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Centipede's Dilemma
- 511 statements
- 97 feature instances
- 73 referencing feature instances
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A trope named for the folk tale poem about a centipede who had no trouble walking until asked how he managed all those legs. He started thinking about the process and immediately became unable to do it anymore. In psychology the effect is known as as "hyper-reflection" or "Humphrey's law" after psychologist George Humphrey who wrote about the poem's profoundness in 1923. Often encountered during the Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game, when one player attempts to induce a dilemma in his (usually winning) opponent by asking, "Do you breathe in or out on the backswing?" That said, this can show up in any context featuring a complex activity that requires one "get into the flow". If this is attempted on a group of people simultaneously, it may lead into someone biting into the Apple of Discord. If done in works with Shapeshifting, it may lead to Stumbling in the New Form — after all, moving your body can suddenly become difficult if you think too hard about it, so imagine how much harder it would be if it's not your normal body you're trying to move. The flip side of this trope is Autopilot Artistry, for when someone starts to succeed at something as soon as they stop paying attention. Compare with Achievements in Ignorance, Acting Unnatural, Damn You, Muscle Memory!, Don't Think, Feel, Magnum Opus Dissonance, Paralysis by Analysis, Performance Anxiety, Puff of Logic, You Were Trying Too Hard, Thought-Aversion Failure, Reminder of Impossibility, and There Is No Try. Don't Look Down can result in this, if the person was doing fine beforehand and being told not to look down causes them to look. Should not be confused with The Human Centipede. Or even with the Creepy Centipedes, which are much more likely to give you a dilemma. Warning! Reading the examples below may cause you to have similar problems. |
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| Centipede's Dilemma / int_15c6ea11 | type |
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Wonder Woman (1942): Gail Young's telepathy starts to break down the more she thinks about it, which is why she wears a blindfold or closes her eyes to concentrate to in order to cut down on even more distractions and explains why she didn't realize Cheetah was lying to her face while badgering her into using her telepathy to spy for her. | |
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Wonder Woman (1987): Cassie's first few outing with Hermes' flying sandals work out great, until she goes for a practice flight and starts questioning how they work which also causes her to fear falling from her incredible height which causes the things to stop functioning until she stops overthinking things. She only survives because she's accompanied by an adult with impressive innate Not Quite Flight abilities. She gets the hang of using them just by instinct pretty quick, and shortly thereafter her power limiters are removed which allows her to fly without them. | |
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Cliff discusses this on an episode of The Cosby Show when Clair breaks her toe and is holding her cane in the wrong hand. He demonstrates how people naturally walk and how awkward it would be for her if she didn't switch hands. | |
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In The Baby-Sitters Club book "Mallory Hates Boys (and Gym)", when Mal's name is called to be on one of the volleyball teams and she starts jogging over to her teammates she suddenly becomes very conscious of her arms. | |
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Near the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the game starts deconstructing itself as a mechanism for simulated emotional responses and player catharsis. An AI construct, in a lengthy radio conversation, spends ten minutes dissecting the postmodern condition, the player character's personality, and his role as a vehicle for the player. The player is left to wonder what the point of fighting is if he's just being manipulated by the game and its fictional stakes. | |
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In Parks and Recreation, Leslie tries to affect a laid-back stance while at a campaign stop. Ann suggests that she just stand like she normally does; however, this causes Leslie to forget how to stand altogether. | |
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An episode of Beavis and Butt-Head has the boys forget how to urinate after thinking too hard about how to do it. | |
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In the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mikey tries to fight without thinking (he's normally a natural), only to discover he can't, as he winds up "thinking about not thinking". | |
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Spacetrawler. Emily deliberately invokes it. | |
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One of the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon stories by Spider Robinson is actually titled "The Centipede's Dilemma". In it, a character with a dangerous psychic ability is defeated and rendered powerless by using this technique. | |
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Every time Abel Hopton overthinks in Grent's Fall, something goes wrong. | |
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Fullmetal Alchemist: People who get automail limbs have to relearn how to use those limbs and get used to things like not having any tactile sensation in them. Ed is shown going through this in a few flashbacks, and Paninya explicitly says that she pretty much had to learn how to walk all over again. Truth in Television; people with prosthetics go through those exact issues and it can take years to fully adjust. | |
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In The King's Speech, Lionel Logue points out that this is Bertie's problem (though it's a significant problem and not easily surmounted) by having him recorded reading Hamlet while listening to music that makes it impossible for him to hear himself. It's not until much later, after getting drunk and dismissing Logue as a crackpot, that Bertie listens to the recording... and hears himself speaking without a stutter for the first time in his life. | |
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Monster Rancher: One episode has Genki run headlong into this when he decides that they need to strategize more during battles. So he comes up with a bunch of plans and tactics ahead of time, frantically flipping through his notes trying to determine the best moves... which naturally proves to cause more problems than it solves. | |
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In Community, when Jeff becomes a law teacher, he spends a lot of time confused about what he's supposed to do and is unable to actually teach, falling back on lazy excuse assignments to give his students. After his students watch him successfully Logic Bomb Annie with her own thought process, they ask him how he managed to pull that off and he winds up accidentally teaching a lecture on how to win an argument in that manner. | |
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Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman (1942): Gail Young's telepathy starts to break down the more she thinks about it, which is why she wears a blindfold or closes her eyes to concentrate to in order to cut down on even more distractions and explains why she didn't realize Cheetah was lying to her face while badgering her into using her telepathy to spy for her. Wonder Woman (1987): Cassie's first few outing with Hermes' flying sandals work out great, until she goes for a practice flight and starts questioning how they work which also causes her to fear falling from her incredible height which causes the things to stop functioning until she stops overthinking things. She only survives because she's accompanied by an adult with impressive innate Not Quite Flight abilities. She gets the hang of using them just by instinct pretty quick, and shortly thereafter her power limiters are removed which allows her to fly without them. |
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Harry Potter: In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets we learn that, when interacting with snakes, Harry has been speaking to them via Parseltongue without realizing it. Later, when he needs to use it without a real snake around to trigger it, he has a much harder time doing so. Later, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore takes Harry to view a memory involving a family called the Gaunts. Harry fails to realize the Gaunts speak in Parseltongue until it's pointed out to him. |
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Deverry: Cullyn, acknowledged as the best swordsman in Deverry, is training Rhodry how to better his swordmanship, by going through the motions very, very slowly. Rhodry reflects on how hard it is to manage the sword properly when you have to think about each movement, rather than doing it instinctively -but he's also far more aware of how each step fits into the whole of using a sword.note Cullyn's daughter is able to beat men several years her senior in combat. | |
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Dilbert: Bored, Dilbert contemplates the connection between his mind and body and forgets how to move. Parodied with another series where Dilbert loses the connection between effort and reward and realizes that he still gets paid if he stands around flicking his fingers. Eventually the entire office is doing it, and the boss thinks to himself "I don't know what success sounds like, but I don't think this is it." Also happens to Ratbert once when Dogbert muses on how we unconsciously manage incredibly complex nervous signals to move our muscles; stopping to think about it, he immediately goes into a spasming fit as a Funny Background Event. |
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In Guardian, Yuna subconsciously walks on water, demonstrating Summoner talent, but she falls in once she realizes the others are watching. | |
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In Walter Brooks's Freddy the Pig series, at one point a beetle came to Freddy saying he couldn't walk anymore, since every time he tried he got distracted by where his legs were and tripped. Freddy had him stare at the ceiling while he walked, and it worked. | |
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| Centipede's Dilemma / int_415739bf | comment |
In the second chapter of A Delicate Balance, after Twilight Sparkle realizes that she has a crush on Applejack, she makes a determined effort to act as normal as possible around her, and fails precisely because she's thinking too hard about what she should be doing. Another scene has a distracted Twilight pick up a cup with her hooves rather than with her telekinesis. She manages just fine until she realizes that she's holding it that way, at which point she promptly spills it. | |
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In The Dresden Files book Ghost Story, a newly-formed ghost (Harry) is in a car when a comment from Mortimer Lindquist makes him realize there is a logical flaw in the fact that he can walk through walls, but is sitting here in a car. Before he can even complete the thought, he's fallen through the bottom of the car. A more experienced ghost drags him back up and explains this trope. | |
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SCP Foundation: SCP #1475 is a person who created and took a drug that allows him to use 100% of his brain, giving him complete control over his body to the point where he made his brain rewire itself to remove the need for sleep. The downside? Everything his body used to do automatically, he now has to do manually, such has pumping blood through his veins or digesting food. This takes so much of his concentration that he's left bedridden and unable to move. | |
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Rhythm of War has a variant. The Sibling doesn't actually know how it is able to generate Towerlight or control the tower-city of Urithiru, it simply does so (much like a human child can move its arm without understanding the mechanics or biochemistry involved). Which becomes a problem when a metaphysical catastrophe causes the Sibling's powers to stop working, and the heroes have to try and figure out how to restore them. | |
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Garfield: There's a strip where Jon asks Garfield which way he puts his feet down when he walked. Garfield is then paralyzed. In "The Me Book", Garfield suggests an extremely subtle version for ruining someone's golf swing, in which he instructs the reader to tell the golfer, "Think about your right hip." |
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King of the Hill: An episode has Peggy, Dale, and Minh secretly using Bill's interests and likes as an example of what to invest in on the stock market. When being used as an oblivious test monkey, Bill's a money-making machine. When he finds out and is actively trying to impress them, he begins second guessing himself and the results falter and fail. Dale name-drops the Observer Effect to explain. | |
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Discworld: Referenced in A Hat Full of Sky. Miss Level once had this trope described to her by an acrobat: "Never ask the tightrope walker how he keeps his balance. If he stops to think about it, he falls off." This principle helped her out later on. This was proven on a Derren Brown show, where he asked an experienced tightrope walker stuff like that, and repeatedly told him not to fall off. Guess what happened next. | |
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In The Elenium, by David Eddings, Sephrenia, a Styric, steadfastly refuses to learn to read the Ehlene language at all. When one of the Ehlenes asks her why, since being able to read the language would make some things much easier for her, she replies that to learn to read Ehlene, she would need to learn to think in it as well, and she doesn't want to risk that she would then at some point have to stop and remember how to think in Styric when she needs to. | |
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Brooklyn Nine-Nine: At a shooting range, Terry, who hasn't shot a gun since he relegated himself to a desk job, becomes frustrated with Gina and shoots seven shots with no problem. When Holt and Gina reveal that the real reason they're there is to get him recertified and that he just needs one more shot to get his license back, he starts freaking out and can't bring himself to shoot the last one. | |
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A Girl and Her Fed: Psychic healer Smithback tried to pass his knowledge to Hope (The Girl). But Hope's traditional medical training interfered with her understanding of Smithback's techniques, to the point where they stopped the healing lessons. | |
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In Kung Fu Panda, Po is utterly incapable of performing any kind of kung fu. He can, however, punch through doors and do perfect splits while trying to get food. Fitting the original usage of the trope, the moment it's pointed out to him he's ten feet off the ground he falls flat on his face. | |
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Referenced in No Country for Old Men. The narrator recalls a ballplayer saying that if he had a slight injury nagging at him, his game generally improved, as it kept his mind focused on one thing instead of a hundred. | |
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Sketch Comedy: Perhaps starting your webcomic off on the wrong foot is better than starting it off on no foot at all. | |
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In The Young Ones, after some incredibly mean-spirited negative vibe-merchant boards Neil's bedroom up, meaning he can't get to his wardrobe, Neil is forced to protect his modesty using a plant pot. The plant pot incredibly manages to stay on without any visible means of support...until Rik asks him how he's keeping the plant pot on? | |
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In xkcd, Black Hat Guy invokes this by telling someone that it is Tongue Awareness Month. The Alt Text includes a Shout-Out to the Peanuts example above. | |
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Parodied in Poker Night 2 when Sam asks Claptrap how he balances on one wheel. Claptrap starts wobbling and panicking...and then laughs, explaining he's got "More gyroscopes than the Hubble." | |
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Inferior Five: In an comic that parodied the X-Men, the equivalent of Archangel is shown wearing a sweater. Naturally, one of the Five asks him how he puts on a sweater over his wings. The poor mutant loses it because, now that he's thought about it, he'll never be able to do it again. | |
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Julia from Think Before You Think tends to have this problem. | |
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In Of Quirks and Magic, Izuku struggles to take his first steps to learn magic because he's constantly trying to control it rather than letting it flow through him. He only gets even more frustrated when Strange tries to teach him with a river metaphor and that the best way to control magic was to surrender control of it. To prove his point, Strange decides to lock Izuku in an infinitely long hallway flooded with water, forcing him to surrender control to make a portal or drown trying. | |
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Cerebus the Aardvark: The titular aardvark tries to win a ball game using this trope, asking if he breathes in or out when tossing the ball. Cut to panel of his panicked partner contemplating it. Cut to panel showing said partner having won and saying, "I breathe out!" | |
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In one episode of The Flintstones, when the Flintstones and Rubbles went out, Barney took Fred out to a skating rink, with the latter stating he didn't know how to skate. After Barney quipped that Fred needed to go on a diet, Fred angrily chased him across the rink. Barney then called attention to Fred skating, causing him to realize what he was doing, resulting in him falling down and crashing into a wall. | |
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Girl Genius: A very rough side sketch of Agatha and Borris has Agatha asking if he ever has trouble keeping track of his extra arms, and he replied only when people ask about it and make him self conscious. | |
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Also played with in an episode where Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd meet as small children. Elmer runs off a cliff, and Bugs tries to make him fall by pointing out that gravity should pull him down. It doesn't work, because Elmer is just a little kid and hasn't learned what gravity is yet. Bugs is later kind enough to provide him with a definition. | |
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Harry refuses to share the secret behind the Patronus V.2, because it is unlikely that the majority of people would be able to reach the mental state necessary, and attempting it could destroy their own ability to cast normal Patronuses. | |
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In the Murdoch Mysteries episode "A Case of the Yips", Murdoch briefly becomes obsessed with golf, and invents a machine that should train someone for the perfect swing. It doesn't help him, and ruins the game of the club champion. Then Dr Ogden performs a perfect drive and, when asked if she was focusing on the ball or the club, says she wasn't really thinking about anything. This advice saves the champion, but the cerebral Murdoch finds it impossible to follow, and the episode ends with him throwing his clubs in the lake. | |
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30 Rock: Kenneth tries to ask Liz a question, but she is in a hurry so he responds "Can you walk and talk at the same time?" Kenneth: "Well, normally I can, but now you've got me thinking about it" and he immediately starts staggering and slurring his words for a few paces. Jack in "Jack-Tor", who forgets how to walk, hold his arms, or enunciate words when the camera is on him. |
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RuPaul's Drag Race: Season 5 contestant Alyssa Edwards became a fan-favorite due to her Large Ham personality making her a Fountain of Memes. But whenever she specifically has to be funny for a comedic challenge, she gets stuck in her head and the jokes never land, which ultimately leads to her elimination. Kennedy Davenport made a name for herself in Season 7 as the best dancer in the cast. When she reappeared in All-Stars 3, the queens had to imitate various pop divas for a challenge and Kennedy is assigned Janet Jackson for seemingly-obvious reasons. However, Kennedy struggles with the challenge and admits that she's more used to dancing off-the-cuff rather than following a choreographed routine. |
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My Hero Academia: While training under an Old Master, Izuku Midoriya has an epiphany that makes him realize that a lot of the issues he's had with controlling the Super-Strength of his Quirk One For All stemmed from this trope. Having grown up Quirkless and gaining One For All as a teenager, he viewed his power as Too Awesome to Use while his classmates have had their powers since kindergarten and use them as naturally as they breathe. That Old Master also mentally notes that this is an issue with All Might and his instruction of Midoriya in One For All's use. All Might took to One For All far more easily than Midoriya did, and it shows in how he trains his student. The use of One For All came so naturally to All Might that his explanations to Midoriya are generally vague and less useful than they should be because he doesn't realize it isn't coming very naturally to Midoriya. |
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Implied to be the case with Lightning McQueen in Cars 3. His preoccupation with beating Jackson Storm is clouding his judgment and lowering his concentration, affecting both his racing and his training. However, when he accidentally enters a demolition derby and is forced to concentrate, he manages to weave his way through the chaos without a single scratch. Doc's old mentor Smokey points this out to him later on: | |
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In Family Matters, this happened as Carl was trying to teach Steve how to swim. Steve actually began to do really well... that is until Carl pointed out that he was in the deep end. This did, however cause Carl to realize that Steve simply needed not to think about what he was doing, so he had Laura fall in and pretend to be drowning. Steve jumped in and tried to rescue her. | |
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In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets we learn that, when interacting with snakes, Harry has been speaking to them via Parseltongue without realizing it. Later, when he needs to use it without a real snake around to trigger it, he has a much harder time doing so. | |
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Bob's Burgers: In "The Fresh Princ-ipal", Teddy begins asking Bob how he is able to flip burgers so well, causing Bob to immediately screw up once he starts thinking about it. Teddy is frequently prone to this. Give him a task (outside his capabilities as a handyman) and he will make it overly complicated or outright fail at it, only to then comment on how simple it was when he does figure it out. He'll then ask why no one pointed this out when he asked. |
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Case Closed: An Asshole Victim ruined the career of a promising young pitcher by (falsely) claiming that there was something wrong with his pitch, after which the poor kid destroyed his own shoulder trying to figure out what was wrong. Another victim died when her murderer induced semantic satiation on the word containing her last name, and then asked her to sign an important contract. (The poison was carefully applied to the edges of the dictionary that the victim would touch upon looking up the word.) |
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Archie Comics: In one story, Jughead beats Reggie at bowling by tricking him into actually focusing on the mechanics of play (e.g. how many steps he takes during windup, the ergonomics of the bowling ball) instead of just playing. | |
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Tintin: In The Red Sea Sharks, Captain Haddock is unable to sleep after Allan mockingly asks him if he sleeps with his beard under or above the covers. This ends up saving his life and those of everyone on the ship. (Captain Haddock is shown to sleep on his stomach in Tintin and the Picaros.) | |
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Futurama: Leela has issues with depth perception, but only if someone's just asked her how she can perceive depth with only one eye. | |
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The Saint of Steel: The perfumer Grace has been burgled, with her extensive and painstakingly researched notebooks on the creation of perfumes stolen. When she attempts to continue her work, she begins by working on muscle memory, but quickly begins second-guessing herself and overthinking to the point that she cannot work at all; wondering if it was seven drops in a particular recipe, how big the drops should be, if seven is even a number... | |
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In the Modesty Blaise novel I, Lucifer, Lucifer has no martial training, but is able to defeat Modesty in single combat because he can instinctively see what she's about to do and always has the counter ready. In the rematch, Modesty trips him up by getting him to consciously think about how he's predicting her moves, which stops him doing it effectively. | |
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In the Revenge of the Sith novelization, Anakin is dominating in his duel against Count Dooku until Dooku realizes that Anakin is unconsciously calling on The Dark Side. Dooku taunts Anakin over the anger in his heart and his fear of said anger, causing Anakin to worry about controlling his anger, ruining his ability to fight. He's even compared to the Corellian multipede. | |
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In the Paradox Trilogy, Devi is able to subconsciously resist Evelyn's plasmex telekinesis until Evelyn points out to her that she's resisting. This causes Devi to realize that she doesn't know exactly how she's resisting it, which makes her resistance immediately fail. | |
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In Tallyho, the fox experiences this when Siegfried the hound points out that foxes can't climb trees. | |
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In Bull Durham, the hot young pitcher has no control when he thinks about what he's doing, and his catcher exploits this, goading him into throwing a fastball right at his chest from five feet away, and he misses. His girlfriend makes him wear garters under his uniform, and he's so twisted around thinking about how uncomfortable he is that he pitches beautifully. | |
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Jade Empire: Wonderfully referenced when you ask Kang how he manages to remotely pilot the Marvelous Dragonfly from the ground. | |
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Peanuts: Similarly, in a storyline Linus is asked how he tied his shoes, and he has to go barefoot for the rest of the week. |
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The Heroes of Olympus: In book one, Leo Valdez, as a son of Hephaestus, has the ability to operate any piece of machinery. When he needs to fly a helicopter, he is explicitly described as going back-and-forth between doing things right without thinking about them and doing things wrong by thinking about them. | |
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Invoked in-universe in Divine Divinity. The Player Character encounters a pair of skeletal mooks discussing the inherent Fridge Logic of their design, like how they really shouldn't be able to speak, walk, or even stay assembled without any muscle mass, skin, tendons, or internal organs. It eventually causes them to fall to pieces. | |
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In the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series it is possible to fly, as long as you don't think about the fact that you're flying. It's not terribly hard — all you have to do is throw yourself at the ground and miss. (The only way to miss is to distract yourself, somehow, right in the instant before you hit the ground.) Once flying, though, it becomes vitally important not to let yourself become aware of the impossibility of the act, e.g. through a passer-by helpfully pointing this out, because they will be proved suddenly and painfully correct. | |
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Lampshaded at least once in Tiny Toon Adventures — they can walk on air across a canyon as long as they don't look down. | |
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SpongeBob SquarePants: "Pickles" has SpongeBob forgetting how to "assemble" a Krabby Patty after a rival (falsely) tells him he forgot the pickles; exaggerated in that he becomes so confused and nervous that he can't do ANYTHING right. It comes to a point where he tells Mr. Krabs that he cannot do it while saying the steps, then realizing he did just that.note He actually says different steps than he does in the beginning of the episode. Either this was a directorial goof, or, more likely, all that really mattered was that the ingredients were still the same. When Squidward repeatedly fails to win anything from a crane machine in "Skill Crane", he becomes so obsessed with it that any activity that involves picking something up, like a glass, became impossible for him to do. |
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El Goonish Shive: When transformed into a girl, Justin initially has trouble walking because he tries to compensate for the new body... until he's told that he just shouldn't think about it, since the transformation gun already compensates. In another comic, Elliot discussed this trope, once again in regards to walking while transformed into a girl. He predictably promptly falls victim to it himself. |
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Beetle Bailey: What do you do with your arms when you're walking? Mort Walker was nice enough to show a character walking before thinking about this and swinging them in the opposite order from how he moved his legs so that the reader didn't have to face the puzzle. | |
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Invoked by Yuna in Final Fantasy X. At the Farplane, Yuna tells Tidus to think about his father, Jecht, to see whether or not Jecht is still alive. As Tidus himself notes in his narration, trying not to think about Jecht, of course, makes Tidus think about him. | |
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This Bites!: Merry warns Sanji that he'll get a unholy beating from her if the Bags Of Holding that connect to her hold stop working because he asked her how it worked. | |
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My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Twilight Sparkle constantly overthinks on things. The episode "Lesson Zero" once had her only give a baker's dozen of cupcakes with only a drip oi frosting just to avoid a mere inconvenience of any other cupcakes getting more frosting than the rest. Starlight Glimmer also has a problem with overthinking, like when trying to make friends with Big MacIntosh or Mrs. Cake, she tries to use her magic to get on their good side, but it ends up backfiring on her. |
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In Chapter 8 of the fanfic It Takes a Village Spike finally figures out how to fly. He immediately makes it clear that no-one is to ask him how he managed it, otherwise he might forget. | |
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Level 30 Psychiatry has The Scolipede's Dilema, where Audino questions Gardevoir's ability to stand on such small feet. She proceeds to crash immediately into the ground. | |
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Referenced in The Last Samurai. Nathan Algren's training fights always end quickly (and with him sporting a fresh bruise), until Nobutada explains that Algren has "too many mind — mind the sword, mind the people watching, mind your enemy. Too many mind. No mind." Notable in that this is legitimate advice and something many martial arts schools teach. It does, indeed, work like a charm, but you're far more likely to hit your sparring partner harder than you should. | |
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Buddy Telemachus from Spoonbenders has visions of certain, dramatic events happening that can't be averted, but he can control the context of the vision and try to avert disaster, but he's so worried that every action/inaction he takes could lead to things spiraling to disaster that it has rendered him a passive observer of his own life. He tries communicating this to Frankie by giving him a book on Chaos theory, but Frankie just thinks he wants it read to him. | |
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In Amazing Fantasy, Izuku's neuroticism hampers his attempts to learn how to use his web-shooters, missing by a longshot after spending several seconds trying to aim at a still target. Once he stops worrying about the minute details and goes with the flow, he finds that both web-slinging and web-swinging come to him more naturally. | |
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Death Blow of Abernanit, an in-universe poem from The Elder Scrolls franchise, ends with a duel between the heroes Rangidil and Dagoth Thras. Throughout the fight, Thras puts up an almost perfect defence, effortlessly deflecting every attack Rangidil tries to land, and plans to exhaust Rangidil in order to make him an easy kill. When Rangadil asks how he became so good with a shield, Thras hesitates for a moment and realises he can't put his skills into words, and Rangidil, sensing a moment of confusion, finally manages to land a killing blow. | |
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In Lost World, Tom narrates that he hates thinking about doing basic things such as talking and reading because he usually loses his ability to do them in the process. At this point, he's still getting used to being in control of his body again. | |
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In Pokémon: The Series, Ash tends to screw up battles if he actually tries to get a long-term strategy together beforehand instead of using off-the-cuff tactics as he normally does. In his Gym battle with Elesa, Pikachu had to shock him out of thinking too much about it when he was on the verge of losing, rerailing him into his normal battle style and making a comeback. | |
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The trope is, in fact, the basis for an entire genre of QWOP-like games such as Surgeon Simulator 2013, Octodad and Manual Samuel, which purposefully overcomplicate basic movement by forcing the player to consider motor functions that would otherwise be handled completely subconsciously in real-life, and automatically in other video games. | |
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In The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, only those who enter the wardrobe when they're not looking for Narnia actually wind up there. | |
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In Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, the more you think about the logistics of time travel while traveling through time, the more likely you are to retroactively cause a disaster. Commander Badass has found that using an Ice-Cream Koan to distract people works well. | |
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In Sticky Dilly Buns, Dillon uses this effect to prove a point to Ruby. | |
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anti-HEROES: Kaalinor can ride in a cart as long as he's not thinking too much about it. But since he's a ghost, once he starts questioning it... the moving cart goes right through him. | |
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This concept underlies the flash game QWOP, in which the player controls his character's legs with a keyboard. This makes the action of running, or even walking, almost impossible, despite it being second nature in real life. This is part because the game has four commands that denote movement of each thigh and each lower leg individually to move. Until you develop a rhythm instead of trying to conceptualize coordinating these movements in relation to each other, you will keep getting out of sync. The trope is, in fact, the basis for an entire genre of QWOP-like games such as Surgeon Simulator 2013, Octodad and Manual Samuel, which purposefully overcomplicate basic movement by forcing the player to consider motor functions that would otherwise be handled completely subconsciously in real-life, and automatically in other video games. |
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In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Mirielle's superpower allows her to visualise the relationships between people as strings that she can then interact with. However, this causes her to frequently trip over them. She realises that she can avoid this by not thinking about them, thus not causing them to physically manifest... but trying not to think about the strings naturally leads to her thinking about them. | |
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In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Watson uses this to find Moriarty’s assassin in the climax; the guy has spent so much time perfecting his disguise as a partygoer that the acting comes naturally to him... until Watson does something completely random (knocking a bunch of drinks to the floor for no reason). With his rigid script broken, the assassin has to actually think about a response on the fly and promptly freezes up, allowing Watson to identify him. | |
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In Doug, Doug needs to talk to Chalky after being accused of cheating off him on a test, but Chalky is in the middle of track practice, and Doug is desperately trying to keep up with him, jumping over every hurdle along side him. After the second hurdle, Chalky comments, "Hey, you're pretty good, Doug!" That's when Doug realizes what he's doing and trips over the next hurdle. In another episode, Judy flunks her driver's test because she has trouble parallel parking. While they're out driving, Doug tries to encourage her to practice and try again. Finally he reveals the reason why. He had promised Patti that she could drive them to Bumper Car Mania that weekend. Upon hearing this, Judy becomes enraged, and starts chewing out Doug, during which time she successfully pulls off a parallel parking job. She doesn't even realize it until Doug points it out to her. Turns out she just had to not really think about it. |
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The player character of Kingdom of Loathing can exploit this when fighting a swarm of killer bees: | |
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In Little Mosque on the Prairie, Sarah spends all day accidentally insulting people after Fatima asks her how she always knows the right thing to say. | |
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Later, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore takes Harry to view a memory involving a family called the Gaunts. Harry fails to realize the Gaunts speak in Parseltongue until it's pointed out to him. | |
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The First Men in the Moon begins with Bradford's attempts to write a novel being confounded by Cavor — who keeps walking past his house, shaking his shoulders and making strange noises to himself. Bradford confronts Cavor over it, and Cavor confesses that he's a scientist and that he finds his daily walk to be the best time for thinking about his research — and he's so engrossed in his thoughts that he had never noticed that he was acting so outwardly strange. About a week later, Cavor confronts Bradford—he hasn't been able to make any progress on his research in the past week, because every time he goes out for a walk he's too focused on the walking to get any thinking done. When Bradford offers to help with his research, Cavor brightens up, and as he walks back to his house, he begins shaking and making noises in his old manner. | |
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Cimarron: The newspaper printer Ricky has a stutter which improves over the course of the film. Towards the end, a character compliments Ricky for not stuttering so much as he used to. Ricky's stutter immediately returns. | |
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