This Is Not a Floor: Difference between revisions

When you have a [[Master of Illusion]] or a [[Lotus Eater Machine]], why bother bloodying your hands or risking the victim fighting back, when you can trick them into walking across empty air? A perfect plot (bar necromancy or mind-reading) when the only evidence that points toward you, or even murder at all, rests in the mind of the deceased. Often, another character will call attention to the character's actions and unknowingly break the illusion, or the illusionist will break the illusion himself at the last instant to [[Manipulative Bastard|play with the victim's mind]] [[Smug Snake|just to show]] how [[The Chessmaster|in control]] he is.

 

 

 

* Shows up twice in ''[[Paprika]]'', first from the outside, as a character rants about "[[Word Salad|the fifth grade class with the photographic zoom lens]]" and runs through a full-length window, then from the inside, with the main character snapping out of it just in time to avoid going over a balcony.

* A variant occurs in one manga of ''[[Read or Die]]'', where the floor is in fact a lot of paper being held rigid by Yomiko's will. The building was under construction at the time.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* This is part of Mysterio's M.O. in ''[[Spider-Man]]'' comics and cartoons.

 

* Peters of ''[[Event Horizon]]'' was killed in this fashion when the evil ship created an illusion in her mind of a bridge across an open shaft with her son on the other side, resulting in her falling to her death on the gravity chamber floor.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* In ''Point Blank'', the second book in Anthony Horowitz' ''[[Alex Rider]]'' series, a murder is set up by putting a holographic elevator into an out-of-order elevator shaft.

* In ''[[Xanth]]'', Iris has the power of illusions, and this is one of the things she can do.

* While Calesta, the [[Big Bad]] of the ''[[Coldfire Trilogy]]'' is incapable of hurting people directly, his illusion powers make it easy for people to not notice a real danger, or a way to avoid said danger. At one point he makes an entire city fail to notice an incoming tidal wave.

 

* ''[[House MD]]'' uses this a lot, in the "patient of the week is hallucinating" form.

** ''[[Royal Pains]]'' does a similar version, where a "haunted" client can't tell the difference between a floor three inches below or thirty feet below.

* One case in the original [[CSI]] involved a woman who'd jumped off a high-rise apartment balcony in her bikini. She'd been hypnotized to think she was taking a dip at the beach.

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' 3rd Edition suggested in the Dungeon Master's guide that an effective trap would be an illusionary floor over a pit of acid.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* Old gamers of the ''[[Castlevania]]'' series may remember ''Simon's Quest'' and its annoying fake floors, which can only be detected if you fell through them or if you made obssessive use of Holy Water to figure out which floors aren't fake.

* The ''[[Mega Man (video game)|Mega Man]]'' games occasionally use this trick. Two examples that stand out are ''[[Mega Man 2]]'', where they can be detected by a weapon that follows the ground, the Bubble Lead, and '9'', where there are actual enemies that fly by to create holographic platforms over pits right by the real ones.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

 

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[[Category:Mind Manipulation Tropes]]