It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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{{quote|''"This is my [[Timey-Wimey Ball|timey-wimey]] detector. [[Buffy-Speak|It goes ding when there's stuff.]]"''|'''The Doctor''', ''[[Doctor Who]]'', "Blink"}}
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** All of Franky's robot powers run on carbonation from Cola. As do the special abilities of the Thousand Sunny, the Straw Hats' current ship that Franky built. Everything from it's air-burst speed-boost to a ''[[Wave Motion Gun]]'' runs on cola.
** Pappagg, the talking starfish? He can talk because - hear, hear - in Japanese "hito desu" is "I'm a human" and "hitode" is starfish. So, '''because of a pun''', he spent his early years convinced he was a human; subsequently he learned to talk and walk around. Then he finally realized he was a starfish; but, oh well, it was too late.
** The Marine Captains' [[Badass Cape
** It even shows in anime fillers. Twin villains Canpachino and Brindo have the ability to magnetically attract and repel each other. They specifically state that this power doesn't come from a Devil Fruit, but from their [[The Power of Love|brotherly love.]]
* In ''[[FLCL]]'', "sushi-eyebrow" Amarao's explanation as to how and why robots are sprouting from main character Naota's forehead, apparently involving the thought processes of certain people's brains (particularly Naota's) creating hyperspace teleportation portals called "N.O. channels" when subjected to a good old smash from space officer Haruko's Rickenbacker bass guitar.
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* The novel ''[[The Holy Land]]'' claims that extraterrestrials are taller because of relativity. They've been flying in spaceships for generations, and since everything in the universe is shrinking (the ''real'' reason for the redshift), the time dilation means that they've shrunken less.
** James Blaylock used the same premise in ''Land Of Dreams'', mostly as an excuse to include time travelers' giant shoes and spectacles in his novel alongside little men disguised as mice.
* This was the [[Word of God]] explanation (and heavily implied in the
* In one [[Paul Bunyan]] story, he builds a sawmill that, simply by being set in reverse, can convert sawdust back into whole logs.
* Although it's half-[[Techno Babble]], half-[[Magi Babble]], there has to be space here for [[Robert Rankin]]'s ''Raiders of the Lost Car Park''. The explanation for where [[The Fair Folk]] are hiding, which would boggle [[Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy|Ford Prefect]]: if you've ever tried to glue a rectangular map onto a globe of the same scale, you'll find it doesn't fit properly. The bits of the map that don't fit onto the globe are the regions in which they hide out. These are only accessible to humans by playing certain notes on an ocarina that has been reinvented with a power drill. And that's the part that, comparatively speaking, ''makes sense''.
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* [[Warhammer 40000|Orky]] "teknologie" runs, quite literally, [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe|because the Orks believe it should work that way]]. This is typified in their most common upgrade to any vehicles' speed: they paint them red, because "[[Law of Chromatic Superiority|da red wuns go fasta]]!" So while the real reason is that Orks have tremendous [[Psychic Powers]], their explanations fit this trope perfectly.
** This is used to hilarious effect when a group of Imperial engineers try to determine what it is that makes Orky weaponry so deadly. They dismantle it, put it back together, try everything they can to even get the gun to fire but nothing. The gun is actually missing several vital components, but when they put it in the hands of an ork, it fires with deadly power.
* One of the main problems with the mad science of ''[[Genius: The Transgression]]''
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* The ''[[Fallout]]'' series explicitly works based not on actual science, but Science! of the 1950s. Nuclear powered cars and radiation causing giant bugs to pop up is just how things are supposed to work.
** The giant bugs and other oddly modified creatures could also have been a result of the FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus), a failed [[Super Serum|Super Soldier Serum]] which created the super mutants. It got out and into the remaining animal life after the bombs dropped, making them larger and more aggressive. The nuclear cars still don't make sense, though.
*** FEV would be the inversion of Nonsensoleum, as a non-jokey though still vaguely enough defined [[Phlebotinum]]. The beginning of each game [[Hand Wave
*** In fact, FEV is hardly a failed project. It works exactly as advertised, as super mutants are immortal, super-strong and resistant to radiation, and while most of them act like troglodytes, some (who e.g. got education after exposure) are show as at least as smart as normal humans.
*** Nuclear cars would obviously work, but be to dangerous and expensive in real life. However, in Fallout universe no one really cared about danger from radiation and apparently there are more radioactive elements (both in number of kinds and amount) than we know about.
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* A whole lot of stuff in ''[[Regular Guy]]''.
* ''[[Girl Genius]]'', being a comic about mad scientists lives and breathes this trop.
* In ''[[Black Adventures]]'', quantum physics cause [[Magical Girl]] [[Transformation Sequence
* ''[[Goats]]'' has a singularity that turns kittens into pop tarts, or vice versa. It turns out to be both a [[Running Gag]] and, eventually, a bit of [[Applied Phlebotinum]].
* The [[Cool Ship]] in ''[[Dubious Company]]'' runs on '''inebriation'''! No, not alcohol. Inebriation. The crew must be [[The Drunken Sailor|drunk to drive]]. Why yes, this is a comic about pirates.
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== Western Animation ==
* Much of Professor Farnsworth's science in ''[[Futurama]]'' is based on total nonsense. For instance, his theory of "reverse fossilisation"
** Lampshaded at least once:
{{quote|'''Cubert:''' That's impossible!
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'''Fry:''' Magic. Got it. }}
*** Curiously this contradict the previous statement about having changed the speed of light.
*** Careful. The light that made it to Omicron Persei 8 was "old light," so to speak, that is light that was generated ''before'' the change in the speed of light, thus it traveled at the speed for which a lightyear was still accurate (distance traveled in one year at 2.99x10^8
** [[It Got Worse|It gets worse]] in [[The Movie|the movies]], especially [[What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?|Bender's Game]].
** In "Mars University", the characters meet Gunter, Professor Farnsworth's talking monkey. Fry asks if Gunter can talk because he was genetically engineered, but the Professor laughs and tells him that genetic engineering [[What We Now Know to Be True|is a bunch of science fiction mumbo jumbo]]. He then explains that Gunter's intelligence and ability to talk come from "his electronium hat, which harnesses the power of sunspots to produce [[Foreshadowing|cognitive radiation.]] "
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*** And the gag doesn't stop there. When it went to trial, {{spoiler|someone actually is able to explain how the microwave works. But he's at a complete loss on the creamer.}}
* ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'', this show is '''made''' of nonsenseoleum. The very first episode has them escaping earth's gravity, in a rollercoaster, because the Effiel Tower ''flung'' them there like a slingshot.
** Though interestingly, sometimes things ''will'' have a scientific basis, such as their plan to experience forty hours of sunlight by flying around the world in "Summer Belongs to You." Amusingly, ''this'' was the one time one of their friends decided to exhibit [[Arbitrary Skepticism]]
* ''[[Darkwing Duck]]'' hardly has any other kind of technology. For example, there's the completely fictional notion of all matter consisting of "trons", particles that come in good and evil flavours.
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