up and down in mid-air while screaming, for example Tom of ''[[Tom and Jerry]]''.▼

* '''Out On A Limb:''' Gravity is less powerful than other physical forces, including friction, tension, torsion and all the rest. Static electricity appears to be the most powerful physical force. This allows objects to be stacked on top of each other across an unlimited space or height;<ref> Also true in [[Real Life]], allowing an endless bunch of dominoes to be stacked across a room like a House Of Cards, this is the principle on which [[wikipedia:Corbel vault|Corbel vaults]] and [[wikipedia:Calder mobile|Mobiles]] are designed. However, they must be stacked or suspended in a [[wikipedia:Catenary|catenary]] distribution, meaning you can theoretically cantilever a pile of bricks across a ridiculously wide gap, but you get vanishing returns as the pile climbs higher</ref> and will maintain stability even if the branch or beam they are standing on is sawed in half; so long as the pieces are touching. This also allows characters to balance an unlimited number of objects in their hands.▼

** For instance, ''[[Shel Silverstein|Where The Sidewalk Ends]]'' the characters are standing on an object that is clearly about to break, and yet it somehow still supports their weight at least momentarily. Which is to say indefinitely, since the artwork is in single-panel form, and therefore rules of cartoon physics regarding [[Talking Is a Free Action|time dilation]] [[Tethercat Principle|also apply]].▼

* '''Counterintuitive Gravity:''' Items which should fall don't, when items that shouldn't, ''do''. The traditional case is a character chased up a tree and out onto a limb, as above. It is reasonable for them to trust their weight to a branch while the chaser is cutting through it, because sawing the branch off will make the ''tree'' fall. The section being removed (and the character on it) remains suspended in mid-air while the rest of the item (plus whatever object or structure had been supporting it) falls, [[Bottomless Pit|presumably forever]].<ref>This could be because [[Recursive Reality|It's Turtles All The Way Down]].</ref> Diving boards and bridges are also prone to this effect.▼

*** This is actually explained by [[Looney Tunes|Bugs Bunny]] in the short "High Diving Hare". At the end of the episode, Yosemite Sam tries to saw off the end of a diving board, with Bugs on it. However, the diving board ladder, and part where Sam is, fall down, leaving Bugs and the end floating. Bugs remarks "I know this defies the law of gravity but eh, I never studied law", suggesting ignorance of the law of gravity, equals it not noticing you, thereby allowing the situation.▼

** The Road Runner and Coyote lampshade it in a cartoon where they use signs to communicate the same thing.▼

Named for a line in ''[[The Tick (animation)]]'' (who complains about gravity working all too well, at the time. Luckily he is [[Nigh Invulnerable]]). The author may or may not have stolen it from an earlier [[Garfield]] strip, which itself is a riff on the title of the novel ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'' by [[Robert A. Heinlein]], and where varying gravity is an important plot point. Which is in turn a play on the sailors' saying [[Space Is an Ocean|"The sea]] [[Wooden Ships and Iron Men|is a harsh mistress"]]. Which [[Older Than Feudalism|probably goes back]] to [[The Bible]] "The Law is a harsh master" (Romans 7, 1-6). And then Cassandra Claire plagiarized it in [[The Draco Trilogy]].▼

The non-PG version is "[[Mass Effect 2|Gravity's one mean mother, huh?]]" or "[[Big Bang Theory|Oh Gravity, thou art a heartless bitch.]]" (meme also used as the name of an achievement in the game [[Magicka]]).▼