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

— Tom King, novelist "The truth about stories is that's all we are."

Things happen because the plot says they should.

All fictional realities have this underlying principle to one degree or another. It is the reason Plot Technology and Plot Armor work. It's why The Good Guys Always Win in the end, even though many individuals may try and fail and die gruesomely before the plot relevant good guys comes along. It's why it seems like the world's out to get the protagonist, it's why the reasonable explanation is almost never true, it's why someone can be Genre Savvy or Wrong Genre Savvy, why a trope can be invoked, why a Million-to-One Chance crops up nine times out of ten and why it's never a good idea to Tempt Fate. Reality itself is mutable before the will of the plot. In stories where this is strong, tropes may as well be laws of physics.

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Another way to look at it is that amazing things don't happen to the Main Characters because they're the main characters — rather, they're the main characters because amazing things happen to them. If they weren't remarkable people with remarkable feats and tales to their name, there wouldn't be a story about them and you wouldn't be hearing it in the first place.

Or, an even shorter way to look at it, the reason something happens is that the story is better if that something happens (it wouldn't be much of a story without it).

Alternatively, think of the principle laid out in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, in which this phenomenon is not only an explicit physical law but has been codified, studied, tested, found to be an in-universe element ("narrativium") and may be the local equivalent of the strong nuclear force, although the term Narrative Causality is older than that.

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Warning: This law may not apply if you've found a missing shaggy dog.

See also: The Laws of Magic, The Plot Demanded This Index, The Chris Carter Effect, Watsonian versus Doylist

Examples

Due to the omnipresence of this trope, please limit examples to in-universe references or Lampshade Hangings of the principle.

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In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio "The Holy Terror", the entire society the story is set in is built around these principles, its Deadly Decadent Court modelled after a collection of Shakespearean cliché elevated to the point of ritual - for instance, queens must always give birth to two sons, a good but gentle older son and a corrupt and disfigured younger son, and the law of succession is such that when the king dies, the older son is instated as king and the younger son will betray and assassinate him and succeed him as the rightful heir. This at first seems like laws instated upon this world, until the Wham Line when the Doctor, who is attempting to escape with a seemingly helpful character, tells that character that he knows he'll betray him "because you're a stereotype". Told his role in the story is to be the person who seems helpful but betrays the heroes when pressed, the character attempts to defy this characterisation but is powerless against it, revealing that the particular universe is actually a story built as a prison for one of the characters and narrative causality is necessary to keep it on the rails.

The radio version of the That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch "Are We The Baddies?" has an SS officer, already concerned that the skulls embroidered all over his black uniform generally lack positive connotations, worriedly begin to realise that the course of the Second World War has begun to resemble the plot of every Underdogs Never Lose movie he's ever seen, that the Allies are in the position of 'underdogs', and he's never actually seen a story where the good guys start off strong, have a few setbacks, and then go on to win anyway: "I'm just increasingly worried about our place in the narrative structure of this war..."

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