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It's a Small World After All: Difference between revisions
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* In ''[[The Windup Girl]]'' by [[Paolo Bacigalupi]], Emiko is running for her life and looks certain to be killed when Anderson Lake ''just happens to be'' riding past in his rickshaw and rescues her.
* Sheckley's Mindswap. That method of looking for Ze Kraggash actually pays off. Somewhat.
* ''[[Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows]]'': Whilst jumping around the British countryside ''entirely at random'', our heroes land within a few hundred meters of a group of people they know, and Harry just happens to wander by them while they discuss plot-relevant events. Britain, remember, covers some 210,000 square kilometers.
** And in the film, they just happen to apparate right in the middle of of a group of snatchers.
** This happens in favor of the villains in the background of ''Goblet of Fire''. Pettigrew decides to stop at an inn on the way to meeting Voldemort, and runs into a Ministry official who happens to know the location of a loyal Death Eater, {{spoiler|secretly being held under house arrest by his father and assumed dead by the rest of society.}}
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* Averted in ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'', where the heroes travel to the moon and find that, though it is indeed smaller than the normal world, as one might well expect of a moon, it nevertheless does have a fully detailed worldmap. It's just... rather sparsely inhabited. Again, as one might expect of a moon.
** This is also because all of the humanoid inhabitants are sleeping below the surface, and the only other people living there, the Humingways, occupy one cave.
* Averted in ''Haven: Call of the King'', a game which goes to show exactly why it's played straight most of the time. In the later stages of the game, you're tasked with [[
* ''[[Mass Effect]]'''s planets generally consist of about a square kilometer of mountainous terrain. You can see areas beyond the tiny map, but you're not allowed to go there - and, at any rate, all the stuff on the planet worth exploring is within a short drive of everything else.
** "You're leaving the bounds of the operational area, you're leaving our scopes, you need to turn around Commander" says Joker every time you try to go a little too far out. Although on one particular planet there's an annoying bit of ore that's JUUUUUUST outside the operational area and you have to very, VERY carefully inch over to it on foot or Joker picks you up and deposits you back at the "beginning of the level". Great scanners you got there, Normandy...
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** Played straight with searching for Liara. The smallest to which your superiors can narrow down her location is a sector ''with four navigable star systems''. Although they do recommend starting the search on "the planet with the Prothean ruins", without even specifying its name. Likewise, Liara can only narrow down the Conduit's location to "somewhere on Ilos", and you only find it by locating [[Big Bad|Saren]] and airdropping right behind him.
* The ''[[Knights of the Old Republic (video game)|Knights of the Old Republic]]'' games take this trope to an even farther extreme than the ''[[Star Wars]]'' movies. Regardless of whether the protagonists land on a desert planet, an ocean planet, or a planet that is one big city (Coruscant-style), their destination is always just a few zones away, perfectly walkable on foot, even if they don't know its location. Also applies when their spaceship crash-lands in the middle of nowhere.
** In the case of Tatooine(desert planet) and Manaan(water planet), there were only one setlement on each planet, so there really wasn't anywhere else to go. Also on Tatooine, when finding the Star Map there is really no way to know how far it was before you find the cave containing the map, especially given that you are unable to travel there without a map. Also on Taris(city planet), you and Bastila both ejected from the same ship at roughly the same time, meaning it would be highly unlikely for you to end up in different locations. Everything else that you encounter is largely related to Bastila's capture. Although the fact that you travel to Tatooine of all places is really an example of this.
* [[The King of Fighters]] meta-series has several of the oldest fighters (Takuma, Saisyu, Chin, etc.) having either known each other superficially or being old friends. Specially, [[Art of Fighting|Takuma Sakazaki]] knew [[Fatal Fury|Jeff Bogard]] rather well, and he also was an acquintance of Kyo Kusanagi's father Saisyu; also, Chin Gentsai was an old friend of [[Fatal Fury|Tung Fu Rue]]. ** Noticeable in that the "Takuma knew Saisyu" angle was pure [[Fanon]] at first, then became canon.
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== Real Life ==
* It actually is a small world... when comparing urban centers to rural. The reason humans tend to run into each other - even across the earth from where they met - is they tend to hang around cities and other places where humans live.
** If the entire human race of several billion people were put into a megacity at the same population density as New York City, it would be the size of the state of Texas. Seems big, but compared to the amount of available land on the earth is pretty tiny - .0046% of the total land area of the earth.
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