In Mysterious Ways/Playing With
Basic Trope: The way God intervenes in human affairs is completely incomprehensible to us.
- Straight: The strange events of the plot are revealed to be down to God playing a Xanatos Roulette only He could possibly keep track of.
- Exaggerated: God's interventions take the form of The Butterfly Effect.
- Justified: God doesn't want humans to be certain that he's intervened, so he only does so in the most convoluted and unpredictable way possible.
- Inverted: People think a miracle must have occurred, but it turns out God has no idea how it happened.
- Subverted: He gives the whole "thou canst not know the mind of God" spiel... until someone reveals The Man Behind the Curtain.
- Double Subverted: As the characters storm out in disgust, the man behind the curtain smiles to himself, turns to the camera and winks.
- Parodied: God's interventions are entirely mundane and idiotic - while he thinks these minor tweaks are pulling the puppetstrings of the world, everyone else is utterly bemused.
- Zig Zagged: God causes Obscure Event A but claims not to have caused Confusing Event B, then A and B intersect and cause Bewildering Event C which was His plan all along, then Event D happens....
- Averted: God didn't do it.
- Enforced: "If we make a definite statement about the existence of God either way, someone is going to complain. Better to make a vague faux-philosophical platitude about the ineffability of the divine, then everyone's happy."
- Lampshaded: "God must be pushing butterflies again....would it be so much trouble for Him to tell us what's going on?"
- Invoked: God pretends to be mysterious and ineffable so people will think he's in control - in reality, he's as mystified as everyone else.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: God explains exactly how he caused what happened.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: God's tendency to work through overly complicated chain reactions is hugely inefficient, allowing deaths and suffering that could have been avoided if he had just taken an active involvement. As a result, people begin to suspect that he isn't really helping at all but is simply taking credit for all good events whilst writing off the bad as part of some undefined plan. Meanwhile those pesky atheists keep pointing out that a God controlling the universe in an incomprehensible way looks exactly the same as a universe doing incomprehensible things all on its own.
- Reconstructed: God doesn't want people to know he's there, we wants them to believe he's there. Why? Who knows, he's mysterious.
- Played For Laughs: ???
- Played For Drama: ???
Seek the path back to In Mysterious Ways, and the Lord shall provide.