The Law of Conservation of Detail: Difference between revisions

** At the beginning of ''Pawn of Prophecy'', the first book, the old storyteller brings out {{spoiler|a story only to be told in the presence of royalty, even though he's in an ordinary (though pretty wonderful) farm, and glances at Garion}}. Lo and behold, halfway through the fourth book {{spoiler|Garion is crowned the Rivan King.}} The old storyteller, being Belgarath himself, knew the entire time.

** Also in ''Pawn of Prophecy'', Garion mentions to Belgarath in a throwaway line that {{spoiler|a fortuneteller once came to Faldor's farm and told Durnik the blacksmith that he would die twice}}. Funnily enough, in book 5, {{spoiler|Durnik dies and is resurrected a chapter or two later. One down, one to go.}}.

* If someone is invited to a banquet in ''[[Romance of the Three Kingdoms]]'', then chances are that it's part of a plan to kill them. Most of the banquets without murderous intent go unmentioned, leaving [[Genre Savvy|modern readers]] to wonder why anyone would be stupid enough to go to a banquet in the first place.

* [[Douglas Adams]] is famous for mentioning things in throwaway lines which later turn out to be what the entire plot hinges on. However, he does a ''fantastic'' subversion in ''Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency'' (which is itself a ''book'' of this trope) - there's a scene where the protagonist is looking into a bathroom, and Adams spends several paragraphs describing the contents of the room, the panelling on the walls, the scuffs on the floor, and so forth, in intricate detail, only to end with "There was also a large horse in the room, taking up most of it." This trope may also have been parodied with a fictional novel that Arthur Dent reads on the planet Bartledan: Due to a plumbing problem that is only briefly mentioned in the second chapter of the novel, the main character abruptly dies in the penultimate chapter (the rest of its precisely 100,000 words are about road-mending).