Impossibly Compact Folding/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A small object is unfolded to be much larger than is believable.

  • Strait: Alice unfolds an average sized road map until it fills up her entire car.
  • Exaggerated: Alice uses a microscope and tweezers to unfold a bacterium-sized road map until it outgrows the solar system.
  • Justified: The road map exists in the fourth dimension, and Alice is simply pulling more of its mass into the third.
  • Inverted: Alice pulls an enormous wad of paper out of her car and folds it up into a normal-sized road map.
  • Subverted: It is later revealed that Alice was pulling more and more road maps out of a hidden compartment as opposed to unfolding a single road map.
  • Double Subverted: When Alice's trickery is discovered, she sighs in disappointment and folds all of the road maps into a tiny wad and puts them back in the compartment.
  • Deconstructed: Alice tries to keep unfolding the road map, but runs out of pages.
  • Reconstructed: Bob then takes the road map and unfolds it for her.
  • Zig Zagged: The road maps explode to their original size after being placed in the compartment.
  • Averted: All foldable objects are folded into a reasonable size.
  • Lampshaded: "How on earth did that giant wad of paper fit into a tiny road map?
  • Invoked: Alice, knowing the properties of the road map, unfolds it and uses it as a bridge to get across a canyon.
  • Defied: Alice refuses to open the road map because she doesn't want to fill the whole car up with paper.
  • Discussed: "I bet that this road map is going to fill the entire car before we've got the whole thing unfolded."
  • Conversed: "It's ridiculous to think that such a small road map could fill up an entire car."

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