http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic

Cracked, "6 Real Serial Killers More Terrifying Than Any Horror Movie" "As we've mentioned a few times before, the real world occasionally gives rise to murderers so terrifyingly crazy that if we saw them in a horror film, we would instantly write them off as utterly ridiculous B-movie cheese."

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When exposed to an exaggeration or fabrication about certain real-life occurrences or facts, some people will perceive the fictional account as being more true than any factual account.

This might lead to people acting on preconceptions about unfamiliar matters even in a life-or-death situation, or cause viewers to cry foul when things on a show work out in a way that actually is realistic, but contrary to "what everybody knows", like complaining of the "fake Scottish accent" of a real Scottish actor or about a character's death from a bullet "merely" to the shoulder.

This is known as an "Orange Box" in television and movies, named after the "black box" of airplanes which are actually orange to make them easier to spot.

Very widespread in fiction. In Real Life, it is commonly expressed as "you couldn't make it up".

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For cases in which the unrealistic thing is reality, see Aluminum Christmas Trees below. For a list detailing how unrealistic tropes can be dangerous in reality, see Television Is Trying to Kill Us.

Tropes commonly falling into this

Contrast with Uncanny Valley, where a certain amount of increased realism causes the remaining unrealistic aspects to become extremely obvious and disconcerting.

See also: Based on a Great Big Lie and Artistic License.

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Advertising

Beer commercials, 'cause tropers love their drink: You know how these always have a "beauty shot" with a glass of beer with a thick, frothy head? Beer doesn't really froth that much, but the average viewer thinks it should, so the advertisers add detergent to the beer to achieve the effect. Similarly, beer commercials are also fond of showing the head overflowing and spilling over the glass. Bartenders are told by their bar managers not to do that, as it wastes beer, and needlessly messes up the bar and the napkins. When the head overflows, you've poured too much. In the UK, there are laws ensuring that a pint of beer is really a full pint. Pint glasses in pubs always hold more than a pint - they have a line indicating where the liquid level should be, typically about a centimetre down from the actual rim of the glass, to leave room for the head. If the foam doesn't come up to the rim, your server might not have their pouring technique down, but it doesn't prove you've been short-changed. Sometimes, those mugs of beer actually are Frothy Mugs of Water. When filming, they often do this because there are issues with drinking real beer on the set. (Especially if it involves minors.) Besides, to get that beautiful head that consumers have come to expect, many a brewer have resorted to additives (for example E405, propylene glycol alginate). To get that head without those additives you have to pour the beer badly (straight into the glass, rather than down the side) or use a special foaming nozzle (once common in northern England).

Cereal commercials: The "milk" they use is actually white paint with a little bit of turpentine mixed in. Apparently, it looks thicker and more real than actual milk. Real milk under studio lighting looks transparent and bluish, and less attractive than the PVA glue or white paint that usually stands in for it. Milk also curdles quickly under hot film lights. The milk-swirling-into-coffee images were similarly mocked up, usually with white paint and treacle (or Marmite in the UK). There was at least one photographer's studio in the UK in the 1980s dedicated to this kind of phototrickery. It's also unlikely you'll get a lot of steam off freshly served food, unless it's very hot, moist food in a quite cold room. The steam you see on TV? Probably a soggy microwaved tampon.

Remember those "Ask Dr. Z" commercials for what was then Daimler-Chrysler, with the actor with an odd-looking fake mustache and goofy German accent purporting to be the company's CEO and taking customers' questions? That was the actual CEO of Daimler , and the accent and mustache are both real.

, and the accent and mustache are both real. Darker soft drinks, e.g. Coca-Cola, often have to be diluted significantly when photographed because they look too dark in their actual state.

Comic Books

Fanfic

In The Aristocats, Duchess' kittens are the ginger Toulouse, black-furred Berlioz, and snowball Marie. It should normally be impossible for such a litter to exist. All My Kittens explains this by Marie having a different father from her brothers: Marie's father was white-furred while her brother's was a fertile calico. It actually is possible for littermates to have different fathers if the queen mates with more than one tom within a certain period.

Happened to Tonks in The Awakening of a Magus. She was quite plain looking while a child, but when the She Is All Grown Up trope started kicking in, everyone assumed she was using her recently manifested Metamorphomagus abilities. She resorted to using an appearance extrapolated from her earlier looks, which is implied to be the reason for her clumsiness, due to different balance and all.

Some fans of Welcome to Night Vale can be extremely picky about racial depictions although it's a notoriously inclusive show. Both actors who have played Carlos have him speak unaccented English. Fanfic writers who have him speak Spanish or Portuguese note assuming he's Brazilian, as he was originally meant to be have been accused of otherizing and Latin Lover stereotyping, since if he spoke Spanish he'd have an accent in English. These critics have perhaps watched a little too much I Love Lucy and may never have been to Southern California, where Night Vale takes place; Hispanics routinely switch back and forth in mid-sentence and speak crisp unaccented English as Carlos does.

Music

Professional Wrestling

Radio

Horse hooves were always simulated with coconut halves in golden age radio shows, but by then, the automobile had already almost completely replaced the horse as everyday transportation, and so the common man came to think that horse hooves actually sound like coconut halves banging together. This misconception has persisted to the point that now that it would be a simple matter to digitally insert actual horse hoof sounds into film or radio or television, audiences won't believe it sounds like horse hoof sounds because they will only accept the coconut sounds. Monty Python doesn't help things either.



Sports

Tabletop Games

d20 Modern: Players and reviewers often complained about how unrealistic it was that wielding a weapon with a burst fire setting doesn't give you the effects of the game's Burst Fire feat. As the game's designers have pointed out, the point of the burst fire setting on guns is to ensure you only fire the three to five rounds in an automatic burst that have any realistic chance of actually hitting the target. If you don't know how to effectively fire an accurate burst with an automatic weapon, this setting won't make it any easier. This game got this in a lot of respects. Many players and reviewers compained about how a submachine gun could easily kill a character in the early levels of the game (where the median hitpoints could be around 7 or 8 at first level and a submachine gun could deal 2d6 (2-12)). The logic on why this was bad? Because SMGs shoot 'little pistol bullets' and everyone knows from movies those only wound you, not kill you.

The Dragon Magazine article "Illusions of Grandeur " proposed a Spectral Farce spell weaponizing this. It makes things in the affected area to be perceived as less believable, whether they are real or not. Of course, in this case Illusion/Phantasm magic aura actually helps the effect if detected. The whole point is that a harmless spell becomes ridiculously lethal once the victims disregard as "fake and tacky" something like a swooping dragon — or even a badly disguised trap.

" proposed a Spectral Farce spell weaponizing this. It makes things in the affected area to be perceived as less believable, whether they are real or not. Of course, in this case Illusion/Phantasm magic aura actually helps the effect if detected. The whole point is that a harmless spell becomes ridiculously lethal once the victims disregard as "fake and tacky" something like a swooping dragon — or even a badly disguised trap. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition tries to head off arguments over this trope from either direction with a sidebar in the intro that notes that yes the rules are abstract and not totally realistic for the sake of ease of play and fun, and that, "Should anyone start querying the rules, citing martial arts training, historical precedent, or even, Gods forbid, logic, the GM is fully within their rights to throw dice, food, or even this book at the offender. WFRP is a game, not real life."

House rules are the bread & butter of Tabletop RPGs, but they also show how pervasive this trope is. Those who read an AD&D newsgroup or a forum for several years probably reflexively laugh from hearing or seeing the word "realistic". Or at least grin, remembering some "realistic" accomplishments that good rules absolutely have to make possible. Let's say, shooting a squirrel in the eye with a longbow (yes) is not nearly the worst. Conversely, the foreword by Rich Baker to a Players' Options book (that derived some of its parts from internet house rules) set it straight on the very first page: The Combat & Tactics book is a compromise that adds some detail to combat — not to make it more realistic, but to make combat more believable.

Theatre

The Bonnie and Clyde musical was, if historians are anything to go by, the most accurate fictional depiction of the infamous duo to date. The entire first act was devoted to backstory, and details like Clyde's traumatic experience in prison and the unpleasant nature of their life on the run were left in where the 1960s movie omitted them. Critics panned the show for being boring and nothing like the movie; it only ran about a month.

Lin-Manuel Miranda said in the Alexander Hamilton episode of Drunk History that he explicitly removed things from Hamilton because audiences would find them unrealistic.

Frankie Valli lost two daughters within six months of each other, the first in a fall from a fire escape, and the second to a drug overdose. The play and film Jersey Boys depicted only the second, because showing both would have appeared contrived and melodramatic.

Natalie Portman was punished by some for doing her homework when she starred as Anne Frank on Broadway. Some sources outside the diary suggest Frank was something of a brat, but when Portman incorporated this into her performances, some patrons and critics couldn't accept it.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: In-universe, The Player mentions that he once arranged to have one of his actors who was supposed to be executed hanged on-stage during their next show. It was terribly unconvincing.

A line ended up removed from the musical 1776 because of this trope: John Adams claimed that if they allowed slavery in America, trouble would happen a hundred years hence. That was actually claimed by the real Samuel Adams (John's cousin) but the writer knew people would just attribute it to historical hindsight by him and removed it. Otherwise, the musical was pretty accurate. Of course, Roger Ebert claimed that it was an unrealistic portrayal and an insult to the founding fathers.

The Sound of Music: Many people will scoff at the idea of landlocked Austria having a navy, and, as a corollary, find Captain von Trapp's past as a submarine commander ludicrous. In reality, pre-World War I Austria-Hungary controlled a large part of the Adriatic Sea coast, and had a small but well-trained and well-equipped navy to keep their blue-water ports open. Captain von Trapp, in the meantime, earned his stripes as a midshipman in China helping to put down the Boxer Rebellion, commanded two submarines during World War I (U-5 and U-14), sank an Italian sub and a French armored cruiser and was Austro-Hungary's most decorated Navy officer after the war. Incidentally, he also angsted over the German offer of a submarine command a lot longer in real life than the musical; after having been a naval officer without a navy for two decades, the offer of a top-of-the-line submarine command was sorely tempting to him.

Visual Novels

Ace Attorney: In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the first victim is killed with a glass bottle to the forehead, leading to people to question why it didn't shatter, leaving it to be presented in court intact (made worse by the fact that the series is based on finding such contradictions, but asking this in game isn't an option and a previous game in the series featured a bottle that broke when someone was hit non-lethally). Glass is not as fragile as depicted in Hollywood, and the process used to make the bottle (of which there are several) and the quality and amount of material used are a factor. In fact, the non-lethal broken bottle from the previous game was likely a cheaper product, and was non-lethal because it broke, which absorbed a significant amount of the energy involved, while the unbroken bottle would have transferred more energy into the skull, thus causing more damage. The common misconception of Soft Glass exists because scenes where glass is broken don't use real glass  they used to use "sugar glass" (essentially, flat rock candy), and now just use a plastic "breakaway glass". The entire series falls into this, for most people. The Japanese legal system is represented in game in an exaggerated and outright over the top fashion but it is represented nonetheless. Ask the average player of the games and they'll tell you that the legal system of the Ace Attorney world is so unrealistically absurd that it borderlines over the top. But in reality, the only thing that's not true to real life, is the contents of the cases themselves and how fast-paced and twisty the trials are. The laws, trial procedures, treatment of the defense, and "guilty until proven innocent" motto are all in fact true to the Japanese Bench System, which the games are based on. The act of calling a parrot to the stand in the first game seems ridiculous (the person who brings it up as a possibility does so to mock Phoenix), for good reason, but in actuality, such a thing has happened in real life trials before, and the idea of using words a parrot can speak as legal evidence is something that has happened before. The absurd part is how the game presents it in the context of such a serious moment in a murder trial, along with the way the parrot's cross-examination is treated in the same manner as that of an ordinary person's, rather then how it would realistically be if you were to use a parrot's understanding of human language as proof. One of the cases, Turnabout Big Top, is considered the worst among fans, with one of the reasons being the absurd coincidences which answer a lot of the cases riddles. Such as- how did a witness, Moe, see the defendant fly away? The killer, Acro, who just happened to have an exact murder plot which involved dropping a heavy object out a window, used a random object that his monkey pet has in his stash, which just happened to be a bust of the defendant, Max Galactica. And the victim, the ringmaster, just happened to wear the defendant's clothes, and when the bust fell onto him, the defendant's cloak just happened to fly forward off him and snag onto the bust. Then the killer pulled the bust on a rope back up. So when the witness looked out the window, it was only by an absurd string of coincidences that he saw the defendant's silhouette 'flying' upwards as the killer pulled the bust up . And it was also only by these absurd coincidences that the defendant ended up being the prime suspect. In actual fact though, what's not realistic is the typical murder plots seen in Ace Attorney where everything's completely planned out. If anything, this case is one that'd be more likely to happen in real life then most. The regular judge in the series is portrayed often as a feeble-minded old man, who has trouble keeping up with the proceedings. However, you'll often see people lumping moments in which the judge asks for clarification over a specific thing that he should already know about as a judge, or something that anyone should know, into being part of this character trait. For example, he asks Edgeworth to explain exactly what he means, when he says that the defendant has lost her chance of escaping criminality for her killing. Note The victim had attacked the defendant, so justified self-defense was at first thought likely. But the autopsy concluded that the victim was struck twice, and that the first blow knocked him unconscious. So the second, killing blow, was delivered to someone the defendant knew had already been fully immobilized. In fact, this is a realistic and common thing for judges to do during a trial, and they're very often quoted as asking for clarification on what something rather common place is, or for a legal dispute to be given more clarity or put into more simplistic wording. This is mainly for the sake of those in the courtroom such as the jurors, and the actual sides involved in the case, as well as the gallery, who may not understand what is being talked about. As stated on the show QI: Stephen: Judges have to make sure that absolutely everything in the course of the trial is abundantly clear to everyone in the courtroom, particularly the members of the jury. So judges often ask for such clarification on behalf of everyone else, because you never know when there's that one woman who's been living in a cave for the last hundred years and honestly doesn't know who The Rolling Stones are. That's why you often see judges being quoted as asking stuff like, "So, what exactly is a Muppet ?". Uendo Toneido from Spirit of Justice. You'll often see people bring up "unrealistic" aspects of Uendo's multiple personality disorder , such as how he has four personalities, how one of his personalities is a different gender, the fact that all but one share the same memories and switch in when they feel like it, and that his "child" personality who thinks himself five years old comes out whenever he passes out drunk . As others rightfully point out however, this is probably one of the most accurate depictions of your typical dissociative identity disorder in fiction. spoilers Although it might be unusual to have this many aspects piled together for one sufferer, it is far from unlikely. Differing genders, being in "dissonant" (aka, not in control but still conscious and aware) while other personalities are in control), hidden personalities that other altars do not know about, differing ages between personalities, and even the idea of a certain altar appearing when someone gets drunk, are all, in fact, common aspects of DID The typical Split Personality (one "normal/good" personality, and one "evil" personality who share seperate memories)



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