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{{trope}}
{{quote|''Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.''
|[[Breaking the Fourth Wall|Kurt Vonnegut]], ''[[Breakfast of Champions]]''}}
Most works follow [[The Law of Conservation of Detail]]. If you see something, chances are it's important - either for the plot, or for establishing character or setting.
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{{examples}}
==
* ''[[Cerebus the Aardvark]]'' makes frequent use of this trope.
** Four consecutive pages of one issue are devoted to the title character getting out of bed and urinating. A reader famously wrote cartoonist Dave Sim, demanding a [[Fan Dumb|pro-rated refund]] for that portion of the issue.
** In another issue or two, Cerebus is portrayed with cold symptoms. This isn't a plot point; nor (if I recall correctly) do he or other characters even mention it. He just happens to have come down with a cold.
* [[Brandon
== Fanfiction ==▼
* ''[[Nights in the Big City]]'', a ''[[Kim Possible]]'' [[Fan Fiction]], builds an alternate universe where details casually thrown out just to give the world texture include mentions of minor [[Canon]] characters in different roles, that [[American Civil War|Robert E. Lee]] was the 13th President, the cars run on ethanol, the space program hasn't gone further than the Moon, and that the Pope is female and so is God. These don't have any relevance to the story, they just give a better impression of [[Cryptic Background Reference|a whole world beyond the frame]].
== Film ==▼
* Most of [[Studio Ghibli]]'s movies:
** ''[[Kiki's Delivery Service]]'': Kiki is shown drying her clothes when they get wet, or stumbling on debris while running.
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* If [[Umberto Eco]] [http://non-compos-mentis.blogspot.com/2006/11/umberto-eco-how-to-recognize-porn-movie.html is to be believed], this is ''very'' common in pornographic films.
== [[Literature]] ==▼
▲== Literature ==
* The ''[[Thursday Next]]'' books are full of jokes, parodies, and satire as part of their [[Alternate History]] that has little to do with the plot and are simply bits of fun.
* ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' has all kinds of asides and Guide entries that are only marginally, if at all, connected to the thread of the story.
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* The ''[[Spider-Man]]'' novels by Adam-Troy Castro feature massive amounts of [[World Building]] and tiny details, often by cutaways to the everyday life of people in metahuman-infested New York. In "Revenge of the Sinister Six", there's a constant stream of news reporting on Spider-Man's efforts to prevent mass slaughter by the eponymous villains, including commercials for 'Supervillain Insurance'.
* [[Stephen King]] tends toward this in his novels.
** ''[[The Stand]]'' (especially the unabridged version) not only tries to give almost everyone the depth of [[Backstory]] you'd normally reserve for the main character, but also dedicates a huge amount of space to characters and events that are, at most, tangentially connected to the main plot. This includes a large section given over to introducing characters just to show how they died as an indirect effect of the plague. Of course, we're talking about a single book that's about as long as ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''.
** Early in ''[[The Dark Half]]'', we are treated to a full chapter dedicated to the life of the man who discovers the empty grave that sets the plot in motion. The man literally serves no other purpose and is never mentioned again.
** Toward the climax of ''[[The Shining]]'', when the novel starts to take on its true gripping nature, King does much the same with the policeman who pulls the chef over.
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* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'': It's difficult to have a series with an intended length of seven books, each of which is twice the length of an average [[Doorstopper]], without falling prey to this a little. Each of the prologues goes to great length to bring to life a character who will inevitably die at the end of the chapter. There's also a fair amount of [[World Building]], [[Food Porn]], [[Scenery Porn]], and characterizing side characters. Outside of this sort of description, though, Martin does a pretty respectable job of making all events and conversations important.
▲== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[That Mitchell and Webb Look]]'' has a series of sketches about a director whose films consist of nothing but this.
{{quote|'''Interviewer''': That was a clip from your latest film, ''Sometimes Fires Go Out'', which has been described as "unrelentingly real", "a devastatingly faithful rendition of how life is", and "dull, dull, unbearably dull". Those quotes, oddly all from the same review.}}
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* How often is the Doctor of ''[[Doctor Who]]'' going to mention something completely incidental which has no purpose to the plot? A lot.
* ''[[Street Scene]]'' immerses the audience in the everyday life of the urban setting suggested by its title. There are several points in the play where a couple of minor characters, usually unnamed, cross the stage conversing with each other about something not relevant to anything else in the play.
== [[Video Games]] ==
▲== Video Games ==
* ''[[Resident Evil Code: Veronica]]'' - way more objects modeled than mattered. A number of rooms were just crammed with well done object models with no game function: furniture, victrola, mannikin, vending machines, books, and so on.
* ''[[Ghost Hunter]]''
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* ''[[Primal]]'' - The Count's chateau has an armor museum, a library, and a chapel. All exquisitely done, but with no function what so ever.
* The ''[[Pokémon]]'' games actually do a fair amount of this. Plenty of [[NPC]]s exist only to make amusing comments on the everyday tasks for which Pokémon are used.
* ''[[
** In fact, this applies to most, if not all, ''Elder Scrolls'' games. ''[[The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind]]'' has just as much clutter if not more than ''Oblivion'', although significantly more of it is useful in some way (candles and lanterns set on tables can be picked up and used for light, for example), but there's still a ton of random stuff that never gets used for anything.▼
** The games that Bethesda produced after coding the Radiant engine have a lot more of this than their older works (or older works in series that they took over). This is because the engine allows
▲In fact, this applies to most, if not all, ''Elder Scrolls'' games. ''[[Morrowind]]'' has just as much clutter if not more than ''Oblivion'', although significantly more of it is useful in some way (candles and lanterns set on tables can be picked up and used for light, for example), but there's still a ton of random stuff that never gets used for anything.
▲** The games that Bethesda produced after coding the Radiant engine have a lot more of this than their older works (or older works in series that they took over). This is because the engine allows 'actors' to determine the optimal (according to their [[Artificial Stupidity|own]] [[Artificial Brilliance|judgment]]) methods for achieving goals, which removes the need to script each and every action and allows the developers to work with a larger number of actors and goals.
* Part of what ''[[Beyond Good & Evil (video game)|Beyond Good and Evil]]'' was praised for was its narrative filigree, as the creators worked to make a solid "world" instead of simply a setting. Thus, there are animal species, posters and billboards for events and services, fake commercials, and NPCs with their own little history that don't directly contribute to the main plot, but give some depth to the planet of Hillys.
* ''[[BioShock (series)|BioShock]]'': nearly every wall covered in posters for in-game shows or products and audio diaries from people going about their normal, non-plot-related lives.
* ''[[The Neverhood]]'' has the absolutely ''massive'' Hall of Records, which takes up about 40 in-game screens of tiny text and around 100 pages of flat printing. It describes the lives and worlds of the seven sons of Quatar, precisely one of which, Hoborg, is at all relevant to the plot. (Two, sort of, if you count {{spoiler|Willie's father, Ottoborg}}, but his origins aren't relevant to the plot.) The Ynts and Skullmonkeys also become important in the sequel, but for the most part, it's just a lot of [[World Building]] coupled with some truly bizarre fables—such as the one about the talking burger box.
* ''[[Heavy Rain]]'', particularly in the earlier chapters, lets the characters take lots of little mundane actions—drinking coffee, using the bathroom, playing games, generally fiddling with stuff that serves no actual purpose. In the developer's previous game, ''[[Fahrenheit (2005 video game)]]'', such activities ''did'' have an effect on gameplay (they raised the characters' [[Sanity Meter]]s), but in ''[[Heavy Rain]]'' they're just... there.
* ''[[The Legend of Heroes:
* [[Wii]] RPG ''[[Opoona]]'' is a game that actually ''sells'' itself on its narative filigree: It bills itself as a "Lifestyle RPG," and half the focus of the game is learning about the culture of the alien planet on which you've landed. Things such as the planet's art history, pop culture, fashions, industry, and ecology are all nonessential and "secondary" to the main plot, but they are there to be explored by the curious.
* ''[[Baldur's Gate]]'' is utterly filled with readable books, and not just the same two or three, there are dozens. There are also plenty of empty containers and vast, vast, amounts of wilderness to just wander through, with Tales of the Sword Coast adding even more. The story itself didn't need half of it and most players will never even see more than about 60-70% of the entire map. Sadly Baldur's Gate II is pretty linear by comparison.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Discussed, parodied, and turned up to eleven by ''[[Unwinder's Tall Comics]]'', on [http://tallcomics.com/?id=76 this page]. In the [[Fictional Document|in-story mystery novel]] ''The Gun and the Grapes'', author Greg Kirkpatrick describes ''everything'' in excruciating detail, to deliberately obscure the relevant clues under mountains of irrelevant ones.
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