Not Drawn to Scale: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''"Hi, I’m terrible at perspective. Not with life, but with buildings and materials. So forgive me if I get buildings wrong, I hope I make up for it by getting my perspective on mankind right."''|'''Doug TenNapel''', ''[[Ratfist]]'' [http://ratfist.com/page-3/ page 3]}}

 

 

 

Contradictions arising from the implications of this trope can get involved in pretty much any facet of fiction involving [[Writers Cannot Do Math|math]], from [[Dawson Casting]] to [[Power Level|bizarre tiers of superpowers]]. Sorting algorithm tropes can mitigate this to a large extent, as it avoids measuring anything objectively by instead only measuring things relative to other fictional objects. Even then, size and height is a consistent problem area, as most mundane objects do have general sizes, even if the writers forget this.

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* Until ''[[Digimon Savers]]'', the English ''[[Digimon]]'' dubs tended to increase the age of characters, also lengthening how long the [[Time Skip]] between ''[[Digimon Adventure]]'' and ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'' was to further this end. Fans don't seem to be particularly bothered by this since characters are supposed to reflect the age of audience, and enough characters are [[Competence Zone|modified equally that there is no real change]].

* ''[[Mazinger Z]]'': the applied scale was not consistent at all, and it could vary from one chapter to another or even in different scenes of the same chapter. Sometimes the [[Humongous Mecha]] were too big or too tiny, and the human beings and other objects too tiny. There are plenty examples: In episode 10, a [[Robeast|Mechanical Beast]] grabbed skyscrappers with one of his hands and moved them to elsewhere. And his hands seemed so big like the buildings they were carrying. Later, though, he was just so tall like Mazinger-Z (18 meters), so his hands were way tinier than they should be.

* ''[[Sailor Moon]]'''s author gave only its main character a specific height from which the others are mostly extrapolated. This became tricky as more characters were introduced, since [[Huge Schoolgirl]] Makoto was no longer the tallest character but was certainly not over six feet tall. Both the dubs [[Pragmatic Adaptation|tends to shy away from addressing this directly]], while the [[Live Action Adaptation]] simply regresses it back to her original pseudo-Yankee design.

*** Quistis is one year older than most of the key characters and graduated in the previous class. So the Garden was indeed a little hesitant, but not about her abilities (which were quite ample, thank you) -- it was mostly about her ''inexperience''.

** This does become rather amusing when characters from varying games have to interact with each other in ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy]].'' For example, Bartz from ''[[Final Fantasy V]]'' is officially older than Squall of ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'' but you wouldn't know it from seeing the two of them rendered side by side. Let's not even touch how Zidane's Genome heritage apparently means that he can't clear the five foot mark.

** Better yet there's Wailord, a whale Pokémon that is 47 feet long yet only weighs about half a ton. What is it made out of, bubblewrap?

**** Or it's a particularly small Cacnea. It's distinctly implied that the values given in the Pokédex are ''averages'', not solid numbers.

*** Another mind-bending example is Spinda. The height of a five-year-old, the weight of a terrier. Apparently Spinda are made of hallucinations and pixie dust.

** Apparently, the Pokédex only refer to the average weight of Pokémon.

** The height of characters of the day is also in rather wild flux. If one considers Brock to be a slightly-less-than-average-sized young adult, every few episodes the cast runs into ten foot tall bearmen.

* A somewhat literal application of this trope: In an issue of ''Game Informer'' magazine, the creators of the newest ''[[Red Faction]]'' game have reported that due to the new, highly realistic physics engine used to show the effects of damaging things, and would allow the player to damage a building enough to topple it. It turned out that many of the buildings they'd designed have proven to be structurally unsound, and collapsed under their own weight shortly after being placed in the environment. Consequently, the devs have had to ''learn'' some architecture to continue work on the game.

** To make things worse, the game's own development team can't seem to make heads or tails of their own height system, routinely creating supposedly regular university professors who are nevertheless tall enough to give any NBA player an inferiority complex. Worse still is that even at "normal" size, most cars look so small that a person would have to drive them with his head between his knees. On the other hand, aside from the wildly varying "normal" heights, there really aren't too many things "more giant" than they need to be when it comes to giant monsters.

* More a "game engine designers have no sense of scale" one: in ''[[Pangya]]'', the hole elevation reading is frequently way too large given the visual evidence. Case in point: character standing in bunker just below the green with ball at her feet. Surface of green (and hence hole level) is just above waist height. Hole elevation reading? ''Two point one metres''. Making Hana (a typical schoolgirl), just over ''eleven feet tall''.

** Note, however, that Snake is nearly at the end of his life in Metal Gear Solid 4, and numerous characters comment on how far his body has decayed. His new Octocamo suit is low-grade [[Powered Armor]] specifically because Snake can barely stand without it.

* The ''[[Twisted Metal]]'' series has this in spades. The most notable instance is probably when Axel, a man on a platform stuck between two giant wheels, drives next to the "civilians" in the game, and appears about four or five times taller than they are. He, the motorbike guy, and other "small" vehicles are all as tall as most ''houses''.

* In the ''[[Crusader: No Remorse|Crusader]]'' games, the grenade launcher mounts a 10-round magazine. How big is each round? 9.2 centimeters long. No, it's not shoulder-mounted. No, the magazine is never rendered as sticking out. Of course, the game pretty much redefines [[Hyperspace Arsenal]] to begin with...

** Which actually fits the Other M's [[Values Dissonance]] in a way that's [[Fridge Brilliance]].

** She's not shorter, everyone else is just really freaking huge.

* In ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'', the Normandy SR-2 is a ship that is (judging by in-game descriptions) at least four decks tall, with the top deck (Command Centre and the cockpit) alone being noticeably several feet higher than any human character (including Commander Shepard). However, the ship is modeled to be ''much'' smaller during its appearances in the Suicide Mission. While the crashed ship looks relatively massive when the specialists first exit it, it becomes much smaller during the {{spoiler|end run, when Shepard (and his team, if they survived) run towards the Normandy, which is hovering in mid-air}}. The ship itself is modeled to be just slightly larger (height-wise) than Joker, who is standing at the port airlock and is almost as tall as the ship itself. This is also prevalent during several other in-engine cutscenes where the main cast directly enter the Normandy itself.

** In cutscenes the krogan are huge, towering over every other character. However, in the gameplay itself, everybody is the same height. The developers had to settle for this compromise, since larger krogan kept getting stuck in objects all the time in the playtesting.

* ''[[Freelancer]]'': When flying in space, full-size planets are no larger than a few hundred meters in diameter.

* Don't ever try to reconcile the sizes of the vehicles, your character's size, the sizes of the buildings, and the sizes of the evacuees that emerge from the buildings in [[Blast Corps]]. It will only end in headaches and tears.

* ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' does this on purpose through the use of [[Super-Deformed]] character sprites, thanks to the height discrepancy between some of the [[Humongous Mecha]]. For example, ''[[Super Robot Wars Z|Z2: Hakai-hen]]'' has ''[[VOTOMS]]'' and ''[[Code Geass]]'' (with mecha that average 4 meters/13 feet) and ''[[Gurren Lagann]]'' ([[Serial Escalation|whose title mecha eventually reaches the size of a galaxy]]); imagining anything from the former damaging the latter [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief|would be impossible without the concession]].

** Emphasized in ''SRW'' spinoff ''[[Another Century's Episode]]'', which uses full-sized machines and gladly points it out, as in official screenshots where [[Aura Battler Dunbine|Dunbine]] is shown to be as big as the [[Chars Counterattack|Alpha Azieru's]] head.

 

** The artbook however has Toph listed around a foot shorter then what the commercial stated.

* ''[[Transformers Generation 1]]'' has this problem, even excusing the [[Hammerspace]] answers for "where does Optimus Prime's trailer go?" and "how do they shrink?". Ratchet is the same size as Ironhide (they're [[Palette Swap]] characters in the toys), yet Ironhide will fit ''inside'' of ambulance-form Ratchet, allowing the doors to close. Similarly, Decepticons can fit inside the cockpits of Decepticon jets, even though their robot forms are exactly the same size.

*** Even worse, the Constructicons actually combine into a fully formed Devastator who is able to stand comfortably at his full height inside the cargo hold of Astrotrain's space shuttle alt-mode with plenty of room still to spare for the rest of the Decepticon lineup.

** [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Scale Scale in Transformers is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.]