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Square-Cube Law
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A scientific principle often ignored in media: When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier and its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier. For example, if you double the size (measured by edge length) of a cube, its surface area is quadrupled (22 = 4), and its volume is increased to eight times its original volume (23 = 8). The point of this law is that with living beings, strength is (more or less) a function of area (the strength of a muscle or bone is proportional to the area of its cross-section, not to its total volume), but weight is a function of volume. And Newton's famous Second Law (the "force = mass × acceleration" one) means that if you double a critter's height while keeping it the same shape, you end up with four times the muscle power moving eight times the mass, so instead of having the same relative agility as the original, the double-sized creature actually has only half. The same goes for most machinery. This applies to flyers as well: Double the size, and you get four times the wingpower attempting to keep eight times the weight airborne, so the creature's ability to fly has actually been cut by half. Helicopters are hit particularly hard by this law; the largest payload of a cargo helicopter is about 20 tons, versus the world's largest airplane, with a payload of 275 tons. Sorry, Hotelicopter. Airships, on the other hand, benefit greatly from the square/cube law, as even small increases in size can quickly increase the volume of buoyant gas they can carry. Take the Graf Zeppelin and its successornote and The Hindenburg's sister ship the Graf Zeppelin ll for example. The original Graf was 776 feet in length. The Graf ll was a mere 30 feet larger in any direction, but carried double the volume. Because these gains came at almost no increased structural weight, the returns went entirely into making the Graf ll an even more palatial flying cruise liner than her predecessor. Buoyancy in general, whether it be in the air or in the water, is an easy way to minimize the limitations of the square-cube law when increasing size, because buoyancy is dependent on density, not mass. Good news for the whales, then. This law is relevant when an object is shrunk down as well. Make something half its size and it will have roughly twice the proportional strength and endurance. This is why small animals, like ants, are able to carry things far heavier than themselves, part of how fleas can manage to jump so far relative to their size, and why cats can survive falls of effectively any height — get small enough and your terminal velocity will be a survivable speed. However, don't think this is all win for the Incredible Shrinking Man, who will likely not survive to enjoy his newfound strength. Since body heat production is at least partially proportionate to volume, while heat loss is dependent on surface area exposed to the air, a shrunk human will find they are dissipating heat faster than their body produces it. It won't be long until the shrunk human freezes to death, even during a summer day. (This, incidentally, is why shrews eat their body weight in food and hummingbirds live on sugary nectar — their little bodies need to produce a lot of heat and this requires high-energy diets.) A full explanation for the biological aspect is a lot more complicated due to subtler factors (muscle/bone stress, required oxygen uptake, dissipating body heat, etc.), but the gist of it is the same in every case: You can't just scale something up (or down) to a different size and expect it to still work the same way as it used to. Again, the law is not limited to living creatures, but applies to anything with mass (and, well, everything has mass): A skyscraper twice as wide and tall as another will have eight times the weight, and require a far stronger support structure — wood and brick just can't hold the weight (traditional wood, that is). This is why modern skyscrapers were impossible until steel could be mass-produced to build their frames. Likewise, the humanoid Humongous Mecha needs incredibly strong legs to hold its massive frame upright (probably some sort of Unobtainium), and that's not even considering how the ground beneath it also needs to be able to support that same amount of weight without caving in, or the fact that it needs some incredibly powerful motors just to get those powerful legs and arms moving (which is why we call them Impossibly Graceful Giants). Knowing that audiences are becoming more savvy about this as compared to the days when Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever and the Incredible Shrinking Man were safe, standard plots, many creators who knowingly break the law will try to invent some Artistic License – Physics to justify or Hand Wave how their creation can get away with breaking it — say, the Applied Phlebotinum didn't just change their size, but also does something else to sustain their new size and counter the Law's negative effects upon them. See Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever, Humongous Mecha, and Ridiculously Small Wings for examples of media ignoring the Square-Cube Law. Sometimes justified by the use of Required Secondary Powers. Compare Muscles Are Meaningless and Pintsized Powerhouse. Compare/Contrast Giant Equals Invincible, where the law can either debunk or justify the trope (as a giant creature super-strong and massively-durable enough to simply withstand its own weight and be able to move with any reasonable efficiency would logically be able to shrug off far more damage than something smaller). Do not confuse with Scaled Up — though the trope name may sound familiar, Scaled Up involves a serpentine transformation that usually completely ignores the laws of physics, anyway. |
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Broken severely in Batman: Arkham Asylum with Killer Croc. His dossier says he is 11 feet tall and 580 pounds (9 feet tall and 320 pounds in the sequel). He should realistically weigh 3 or 4 times that. They seem to have realized this when putting him into the game proper, however. Croc moves extremely heavily, and a very powerful freight elevator struggles to slowly grind upwards with him in it. Without him, it moves much faster. Taken a step further in the Arkham Knight DLC "Seasons of Infamy". Croc's condition has mutated even further, and he's now roughly the size of a small Kaiju. However, he can barely move, and has to resort to all fours in order to get anything resembling speed. | |
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Momo in The Emerald Phoenix stands at her canon height of 5'8, very tall for a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl and weighs in at triple of what someone her age and body type should (Her canon weight is never given). This is because her violation of the law is her Required Secondary Power so that her mass can act as fuel to create objects that weigh much more than she should. Luckily for her, it comes with a tertiary power in that she's stronger than she looks, able to lift adult-sized robots with one arm. | |
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In Adventure Time, the Eldritch Abomination known as Orgalorg could move around freely — in outer space. When it was transported to Earth, gravity compacted and condensed its size so much, the creature took on a smaller form: a penguin. | |
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Later Gundam shows handwave this trope. Starting in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, the mechs are built out of stronger, lighter materials. In addition, the Gundam Mk. II is built using Movable Frame technology that further lightens the weight by incorporating all the internal systems into, and all the armor*which is generally thinner than on One Year War-era suits, due to the proliferation of beam weapons that penetrate armor no matter how thick directly onto, the skeletal frame of the suit, allowing for more agile and more human-like movement. That technology becomes more common and, eventually, the standard. After Char's Counterattack, the technology is streamlined and miniaturized, resulting in mechs that are shorter, yet far more powerful than the earlier models. This, not coincidentally, made the new model kits smaller and cheaper to produce at the same scale. | |
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The Salvation War averts this to a degree. On the one hand, most of the "lesser demons" are only about 8 feet tall, basically are made of muscles on top of more muscles, and while they all have wings only two subspecies (harpies and gorgons) can actually fly, it is stated that their bodies must produce lighter-than-air gasses to even manage that. On the other hand, there are many much larger demons, such as Satan, that reach well over 20 feet tall, although they tend to stay on the backs of great beasts or in their throne rooms. All Angels can fly, but they also are stated to have the gas-producing organs. Yahweh is stated to be HUGE, but never moves from sitting on the Eternal Throne. When Heaven is conquered, the great gates to the Eternal City are so giant they cannot be moved, so must be blasted down. | |
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20th Century Boys: Lampshaded when Friend's cult tries to have a giant bipedal robot built, and the engineer they get shoots down most of their ideas as impossible. On the eve of the new millennium, they end up using a fake robot that was just two crawler tread "legs" supporting a zeppelin with a cover and metal frame over it. Towards the end of the series, that same engineer manages to pull it off. Though this version is at least slightly more plausible, as it's not humanoid, but rather something that looks like a cross between a frog and a chicken with the legs connected at the sides for better weight distribution. The robot is also primarily remote controlled, since, while it does have a cockpit inside, operating it manually is rendered nearly impossible due to severe motion sickness induced by its uneven gait. |
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The Monster Hunter series is built around giant monsters, so you might expect it to ignore this law - but interestingly, while it certainly has less of an effect, it does still seem to be present. Monsters like Zinogre can leap around with terrifying speed despite being 15 meters long, but beyond a certain point, the especially large monsters like Gravios do start to get slower and less agile. The greatest example of this is Lao-Shan Lung, an utterly gigantic and incredibly ponderous dragon - it can move with unstoppable force, but seems to take great effort in even lifting its feet off the ground. Of course, this is all ignoring the Elder Dragons, which are often completely contradictory to this pattern - but then again, they're the only explicitly supernatural monsters in existence, so that has some logic as well.note Lao-Shan Lung is also technically an Elder Dragon, but it doesn't display any supernatural capabilities like the others. | |
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Franken Fran: Mentioned and briefly explained by Fran, when she witnesses the 50 foot sea monster that is terrorizing the city. Hand waved as Fran remembers her lost master talking about how dinosaur DNA is one of the most obscure scientific mysteries — and that she is renowned for making even more impossible creatures than herself. | |
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Bleach: Pow's One-Winged Angel form enlarges him greatly until he becomes kaiju sized, and the first thing he does is complain about his newfound massive weight. Averted by Gerard Valkyrie of the Wandenreich whose "The Miracle" ability increases his size, strength, and speed accordingly so that it makes him gigantic while making him even faster. |
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In Epic (2013), the tiny scale the Leafmen and Boggans live at reverses the Square/Cube Law, making them Pintsize Powerhouses able to jump crazy far and shrug off falls from cliffs. Of course they don't explain this to the audience at all. For those familiar with the law it's a refreshing accuracy, but one wonders how many kids, who don't even know what a cube is, were left wondering why the good guys seemed so indifferent about throwing people off of birds to their apparent deaths all the time. | |
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Discussed in Kurzgesagt's"The Size of Life", which explains how growing or shrinking an organism would affect them realistically. Included in the explanation is a demonstration of sizing up using a fleshy cube. | |
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In Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department, when Wolf bête suggests increasing the size of their monster by 25x, Kuroitsu does the calculations about how much more mass and materials it would require, noting the square-cube law (working out that it would take 15,625x the material), then calculates the additional costs, and shows the final cost (over 100 billion yen). After seeing this. Wolf bete concedes the point, looking utterly humiliated. | |
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An NPC in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild expresses confusion at how the Rito Bird People are able to fly since by his measurements wings their size shouldn’t be strong enough to carry them (adult Rito are on average a few feet taller than humans, with the same proportions.) | |
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Discussed in the Deva Series, where it is noted that the Seed can't get much bigger without magical assistance if they want to maintain their power. And since one of their key gimmicks is Anti-Magic protection... | |
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In The Sun Eater, the alloy adamantine is has proven impervious to even mono-molecular high matter blades and normally requires anti-matter or energy weapons hotter than a star to destroy. But when the massive dreadnought Tamerlane is forced to go planetside, its weight is so immense that the adamantine plates shear along their weakest bonds as the Tamerlane is trapped in the planet's gravity well. | |
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MythBusters: Once on the show, Adam was attempting to use a toy as a scale model human to test parachutes. He calculated its weight as a proportion of height and got an unreasonably large number. He later realized his mistake and calculated as a ratio of volume. The irony is that this approach still doesn't work, because a parachute's effectiveness is based on its area. Later used correctly in the Lead Balloon myth. Adam and Jamie's small-scale lead-foil balloon didn't float up specifically because it was too small (as they explained on the show). When they scaled the balloon up to a much larger size, the ratio of volume to surface area became large enough for the balloon to float—in fact, they actually needed to mix air with the helium to keep the foil from ripping from too much buoyancy. |
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Guild Wars and its sequel has the 9 feet tall Norn. Furthermore their figure seems to be bulkier than the average human. That would mean, that they weigh at least 650 pounds (300 kg). To maintain that body weight, a similarly-built 6-foot man must be able to lift at least 330 pounds (150 kg). | |
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Discussed in The Inheritance Cycle. Dragons are logically too big to fly, but they're using intrinsic magic of some kind. When Eragon and his dragon are entering a forest whose border defenses cancel out active magic, they have to to do so on foot to avoid falling out of the sky. | |
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Archipelago: Alice Pintur is a Sizeshifter who can only change to smaller sizes than her normal (and she's not that tall to begin with). At first the villains laugh at this — until it turns out that she keeps her mass, making her stronger and tougher the smaller she gets. The first thing she does upon showing her power for the first time and becoming the size of a small child is to crush a sword blade with one hand. | |
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In RWBY, the Atlesian engineers do respect this law, as the resident Humongous Mecha, the Colossus, consists mostly of two giant, thick, vaguely conical in shape armored "boots" supporting a relatively small rotating cockpit with arms attached at its sides. | |
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Addressed in the Harry Potter books with Rubeus Hagrid — he is a half-giant, quoted to be two times as tall as a regular man and nearly five times as wide, having the weight of 1,000 to 1,500 pounds. If you try to be as large as a Kodiak bear raised on the hind legs, having the body structure (and presumably the muscular strength) of a Kodiak bear helps a lot. Even better when your 7 days a week job is mostly physical labor around Hogwarts lands. In the movies, however, they aimed for a height of 8'6" (about 259 cm), of course towering over any human, but certainly not "twice as high." They do, however, give him an appropriate girth for his new scaled-down height (Robbie Coltrane's real proportions). | |
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Discussed in Perdido Street Station — the Construct Council is a Humongous Mecha, but cannot actually stand up. Presumably it's just done to look impressive. | |
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Lampshaded in Attack on Titan in a bit of Expo Speak concerning the Titans' Bizarre Alien Biology — they're actually much lighter than something that big has any right to be, yet still hit with the force of displacement you'd expect if their weight was proportional to their size. This is far from the only thing about them that makes no sense, and humans know it. Interestingly, the flagship Titan for the series (the Colossal Titan) follows the Law better than its smaller counterparts; since it is exceptionally massive even by other Titan's standards, its anatomy has changed in order to better support its massive frame. It has no skin and proportionally tiny arms and head to cut down on excess mass, while its torso and legs are extremely large and well-muscled in order to support its frame. It is also almost never seen doing anything other than standing in one spot and kicking something, so it doesn't normally have to worry about the bodily stresses it would undergo by ambulating. A later Titan would show up to be even larger than the Colossal and was incapable of even standing upright. Its arms were underdeveloped, while its head and body were massive. The best it could do was slowly drag itself along the ground. |
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Deliberately used in The Dresden Files novel Small Favor, where Harry is fighting a twenty-foot-tall fairie hitman with a car-sized sword, battle armor, and hefty anti-magic defenses. He manages to get said hitman chasing him over a patch of waxed floor and changes direction, causing the faerie to fall over and mangle himself in the impact. He's not overwhelmingly injured (being a faerie and thus very resistant) but it smarts like hell. | |
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In the Whateley Universe story "Boston Brawl", there's an Author Tract explaining how size-warping 'giants' really work, since the Square-Cube Law and some other laws of basic physics would seem to make it impossible. The giant Matterhorn only appears to be a 40-foot giant because everyone else interfaces with his warp displacement field instead of him. The Workshop at Whateley contains a Humongous Mecha that devisor students occasionally work on. The best it's done is take three steps before the knee came apart. Played dead straight on occasion, too — Jimmy T's antics on Hallowe'en come to mind, as do any Shifter (as opposed to Warper) size-changers. |
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Discworld: Mentioned in Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett, regarding how different sizes of animal would end up after a given fall of about two stories — a spider wouldn't notice it, a mouse would walk away, etc. In Guards! Guards! almost all the characters realize right away that the dragon can't possibly fly under its own power... unless it's fueling itself with magic. The descriptions specifically point out that its flight looks completely unrealistic compared to a bird's, because it's actually magically levitating itself. Discworld's gnomes are also terrifyingly strong, despite being six inches tall, and able to knock a man out and break bones with a headbutt or otherwise — because they have the strength of a grown man, concentrated in a very small area. Said gnomes also possess all of a grown man's bad temper concentrated into that same space, which makes the above acts of violence not only possible but also fairly probable. The Nac Mac Feegle seem considerably stronger than an average man, given that they steal cows by picking them up and carrying them off, one Feegle to a hoof. For an average-sized cow, that means they're each lifting in the vicinity of 400 pounds, and carrying it at a dead run. They're actually mostly shown stealing sheep, and even a large full-grown sheep would be about 350 pounds — about 87 pounds. Still a lot to carry at a run, but slightly less fantastic. |
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One of the trials in Final Fantasy XIV has your party fighting a dragon that is as large as a settlement. Because of its huge bulk, it moves very slowly as it advances toward Ishgard and its attack animations also have a bit of a wind-up. If you mistime shooting the dragonkillers (huge harpoons) at it, the dragon will jump several feet in the air to dodge it despite its size. Certain battles can also affect the player's size, which has them moving a little faster when shrunk and a bit slower when made bigger. The trope is also zig-zagged with the player character races; the dwarf-sized Lalafell race have faster movement animations while larger races like the Hrothgar have a slower gait to their movement. All races control and feel exactly the same to keep things consistent and even among all players. | |
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An archaeology project in World of Warcraft mentions that an ogre once thought to use rylaks as mounts. While it managed to make a comfortable saddle, ogres are so large (about 15 feet tall and very fat) that it'd take a mount the size of a small mountain to remain airborne while carrying one, to say nothing of the question of how a creature of that size would manage to stay airborne in the first place. Subverted with the rest of the flying mounts, who tend toward tiny wings even for fantasy settings. |
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The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe tried to be scientifically accurate, so it constantly faced this problem, handwaving them away with references to anti-gravitons or similar technobabble that at least suggests that some writer is aware that there's a scientific problem. | |
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In Iron Man 2, we see North Korea's attempt at making an Iron Man suit, which appears to be a 20-foot-tall machine covered in guns... which immediately falls over because of how thin its legs are to the top-heavy body. | |
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In The Name of the Wind, Kvothe and Denna discuss this as they figure out a way to stop the Draccus; Kvothe mentions that it would probably take only a fall of about ten feet to kill the thing. | |
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In Savage Worlds third-party setting Toy Troopers where you play as the plastic Army Men, the author points out that while you are 50 times smaller than a human, it wouldn't be fun if you were 50 times weaker - and realistically you'd be over 100000 times weaker. While most threats are scaled to your size, falling damage is only doubled (that is, a human falling 3 yards gets 1d6 damage, a small toy soldier gets 2d6, despite this chasm being 450ft deep for him). | |
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Discussed in the '90s HBO remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman — the doctor treating Nancy remarks that at her new size, her heart is under tremendous strain due to the change in her mass, and that any undue stress may cause it to give out. | |
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In Black Bullet, the monstrous Gastrea are explicitly described as inverting this principle: they are based on small animals, mostly insects, with their size drastically increased, but instead of being too weak to support their own weight, they are that many times 'stronger' proportional to their size than the original animals. | |
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See also the many lampshades hung in Atomic Robo, by the same author, and also published on the web. | |
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Given a nod in the original Guardians of the Galaxy. Yellowjacket — whom we've only seen shrink up until then — grows to fight Blockade. She wins the fight, but the exertion puts enough strain on her heart that she loses consciousness. | |
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Mazinger Z: Go Nagai had this trope in mind when he created Mazinger-Z. When the anime was being made he insisted the cartoon-makers that Mazinger WAS heavy and HAD to look heavy, so they used shots low shots to make Mazinger seem bigger and imposing, and it moved slowly and noisily. And even though Go Nagai had always intended that Mazinger-Z flew, he was afraid of making Mazinger seeming light if it flew from the start. So he held back the appearance of the Jet Scrander until it was well established that Mazinger was heavy. Still, it moves too quickly to be so heavy. | |
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Quiet, Please (1947): In "Tanglefoot", the narrator's buddy breeds a housefly that is two feet long. The housefly is perfectly healthy, and capable of causing appalling damage to humans. | |
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The Order of the Stick: Similarly, in #585, Vaarsuvius attempted to use his Common Sense and knowledge of the Square-Cube Law to aid in a Banishment spell, with equally futile results. Also invoked in #326, though not in as many words. Roy uses this law to make a hydra pass out, as its blood supply couldn't keep up with the number of heads it was growing. And played with in #754, when the "Empress of Blood" (a morbidly obese red dragon the size of a small house) is able to fly, despite her wings being maybe 1% of the size of her body. How can she do it? Because D&D rules don't have any rules for not being able to fly because you weigh too heavy. |
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In one issue of Nodwick, this law is specifically addressed by a potion intended to grow people to giant size; specifically, it doesn't increase mass, and as such the 'inability to support own weight' point is moot. Of course, some other problems, like how a fifty-foot tall being weighing one hundred pounds reacts when being exposed to an ambient breeze, immediately present themselves. | |
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In My Little Pony: A New Generation, it turns out that pegasi can't fly without magic because their wings are presumably too small compared to the rest of their bodies, though they can still glide. | |
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In other Mario games, Bowser's size changes virtually every second or third game. One time the issue of the floor breaking beneath was during the final battle of Mario Party 5 during story mode. Bowser uses a potion to grow twice as large, then instantly crashes through the floor beneath him. The rest of the "fight" plays out with him stuck in the floor. | |
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In Captain America: Civil War Scott grows to over 60 feet tall, though he mentions that he passed out the last time he tried that. Scott's arms also move slowly when he attacks in this form, which is true to the square-cube law; every body part of a giant would accelerate slower than the corresponding part of a normal-sized human, and simply swatting away a human wouldn't involve moving his arm far enough to reach its maximum potential speed. He also seems noticeably slower mentally, as if he's drunk or light-headed. And in Ant-Man and the Wasp he claims he slept for three days after that scene, after becoming "Giant-Man" in that film he has trouble breathing within a few minutes and collapses, in the middle of a bay. However, he has no problems when he's twelve feet tall (aside from ceilings). | |
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The dragon species created in Duumvirate has wings in its juvenile stage, but loses its ability to fly as it grows up. | |
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Lampshaded and handwaved in Nobody Dies; it's quoted in dialog between two subordinate scientists that they can never get Yui to explain why the Evas don't sink into the ground due to their weight, and the current dominant theory is that the ground is too scared of them to let them in. | |
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Discussed in the pre-New 52 Jaime Reyes run of Blue Beetle. Since you can't scientifically increase somebody's size past a certain threshold without them falling apart into a pile of bones and blood, magic is always behind giant humans. | |
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PS238: An interesting inversion appears with the superheroine "Micro-Might". Her power is, specifically, to take advantage of the Square-Cube Law — shrinking herself down to half height, but keeping the same mass — to become stronger and tougher. (Okay, so it plays a bit fast-and-loose with the actual equations, but it's still nice to see someone USE the law instead of just ignoring it.) When she's forced into Phlebotinum Overload, she becomes so dense that she can't move and can barely speak. |
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In Harmony Theory, due to the reduced amount of ambient magic to support their bodies, dragons have to maintain a reasonable size to survive. Max Cash goads a young and inexperienced dragon named Boomer into giving into greed. This causes him to grow gigantic and powerful, but then his body starts to collapse on itself. | |
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Addressed in InCryptid when some of the characters find themselves in Another Dimension with Big Creepy-Crawlies (as in, millipedes the size of a train, and spiders so big that a small one is the size of a large horse). They note that the gravity doesn't feel different, and the giant arthropods must have lungs rather than tracheae to get enough oxygen to their organs (magic may have something to do with it as well, but the author doesn't just handwave it with A Wizard Did It). | |
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Broken and lampshaded in Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire with the Myrmidex, a race of intelligent giant ants. As the manual says: | |
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Marvel Universe heroes use "Pym Particles" to grow and shrink, so there's an extra layer of Phlebotinum keeping it working. DC's The Atom, on the other hand, knows that shrinking is dangerous — it's even been made into a plot point and weapon, as seen in Justice League: The New Frontier (The Atom can alter his mass independently of his size, so it's less of an issue for him). | |
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The opening Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man has a rare aversion. After realizing that the giant robot he's fighting is emitting a special gravity beam, Superman pushes down on it from above, applying enough pressure to negate the beam's effects. The robot quickly collapses into the ground, unable to support its own weight without the assistance of the gravity device. | |
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Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls: As Ember puts it to Adagio, "mass is mass". A larger Adjuchas might not be anything special in terms of spiritual power, but its larger mass means that its blows can still send a Hollow of greater strength but smaller size flying. Similarly, Soul Reapers, Quincies, and Arrancars only weigh as much as a normal human, so if caught off-guard even an ordinary human can knock them down. | |
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The Stormlight Archive: Greatshells are a variety of arthropod that can reach the size of small islands. It's justified both by the planet's lower gravity and by a symbiosis with mandras, Nature Spirits that manipulate gravity to offset the greatshell's weight. | |
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Dungeons & Dragons: It is mentioned that creature who has his all dimensions doubled weighs eight times as much, but avoids the rest via A Wizard Did It. Notably with the spells Reduce Person and Enlarge Person, for which there is an equal increase/decrease in Strength and Dexterity, respectively, but only minor ones considered the shift in mass (mainly for balance reasons). Somewhat ignored in that a creature's lifting capacity does not typically scale directly with the creature's mass. For an 8 times mass increase for an extra size category, a creature typically receives a 6 times increase in carrying capacity. It gets worse when A Wizard Did It, as spells such as Enlarge Person increase the creature's weight by the usual eight times, but only increases their carrying capacity by approximately 2.6 times. There is an artifact in the Book of Vile Darkness called the Despoiler of Flesh that gives you very flexible control over a creature's shape, but more or less points out that it has to be scientifically plausible or the creature will die because of an unsound anatomy. In editions where flight maneuverability is mentioned, it's noted that the largest dragons become far less agile as they grow bigger. In 3.5, for instance, Small or Tiny dragons have Average maneuverability, Medium, Large, and Huge dragons have Poor maneuverability, and Gargantuan or Colossal dragons have Clumsy maneuverability — basically, the largest dragons will bank like cruise liners in flight, and are completely unable to pull off things like hovering or flying backward. And while they do get faster, it's nowhere near proportionate to their size; a dragon the size of a sperm whale travels only twice as fast as one the size of a border collie. Of course, the fact that said dragon is able to get off the ground at all is violating this trope pretty hard. One sourcebook explains that dragons get off the ground through a mix of ridiculously strong wing muscles, surprisingly lightweight bodies, and the fact that dragons are partly elemental (hence the Breath Weapon), which gives them a lot of energy to spare. Older game supplements often gave the existence of massive creatures like giants, rocs, and Big Creepy-Crawlies a handwave by stating that such creatures were connected to the innate magic field of the planet that helped sustain them beyond the limits of what bone and muscle alone could accomplish even if the being had no other magical abilities. It was suggested that were they were to find themselves transported to a world that lacked any innate magic (which was much stronger than what the Anti-Magic effects in the game), they'd instantly perish. |
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Pacific Rim: Guillermo del Toro and the effects artists admit that huge beings, robots or monsters alike, would move slowly, but the Kaiju and Jaegers move quickly to make for fun scenes. They do nod to the trope, as the blueprinted robots have different body proportions compared to a humanoid: very large feet, supermodel-like legs, less mass in the upper body. Gipsy Danger using a civilian oil tanker as an Improvised Weapon is flatly impossible; it would have buckled under its own weight the minute they dragged it out of the water, let alone started swinging it around like a bat. Of course it looked great, though. |
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Dwarf Fortress: Huge monsters made of metal like bronze or steel are strong enough to support their own weight (which is suitably high because it is calculated by the game based on their size and material) and are extremely durable, but that same weight also makes them relatively vulnerable to damage from falls. Very large grazing animals that have been domesticated are also almost impossible to keep because they need so much grass to eat. In V 0.34.11, tame elephants will literally starve to death while eating. (This was fixed in 0.40 though they require a very large pasture.) Predatory animals (such as grizzly bears or giant grizzly bears) are exempt from the feeding requirement though. And then there's the giant desert scorpion and giant cave spider, both approximately the size of a (regular) bear... As well as various giant insects, giant slugs, snails, etc. Dwarf Fortress sometimes laughs in the face of the Square Cube Law. The rest of the time, it brings it down on these same creatures with a vengeance, as with the Bronze Colossus. |
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Equally lampshaded and played straight in an episode of Farscape. Most of the crew are shrunk and one complains that it shouldn't be possible. Another tells her that it's better to think of a solution than to complain that what just happened isn't possible. | |
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All the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus are unlikely to have existed, let alone walk, due to their bizarre shapes and sizes. One example is Phaedra, where its multi-ton weight is supported by ridiculously thin points at the end of its legs. A creature that size shouldn't be able to get up with those spindly legs or even use them as a stamping weapon. It's explained by A Wizard Did It reasons since their world has obvious supernatural elements incorporated into it. | |
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Mentioned briefly by Koizumi in Haruhi Suzumiya when he's showing Kyon a Celestial/Shinjin/Avatar tearing up a section of Closed Space. He notes that the giant should be unable to support its own weight, but also that the laws of physics in general simply don't seem to apply to them. | |
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Likewise, one of the Power Pack kids (whichever one has that power this week) can expand but becomes less dense, eventually turning into a vapor cloud, or can contract into a super-dense mini-tank. | |
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Sword of the Stars: Liir are technically immortal and never stop growing, resulting in their Great Elders being very large. Eventually, they grow too big and die due to gravity. Suul'ka are Liir Great Elders who say "Forget this gravity junk" and teleport into space to continue their existence. The Black, the leader of the Black Swimmers (Liir Space Navy), is also this, as he was originally sent to kill the Suul'ka. |
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On the subject of mecha anime, New Getter Robo hangs a lampshade in the final episode. When the final boss grows into a planet-sized form, Hayato and Benkei respond: | |
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The book Gulliver's Travels nods to this law; the Lilliputans realise that since Gulliver is proportioned the same as they are but is 12 times the height, he is therefore 1,728 times the bulk and thus needs that much more food. However, it also ignores the fact that if the Lilliputians were really human-proportioned but 6 inches tall, they would rapidly freeze to death. The book also ignores the fact that the Brobdingnagians could not possibly exist because they should collapse under their own weight, despite the narration pointing out that they are as large compared to Gulliver as he is to the Lilliputians. | |
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Mass effect fields in Mass Effect allow one to alter the mass of an object, getting around this problem. However, it still would take too much energy to let a capital ship land on a planet, so they don't. Except for Sovereign and the other Reapers. Despite being the largest ships in the setting, they have such a massive amount of power at their disposal they can easily land on a planet, walk around, and pop back into space. They are pretty slow and wobbly on the ground though, due to having to deal with the gravity. Additional details mention that their shields are a fraction of what they can maintain in space (which can take the firepower of an entire fleet without a scratch), due to the incredible drain by their mass effect cores. | |
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Ant-Man: Superheroes like, say, Ant-Man, usually don't even bother giving this a wave. When shrinking, Ant-Man maintains the strength of a regular human despite his size, and when growing, his size is "Proportionate" (as strong as the writer needs it to be). Heck, all size-changing superheroes seem to be riddled with problems. Despite their fists often being nearly the size of a pinpoint, moving with the force of a superheroic punch, they always seem to hit like a wrecking ball instead of like a knife... However, there was at least one early story where Dr. Pym increased his size beyond a certain limit and collapsed, unable to move and needed The Wasp's help to shrink him back down to a reasonable size again. A note should be made about the new Ant-Man (Eric O'Grady): he does try to take advantage of his proportionate strength to punch out a guy (to impress a woman) but doesn't realize that his punch is more like a bullet than a hammer. Marvel Universe heroes use "Pym Particles" to grow and shrink, so there's an extra layer of Phlebotinum keeping it working. DC's The Atom, on the other hand, knows that shrinking is dangerous — it's even been made into a plot point and weapon, as seen in Justice League: The New Frontier (The Atom can alter his mass independently of his size, so it's less of an issue for him). In a Marvel What If? one-shot featuring a Soviet Fantastic Four, Pym (fighting for the USA) died from suffocation when Reed forced him to grow, rendering his lungs incapable of supplying enough oxygen to sustain him. Reed did this in an attempt to incapacitate him without considering the consequences, and afterward he was horrified by what he'd done. In Hank Pym's first appearance as Giant-Man, Marvel Comics played the Law quite accurately — after he's grown a few feet, he's no longer capable of standing and needs the Wasp's help just to get at a reversal pill. He pegs his maximum effective size as twelve feet or so and sticks to it for a while. The limitation didn't last long, though — soon he was fighting giant monsters at Godzilla size! The Ultimates version of Hank Pym can grow to just under sixty feet, as according to his wife, 60ft is the point at which the human skeleton can no longer support its own mass (later generic Giant-Men manage to surpass this, with no mention as to how). His ability is reverse-engineered from Jan's ability to shrink, and she mentions that she can't shrink smaller than an inch because her body automatically knows what its limits are. It's eventually revealed that Pym Particles don't just work on size, they affect strength (this trope) and density as well. It turns out a few other superhumans have powers that apply Pym Particles in this manner. Given a nod in the original Guardians of the Galaxy. Yellowjacket — whom we've only seen shrink up until then — grows to fight Blockade. She wins the fight, but the exertion puts enough strain on her heart that she loses consciousness. The movie version of Ant-Man is at least vaguely aware of this trope. Whilst our hero uses 'Pym Particles' to break this law with impunity, the villain's attempts to recreate the effect on test subjects/victims fail. Messily. When Ant-Man and Squirrel Girl team up this trope is not only discussed but utilized against the main villain (an obscure villain from Marvel’s past named Enigmo whose power is the ability to split himself at the cost of his mass) because, while Ant-Man’s Pym Particles allow him to bypass the square cube law, Enigmo does not have any Phlebotinum to help him out in that situation so when all the little Enigmos are tricked into recombining into one giant Enigmo, the first step they take results in them breaking their leg and falling. |
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This is the ultimate fate of the Human Flame in Final Crisis Aftermath: Run! - he grows so tall that he literally cannot move, allowing Green Lantern John Stewart to easily take him away. | |
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Acknowledged/lampshaded in Patlabor: Humanoid-style labors tend to be made with very large feet and small torsos. This trope is mentioned to a certain extent early in the TV series when Kanuka puts a labor through a bunch of stock action movie moves (jumping, flipping, etc.). Noa asks Asuma why he's wincing, and he explains that while the new police labor model (the Ingram AVS-98) is technically capable of performing any motion that a human body can (with regard to degrees of freedom), it can't really take much more punishment than standard walking without requiring pretty serious maintenance, and implies that Kanuka's short performance will mean days of work and hundreds (possibly thousands) of dollars in components to bring the labor back to 100% operating capacity. | |
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Played for laughs (naturally) in comedy series The Goodies, episode "Kitten Kong", in which (as the title implies) the three ply a kitten with a miracle growth-promoting food. In the end, they manage to get it back to normal size, but then discover that they have a problem with mice — giant ones... | |
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Howl's Moving Castle is explicitly only able to stand up because of magic. When the magic was taken out of the "castle," it immediately collapsed under its own weight. | |
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Early paleontologists believed that large dinosaurs lived in swamps because they approach being too large to move under their own power without the buoyancy of water, hence the depiction of Brontosaurus in King Kong emerging from a lake to attack the human party before chasing them on land. But Science Marches On, and discoveries of new fossils or rethinking existing ones led to new schools of thought about dinosaur lifestyles, muscular and skeletal makeup, and even posture. Note that no land-dwelling dinosaurs were ever as large as certain sea creatures, though (except the near-legendary Amphicoelias fragilimus). | |
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Star Trek novels: Justified in the Star Trek: Voyager novel Ragnarok, where Chakotay explicitly notes that the creatures in question must have evolved in a low-gravity environment. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Metamorphosis, Data at one point encounters something flying on wings that couldn't possibly hold it. This bothers him only briefly before he decides, after all the impossible things he's seen in the rest of this mission, why not? |
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Mentioned by name in Humans-B-Gone!'s very first episode, where Professor Gregorsa (the narrator and also a giant cockroach) states that the setting's giant bugs "conquered the square-cube law". | |
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It's explicitly stated in the series bible for RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse that pegasus wings are too small to allow them to fly without their magic. | |
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Discussed extensively in Small Problem. | |
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Star Wars d6: The Executor class command ship is roughly 12 times the length of the Imperial Star Destroyer in each dimension, or roughly 1728 times its total mass and volume, and roughly 144 times its total surface area, but only accommodates roughly eight times its total crew complement (including stormtroopers and TIE fighter pilots) and 12 times as much weapons payload. | |
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Werewolf: The Apocalypse fails to take this trope into account with the Garou and other shapeshifting races. A Garou's crinos form height is 150% that of their homid form height, with significantly more mass. Ironically, a Garou's dexterity increases in crinos form, when it should logically decrease. It's because they're part-spirit, probably. | |
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On Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, the main cast — two chipmunks, two mice, and a fly — are, encounters with size-changing rays aside, roughly the same size as their real-world counterparts, yet exhibit the same fear of falling a human should, given the same heights... often a distance that would likely only daze them for a few seconds. (This being Disney, however, something always lessens the threat to our heroes and their friends anyway, so whether their fears are founded or not is never shown.) A simpler example from the same show would be the cast frequently using large (for them) human-made tools with relative ease. | |
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Gundam: Yoshiyuki Tomino originally wanted to avoid this in Mobile Suit Gundam, with all the battles taking place in space but eventually broke down and had the middle third of the series set on Earth. His novelizations are almost entirely set in space, though. Likewise, supplementary material notes that half the reason for Zeon's massive arms race throughout the series was in part because the Zaku was well-suited for space combat, but ended up being plodding enough that infantry with anti-mobile suit missiles could easily take them on in a gravity-affected environment. Mobile Fighter G Gundam generally has issues with scaling weight up linearly from human to massive robot; with their given weight figures in that series, the average Gundam is made of material with the density of styrofoam. Later Gundam shows handwave this trope. Starting in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, the mechs are built out of stronger, lighter materials. In addition, the Gundam Mk. II is built using Movable Frame technology that further lightens the weight by incorporating all the internal systems into, and all the armor*which is generally thinner than on One Year War-era suits, due to the proliferation of beam weapons that penetrate armor no matter how thick directly onto, the skeletal frame of the suit, allowing for more agile and more human-like movement. That technology becomes more common and, eventually, the standard. After Char's Counterattack, the technology is streamlined and miniaturized, resulting in mechs that are shorter, yet far more powerful than the earlier models. This, not coincidentally, made the new model kits smaller and cheaper to produce at the same scale. Zeta Gundam also had the absolutely gigantic Psyco Gundam, which really shouldn't have been able to walk on Earth. This is lampshaded the first time it shows up, with the characters wondering how in the hell that thing doesn't crush itself under its own weight. The Psyco Gundam in fact needs its own Minovsky Drive like the White Base to support its own immense mass. |
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In Ultimate Fantastic Four, Warren Ellis justified Ben Grimm's "Thing" appearance in this way. For Ben to be as strong and durable as he is, his size and weight were correspondingly scaled up to around nine feet tall and eight tons, with super-dense skin and hyper-efficient organs (handy, as Ben sinks like a stone in open water). His mass and strength are so great that the mere act of walking around measures on the Richter Scale, leading Reed to develop a body suit lined with a new type of shock absorber to act as a Power Limiter for Ben. Otherwise, Ben taking a stroll through Times Square could result in the destruction of New York City itself. | |
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Xenoblade Chronicles X has a lot of very large animals wandering the surface of Mira. Most of the enormous creatures are shown to have very large organic gasbags keeping them aloft, like living blimps, but the Millesaurs and Coronids are just plain gigantic four-legged dinosaurs. The in-game fluff explains the Millesaurs as having a surprising amount of their bulk consisting of an internal buoyant gas sac, which means they are a lot lighter than they look. | |
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Animorphs: When the Animorphs run into the Helmacrons Shrink Ray, they find themselves able to toss around pebbles as big as themselves, while Tobias (to them, now a hawk the size of a human) notes that he can flap faster and climb proportionally higher, and might even be able to carry one of them. Evidently the shrink ray also reduces mass along with size. | |
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It's a bit of a standing joke among BattleTech fans who have done the math that despite usually weighing anywhere from twenty to a hundred tons, given their physical dimensions BattleMechs must be less dense than water and should therefore logically float, especially since they're also by default environmentally sealed so they can operate in vacuum and other hostile environments. The rules, of course, still have them wading through any water deep enough to be worth depicting on the map. The square cube law exists In-Universe, but its magnitude is reduced, with the upper scale of feasible battlemech tonnage capped at 100 tons; you can build them larger ("superheavy"), but then they are barely able to sustain their own weight and move at a snail's pace even with an enormous reactor. Only three superheavy designs exist, and only two of those were functional designs — the 110-ton Matar's design team was executed for "treasonous incompetence" as the mech could barely move under its own power. | |
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Imagine how slow sauropods would have been due to their gigantic sizes. The Walking with Dinosaurs animators found that Diplodocus would have to keep three feet on the ground at all times or they would trip over while designing early models. | |
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Bee Movie famously opens by hanging a great big lampshade on this. | |
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Invoked in the Wonder Woman Vol 1 story arc Judgment In Infinity: When the Adjudicator appears standing beside the Washington Monument — which he's taller than — a woman who was visiting the monument wonders, "But — a man that huge — It's supposed to be scientifically impossible, isn't it?" | |
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In Wakfu, this is how Sallygrove defeats Rubilax. Where every time Rubilax is hit, he grows in size and mass. However, them being in the middle of a desert, after getting too big he starts to sink into the ground. He chooses to return being trapped in a sword rather than dying suffocated in sand. | |
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A Song of Ice and Fire It obeys the law with its roughly-12-to-14-foot giants, who have a body shape that is compared to bears; disproportionately large feet on the ends of short, thick legs, and wider hips than chests, bringing their centre of gravity right down. The series averts this trope with the dragons, which can grow to enormous sizes and are still able to fly perfectly well. However, there has been shown to be some connection between live dragons and the magical powers in the world, so it's possible the dragons get some magic-fueled exemption from this law. Also, really large dragons do obey the law, to an extent. The largest known dragon, Balerion the Black Dread, grew into such a gargantuan size that he had difficulty keeping himself afloat; his last rider, King Viserys I Targaryen, was only able to ride him to circle King's Landing before the dragon had to rest. It's also averted with The Wall, a man-made border that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the uncharted northern lands. It's 213 meters (700 feet) high, and built entirely on ice. While making the TV show, the author recognized that such a huge ice structure would simply be impossible to maintain itself. Once again, however, it can be argued that it was built with the help of magic (keep in mind there is supposed to be a horn that, when played, will make the structure collapse). |
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In a Marvel What If? one-shot featuring a Soviet Fantastic Four, Pym (fighting for the USA) died from suffocation when Reed forced him to grow, rendering his lungs incapable of supplying enough oxygen to sustain him. Reed did this in an attempt to incapacitate him without considering the consequences, and afterward he was horrified by what he'd done. | |
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Pokémon is extremely inconsistent about height and weight proportions of their often-ignored square-cube law. Onix is a 28 ft. long snake made of boulders, but its weight of 463 pounds makes it seem like it's made of Papier-mâché. Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire introduces Wailord, the largest Pokémon ever at 14.5 meters (47 ft. 7 in.) long. It weighs only 398 kg (877.4 pounds). For comparison, a male sperm whale averages 16 meters (52 feet) long and weighs 40 tonnes (45 short tons). In fact, doing the math shows that Wailord is lighter than helium. Float Whale Pokémon, indeed. Though that would explain how they can participate in land battles without collapsing under their own weight. The remakes, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, introduce the Primal form of Groudon (the heaviest Pokémon to date), which weighs just 300 grams short of a whole ton, while only being 5 meters high. Also in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire is Mega Steelix. While neither form is as heavy as a steel snake of its size should be, Steelix's mega evolution is only 14% larger (9.2m to 10.5m) but 70% heavier (400kg to 740kg). Pokémon Sun and Moon introduces Mudsdale, a 2.5 meter (8 ft. 2 in.) tall Clydesdale horse that weighs 920. kg (2028.3 pounds). This is ridiculously heavy by Pokémon standards, but that's the actual size and weight of a real Clydesdale. |
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It's never explained how any of the kaiju in Godzilla films can move, never mind in some cases fly, (though Ghidorah has some Gravity Master powers, so he might get a handwave). The 2014 film does give Godzilla larger and thicker legs to help support his weight, and he moves with an extremely slow gait when he's outside of water. Lampshaded in Shin Godzilla when the government initially believes the larval Godzilla will be unable to support its own weight on dry land, only for it to do just that because it's a Metamorphosis Monster. On the other hand, this also explains why Godzilla and (most of) other Kaijus are extremely durable they're impervious to conventional weaponry. The Kaijus need to be insanely strong to even support their own weight. |
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In Tom Sawyer Abroad the chapter "Tom Respects the Flea" assumes all parameters of a flea: strength, speed, intellect — will scale linearly with size. | |
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In the Old Kingdom volume Abhorsen, Lirael can make a Charter skin, a kind of physical spell, that enables her to turn into an owl. When she and her companions need to travel a long distance quickly, Sam proposes that she tweak the spell a little to become a really big owl, and carry everyone else in her claws. Whether this counts as a violation of the square-cube law is debatable; in theory, a bird that big shouldn't be able to fly, but there is magic involved. | |
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Lampshaded in The Venture Bros. with Humonguloid, a giant with a heart condition and other severe problems. Of course, VB's science of choice being superscience, he later gets shrunk to the size of an ant and survives for decades with no major health problems and, indeed, no medical care (although he ends up being accidentally crushed to death by a rocking chair in the season 5 finale). The same character states the "proportional strength of an ant" idea to likewise be nonsense. | |
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Likewise, The Incredible Shrinking Man film may have averted this, by having Scott slowly shrink giving his body a chance to adapt. | |
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Fate/Grand Order: Ivan the Terrible is roughly 17 feet tall. While he's really strong, his body is so heavy that he can barely walk. He usually gets around by teleporting or riding his elephant. Kingprotea has the ability to infinitely grow and her default mode easily beats everyone else in height, including the aforementioned Ivan. She also primarily teleports to the enemy to attack them. It's explained that the digital world of SE.RA.PH lets her circumvent this law and she can just keep growing without consequence, but it takes effect when summoned in the real world. She has to activate her Reality Marble in order to use her bulk in the real world. In Babylonia this is Zig-Zagged with one of the Seven Beasts, Tiamat, once she grows giant. Roman notes after scanning her that her legs aren't powerful enough to hold up her weight on land, which is part of the reason why she needs to use the Chaos Tide to flood the plains before her to keep going and what motivates the heroes' attempts to buy time for Uruk by burning away the Chaos Tide to slow her down. However, not only can Tiamat replenish it as fast as they can destroy it, but she then surprises everyone by growing a massive pair of wings from her back and beginning to take off into the sky, with everyone incredulous something so big could do that. In this case, the being in question is so mind-boggling powerful it basically gives the middle finger to physics in the first place on top of being a Reality Warper who literally can't die unless she's the last living thing in the world, meaning she can ignore such technicalities. |
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In Avengers: Endgame, Scott becomes Giant Man to save Hulk, War Machine, and Rocket from drowning in the flooded subbasement of the remains of the Avengers HQ, breaking through the bulk of the ruin and joining the final battle in that form. He must have been eating his Wheaties, because he spends at least half the fight at max size, punching Leviathans out of the sky and crushing enemy forces underfoot, and isn't even winded when he reverts to normal size to take care of a special task. | |
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Children of an Elder God: In the prologue, a scientist finds an arthropod-like, gigantic Eldritch Abomination and wonders how it can support its own weight: | |
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Goliath-class machine lifeforms in NieR: Automata such as Engels or Grun are massive in scale (with the former being the size of a building and the latter being 1000m tall kaiju-sized monstrosity,) but they move like they're drowning in molasses and their melee attacks are slow and exceedingly easy to dodge (unfortunately, the thing that makes Grun so dangerous isn't his size, but the massive EMP blasts he emits.) At one point you fight two Engels at once in the City Ruins and the battle, combined with the Engels' sheer weight, eventually creates a massive sinkhole in the center of the map. However, this is subverted with Hegel, a giant flying centipede-like machine, though it's possibly justified with a throwaway line elsewhere in the game about the machine lifeforms utilizing anti-gravity devices. Hegel is also a weaker version of the cloned Emils, who are also capable of flight, though in this case the justification is that Emil and his copies are all magical in nature. | |
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In Cruel Zinc Melodies, the Big Creepy-Crawlies that were created from normal insects keep running into problems with their magically-increased size, as when a giant beetle tries to take flight from a rooftop and winds up splattered on the pavement. | |
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Surprisingly played realistically in Lungfishopolis in Psychonauts, even though it's a Mental World where physics need not apply. Raz dwarfs the city, and due to his immense weight, he moves slower, jumps lower, can't use Levitation, and can only bounce off water two times instead of the usual three. | |
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L's Empire features a penguin called Snowball with the ability to change his size. However his mass remains the same, resulting in a large — yet, ultimately very light — penguin. | |
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Temeraire: This is Hand Waved with the historical in-universe discovery that dragons have internal sacs of lighter-than-air gas, which, in the largest breeds, negate over 80% of their weight. When Kulingile goes through a growth spurt where his sacs outpace the rest of him, he needs to be tethered down at night. | |
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Of particular note is Beakman's World's explanation of the law. Which famous dead guy did they get to help?... they didn't. They got a 3-inch-tall Lemuel Gulliver. | |
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Mentioned in Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett, regarding how different sizes of animal would end up after a given fall of about two stories — a spider wouldn't notice it, a mouse would walk away, etc. | |
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Game of Thrones: The law is followed with the giants. They are twice the height of a regular human, and to compensate for the increase in weight, their legs are disproportionately long and thick, and they appear to move slowly. This effect was realized by a combination of tall actors outfitted with prosthetics and overcranking. This trope is the reason why all of the actors who've played Gregor Clegane (an 8-foot-tall behemoth known as the "Mountain That Rides") have been no taller than seven feet (the shortest being 6'9"). While there certainly are 8-foot-tall men in the world, a man of that height with Gregor's proportions is literally impossible. The loyal Stark servant Hodor is supposed to be almost a foot shorter at just over seven feet (the actor being 6'10"); luckily they two never interact so it isn't quite so obvious. Not entirely impossible: there have been non-pathological (i.e., those without gigantism) giants of Gregor's size throughout history, though certainly not common. The prequel series House of the Dragon shows that not even the magic dragons are immune to this — while dragons never stop growing, they aren't immune to the effects of age, with Vhaegar, the oldest dragon and oldest living creature in Westeros (she's been around since House Targaryen first conquered the continent), is now massive, but has gotten slower and more worn down with age. Word of God indicates that dragons actually die when they get too big precisely because of this law. |
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The Transformers Film Series: In Transformers (2007), in truck mode, Optimus became a conventional tractor (one with a hood) instead of his original cab-over design, to give him enough extra mass to get to 30 feet tall when in robot mode, rather than 25 feet like the other Autobots. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: Subtle aversion. Devastator, a large, gorilla-like robot made from nine smaller robots combining, is so massive that he cannot stand up straight without risking his legs caving in on themselves. It was for that very reason that the folks at Hasbro and ILM opted to go with the gorilla-walk. This even contributes to his death - a single blast from a railgun is enough to damage his leg and knock him off balance, and his weight means that the resulting fall tears him to pieces. The same aversion is seen with the other Cybertronians. Smaller guys like Bumblebee or Barricade are pretty agile, while medium-size bots like Ironhide can move, but they aren't that swift. Moving up to Optimus Prime and Megatron, they're clearly focused on power brawling, although Optimus is a Lightning Bruiser. |
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Spider-Man: The writers occasionally lampshade this, and there has been at least one Retcon that Spidey is actually stronger than the proportionate strength of a spider — or even simply possessing a spider's strength-to-weight ratio, which is likely what the creators originally meant. He has a villain called the Walrus who claims to possess the same strength-to-weight ratio as a walrus. Superdickery pointed out that this would make him weaker than an ordinary human. (The laws of physics were nonetheless basically told to go fuck themselves, as The Walrus indeed turned out to have Super-Strength). Discussed in Avenging Spider-Man #10, when he uses his physics knowledge to discover that Robyn Hood is going to explode. |
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Kamen Rider J: In a rare case of the law being acknowledged during a piece of Toku media, when J assumes his Jumbo Formation, he gains significantly more strength at the cost of his speed, being only able to move at walking pace while in this form. At the same time, his increased weight per square foot means the ground can visibly be seen cracking and collapsing under his feet when he materialises, and does so for a second time when he jumps into the air to take out Fog Mother's giant form with his Jumbo Rider Kick. Of course, his increased weight probably means he shouldn't be able to jump at all, but that wouldn't satisfy the Rule of Cool. | |
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The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk is known to get stronger and larger as he gets angrier (maximum height is roughly twelve feet); this might be justified, though, as his relative muscle (and presumably bone) mass increases as well as his height. Furthermore, Hulk is generally not depicted as merely scaling up; in most depictions, the cross-sections of his arms and legs increase out of proportion, which would balance things out some. It's been implied that he draws his strength from outside of his own body, and therefore muscle mass would be irrelevant. The size changing as he gets angrier and stronger thing is depending on the writer and the artist; some have his height stay consistent once he transforms, though this itself can be an informed ability as an artist will alter his height between panels for various reasons. Officially the Hulk's transformed height is just under eight feet tall. He'll often be shown as over ten, but that's usually stylistic or for dramatic effect. Where Hulk comics fail to justify or avert is in that we frequently see him standing on floors that should not be able to support what his weight must be. Hard wood would splinter under him, for example, as he probably weighs about as much as a four-door car. Floors would take an even greater beating when you realize that all that weight is being concentrated on two relatively small areas. |
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For a series that usually is very good about thinking through how even magic has to follow the rules of physics and common sense, the Triptych Continuum really falls down on this one in Scootalift. It's explicitly stated that Snowflake's ability to fly despite the horrible injuries to his wings from a capless birth comes not from pegaus magic but from his massive muscular development. And ultimately, it turns out to be both a Subverted Trope and a plot point. Snowflake's flight is directly powered by his talent: he gets in the air because he's determined to fly. (It's the same kind of Surge that allows newborn foals to take off, only under his direct control.) Believing it's been strength all along was a self-imposed delusion. |
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PvP: Scratch Fury has much better luck than Red Mage, but then, Scratch took the time to write out the equation. | |
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Actually played straight in Super Sentai and by extension Power Rangers, where the Humongous Mecha move like hulking slow behemoths as they should. At least, that's the way it was done when it was People in Rubber Suits. The franchise has gradually adopted CGI to portray the mecha, which allows them to be a lot more flexible. Although Power Rangers is a weird situation: according to some tech specs from the box, the original Megazord weighed 172,000 pounds-86 tons — and was 333 feet tall, whereas its Super Sentai counterpart Daizyujin was 41 meters tall, not even half the Megazord's height, and weighed 570 tons. Since succeeding Zords are likely of comparable stats, the world of Power Rangers must have access to unbelievably strong materials. Even with the physical suit acting, however, some mecha routinely defy this, as there are plenty of instances where the suit actors forget to slow their movements and instead continue to act with out-of-scale humanlike reflexes. This is especially prominent in older series and scenes featuring a mecha that specializes in CQC. Bonus points for one Sentai series where instead of growing, the monsters used mechs of their own in their likeness. They matched the original monster exactly from the waist up, but they all used a common set of very large and bulky robotic legs, seemingly acknowledging that moving the extra tonnage would require something much stronger than a scaled-up version of the monster's original legs. |
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Giant cockroach movie Mimic hand waves the Square-Cube Law during an autopsy scene, where the entomologist discovers that the Judas Breed has evolved lungs. This explains how they can breathe, but not how a six-foot cockroach with six-foot wings can fly while carrying an adult woman. The issue is simply skipped in the Donald Wollheim story the film was based on: the mimic, a giant moth, is never seen flying and in fact may not be able to fly. Its newly-hatched offspring, the size of very large moths, fly just fine. | |
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In the Naval Ops series, not only are smaller vessels far more maneuverable and faster than the massive battleships, smaller ships also need to spend less tonnage on armouring themselves and have a greater amount of surface area covered by armor. However, Giant Equals Invincible also shows up here too. While Battleships and whatnot aren't as well covered by armor, they can also take far more damage than a smaller ship and the damage taken mostly strikes the bulkhead rather than any important system. | |
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Warhammer 40,000: The Imperial Titans and Baneblades, and Gargants, and Squiggoths, and Hive Tyrants... thanks to 40k's Rule of Cool-powered physics, it's likely cumbersome size can always be counterbalanced by the number of guns bolted to it. Taken to hilarious extremes with the Hierophant Biotitan who, despite being as large as a warhound, is supported by 4 relatively tiny stalks it calls legs. How it doesn't explode from its own weight is anyone's guess. note It's implied that the Hierophant is a very powerful Psyker, but has to dedicate all of its psychic power to maintaining a Warp Field, giving it a powerful armor save while at the same time maintaining its structural integrity.. Unsurprisingly its model is one of the most fragile non-dark eldar ones in the whole line. Averted in a few places, though. Space Marines are about 8 feet tall and almost 8 feet WIDE, with numerous extra organs, and a giant suit of power armor to help take the strain of their larger proportions. Of all the factions to get this right, the ORKS versions of Titans (called Gargants) seem reasonable. Either they have very widely spread out feet, or tank treads to move about, and it appears most of the weight is concentrated towards the ground. Also, if anyone has the right to ignore the square cube law, it would be the Orks, since their technology relies heavily on their innate Psychic Powers to work in the first place. The Square Cube Law is actually referenced by Imperial Biologists, who are astounded that creatures the size of a Squiggoth can exist (in their own words, it should collapse under its own weight and be completely incapable of movement, though such knowledge is likely cold comfort to troops staring down one charging at their lines). The only other faction to field super-huge creatures is the Tyranids, though both groups have in-universe explanations (the Tyranids make use of genetic engineering and Bizarre Alien Biology; the Orks just get to fall back on their usual excuse of "thinking it's real makes it real", which explains why Squiggoths only show up in large Ork warbands). The Tau initially only fielded relatively tiny Mini-mechas in the form of Battlesuits; one-pilot mechas roughly 10-12 feet tall to carry heavy weapons on an infantry scale. They scoffed at the idea of Imperial Titans, whom they thought that the huge amount of resources and manpower to keep one of those things running proportional to just, say, bring a massively huge gunship or artillery is just ludicrous and chalked it up to Imperial Propaganda. One Damocles Gulf War later they realized the humans were crazy enough to make titans and despite the impracticality of it, their effectiveness were unparalleled. This led to the development of the Riptide, Stormsurge, and titan-esque Ta'unar Supremecy Armors (but amusingly, the Imperium also lost multiple Titans to a mere Tau fighter craft). The Catachan Devil is a scorpion the size of a train, with the same proportionally-tiny legs. |
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El Goonish Shive: In this strip, Raven mentions the law by name (he's a teacher), with the implication that the magic involved compensates for the violation of normal reality. This is explained in The Rant of the subsequent comic. Melissa invokes this trope when meeting a dragon. She even mentions The Flight of Dragons not applying here. A recurring theme in size magic, especially Tedd's experiments, is the difference between half scale and half size. The former means what you'd expect, you're shrunk to half your original height. The latter means that you're shrunk to half your original volume, and is a very different experience. |
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Ghostbusters II: Lampshaded when the Ghostbusters animate the Statue of Liberty with the positively-charged slime. | |
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In S. Andrew Swann's Dragons of the Cuyahoga, there is a bubble of magic over Cleveland thanks to a semi-permanent magic portal open in the city, allowing dragons, elves, magic spells, and other "fuzzy gnome" phenomena to flourish. The novel opens with one of said dragons fooled into flying out of the bubble and into our world where the square/cube law rules supreme. The results are... messy. Murder via reality. | |
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In Ilivais X the Ilivais units are basically 80s super robots, and as such standing under their own weight would be impossible without assistance. This developed into "make them focused on flight" which then developed into "don't even bother giving them feet". As such, most of them have blade legs that end in a point, meaning that if they lose flight capability, they're utterly incapable of movement. | |
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The prequel series House of the Dragon shows that not even the magic dragons are immune to this — while dragons never stop growing, they aren't immune to the effects of age, with Vhaegar, the oldest dragon and oldest living creature in Westeros (she's been around since House Targaryen first conquered the continent), is now massive, but has gotten slower and more worn down with age. Word of God indicates that dragons actually die when they get too big precisely because of this law. | |
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In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Calypso grows to gigantic size on board the Pearl, yet neither tips the ship over (again), sinks it, nor collapses the decking beneath her weight. Could potentially be handwaved by her goddess powers or something, but it's never explicitly addressed either way. Seeing as she bursts into a bunch of crabs a few seconds later, it's safe to say that the laws of physics don't apply to her. Likewise, there is no explanation as to where all that extra mass would come from, so the total mass of the ship and its contents remain the same (perhaps her density decreases as she grows?) |
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Lampshaded in Shin Godzilla when the government initially believes the larval Godzilla will be unable to support its own weight on dry land, only for it to do just that because it's a Metamorphosis Monster. | |
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Mentioned in an issue of Planetary dealing with a secret government project that used '50s super-science to turn "undesirables" into, basically, the monsters of '50s horror movies. One guy got the Amazing Colossal Man treatment; he was in pain for the rest of his short existence. | |
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Doctor Who: Actually played realistically with the Master's weapon in the 20th-century show and then again during the Chris Chibnall era, the Tissue Compression Eliminator, which shrinks people down to a couple of inches tall and causes them to die painfully from square-cube law effects. But ignored as usual in several other stories, most glaringly with the Giant Robot in "Robot", and all the regulars in "Planet of Giants" (in which the twist is that it's Earth, and they've been shrunk). Rory's jokes aside, ignored again with the Teselecta's miniature crew in "Let's Kill Hitler". In "Arachnids in the UK", a mutant Giant Spider grows so large that it can no longer breathe efficiently and starts to suffocate. |
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Vin in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy takes advantage of this effect. Burning pewter grants her Super-Strength but does not physically alter her 5-foot-nothing body. This allows her to jump several times her own height using nothing but her super-strong legs. In the same work, the koloss start out at the size of a human and keep growing their entire life. They are hyper-violent and thus tend not to live a particularly long time, but the rare ones who survive long enough to grow to ten or twelve feet tall eventually die from heart failure. |
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Dragon Ball: The franchise has a few characters that can grow in size, or are already gigantic compared to normal people. A Saiyan can become a massive ape monster called an Oozaru if they have their tail and see a full moon. For these characters, they already have superhuman strength, and growing larger boosts that strength somehow, Oozaru multiplies Saiyan strength 10-fold, so they can survive their size. The issue of bulky muscles becomes a plot point in the Cell saga. The Saiyans develop a Super Saiyan form that is muscular to the point they look like oversized bodybuilders (do a Google image search for Super Saiyan Third Grade and you'll get an idea from the first few pictures). It grants major strength, but at the cost of mobility, making the form useless, not to mention that it is very inefficient at energy consumption and quickly wears out the user. Given that the characters by this point have enough physical strength to level mountains with a flick of the wrist, it seems odd that a slightly higher body mass would make such a huge difference. This, of course, is overcome when the Super Saiyan 2 form is reached, where strength and speed increase proportionally and with less drain on stamina. |
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Kaiju Revolution: According to a Q&A, the Kaiju are able to bypass this thanks to their ability to metabolize radiation which makes them so efficient on a cellular and subatomic level that they exist partially outside of reality. | |
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In Kuromukuro, we have two ways to avoid this issue in regards to giant robots — one is that the most common used robots are Mini-Mecha not bigger than a tank. The other is that the actual Humongous Mecha utilize technology that allows them to manipulate gravity, which handwaves all the problems regarding the law. | |
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Noted in The BFG: a cook scales up a meal to the giant's scale based on his height, rather than his mass. The giant is not impressed. | |
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Pokémon Sun and Moon introduces Mudsdale, a 2.5 meter (8 ft. 2 in.) tall Clydesdale horse that weighs 920. kg (2028.3 pounds). This is ridiculously heavy by Pokémon standards, but that's the actual size and weight of a real Clydesdale. | |
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The Ultimates version of Hank Pym can grow to just under sixty feet, as according to his wife, 60ft is the point at which the human skeleton can no longer support its own mass (later generic Giant-Men manage to surpass this, with no mention as to how). His ability is reverse-engineered from Jan's ability to shrink, and she mentions that she can't shrink smaller than an inch because her body automatically knows what its limits are. | |
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Ant-Man: Tends to handwave away the issues with a human shrinking to ant size, or even to subatomic size, with "Pym particles", though the suit needs to be closed when shrinking to avoid becoming a blob of undifferentiated tissue. Shrunken characters also retain their original strength, but it's inconsistent as to whether their mass is changed. Ants can be grown to human-size without ill effects, or even a containment suit, and retain their proportional strength. In Captain America: Civil War Scott grows to over 60 feet tall, though he mentions that he passed out the last time he tried that. Scott's arms also move slowly when he attacks in this form, which is true to the square-cube law; every body part of a giant would accelerate slower than the corresponding part of a normal-sized human, and simply swatting away a human wouldn't involve moving his arm far enough to reach its maximum potential speed. He also seems noticeably slower mentally, as if he's drunk or light-headed. And in Ant-Man and the Wasp he claims he slept for three days after that scene, after becoming "Giant-Man" in that film he has trouble breathing within a few minutes and collapses, in the middle of a bay. However, he has no problems when he's twelve feet tall (aside from ceilings). In Avengers: Endgame, Scott becomes Giant Man to save Hulk, War Machine, and Rocket from drowning in the flooded subbasement of the remains of the Avengers HQ, breaking through the bulk of the ruin and joining the final battle in that form. He must have been eating his Wheaties, because he spends at least half the fight at max size, punching Leviathans out of the sky and crushing enemy forces underfoot, and isn't even winded when he reverts to normal size to take care of a special task. |
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In the Mega Man X series the bosses of the opening stage are generally titanic Mechaniloids with the maneuverability of a brick and are much weaker than their size would dictate. The few exceptions are Gigantic Mechaniloid CF-0 from X2, which could jump extremely high and hit pretty hard; Egregion from X4, a huge dragon Mechaniloid that could fly very fast; and Mega Scorpio from X7, a centaur-like scorpion Mechaniloid who could turn and charge fairly quickly. | |
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Manly Guys Doing Manly Things addresses this in one of its extras. Poor uncharacteristically adorable scorpion.◊ | |
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Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has Bowser grow to a lot more than twice his size. During the Giant Battles, he's probably closer to being 8-10 times bigger than normal. This trope is played surprisingly straight, as Bowser's normal ability to "dodge" attacks is completely removed. This being Bowser, he doesn't waste time dodging and opts to punch the foe over and over until someone falls. The one time the weight issue is brought up is in the Fawful Express battle, as Bowser will fall through a wooden bridge and lose if he takes too long. Whenever he shrinks again after the fight, he realistically shrinks toward his centre of mass — resulting in him falling several feet to the ground that is now far below him. In other Mario games, Bowser's size changes virtually every second or third game. One time the issue of the floor breaking beneath was during the final battle of Mario Party 5 during story mode. Bowser uses a potion to grow twice as large, then instantly crashes through the floor beneath him. The rest of the "fight" plays out with him stuck in the floor. One other thing to note is that Bowser is shown to float or levitate whilst giant, suggesting that he may at least be aware of the impracticalities of this trope. Giant Battles return in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. However, they take place in the Dream World, which doesn't have to conform to the physics of the real world. |
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The Dark CPUs in Megadimension Neptunia VII blatantly disregard the law, being EVA-sized monstrosities with humanoid proportions, but since they appear and disappear on a whim and destroy the fabric of reality when they attack, this is the least strange thing about them. It's given a nod nonetheless when Arfoire takes direct control of one — the protagonists note they've got plenty of time before she catches up, since Afoire has no idea of her new body's physics and keeps tripping over. | |
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Subverted in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Life Serial". In order to distract Buffy, Jonathan transforms himself into a much larger demon (that seems to be modeled on the South Park Satan), except that as the demon, he "actually had the proportional strength of, uh... me." | |
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Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project has, as the end-of-stage boss of Stage 4, a cockroach about 24 feet tall and with corresponding other proportions; a real cockroach even a tenth that size would suffocate. (It also has breasts, despite being an insect rather than a mammal, but that's another trope entirely.) | |
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When Ant-Man and Squirrel Girl team up this trope is not only discussed but utilized against the main villain (an obscure villain from Marvel’s past named Enigmo whose power is the ability to split himself at the cost of his mass) because, while Ant-Man’s Pym Particles allow him to bypass the square cube law, Enigmo does not have any Phlebotinum to help him out in that situation so when all the little Enigmos are tricked into recombining into one giant Enigmo, the first step they take results in them breaking their leg and falling. | |
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Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4852d71 | comment |
Gyo obeys the law — while the walkers that carry fish up to the size of Great White Sharks can walk around on land just fine, a walker carrying a whale lumbers out of the ocean, only for its legs to immediately collapse under the weight of the whale, without any water to support it. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4852d71 | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_e4852d71 | featureConfidence |
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Gyo (Manga) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4852d71 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4de5144 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4de5144 | comment |
Giant Battles return in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. However, they take place in the Dream World, which doesn't have to conform to the physics of the real world. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4de5144 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4de5144 | featureConfidence |
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Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (Video Game) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_e4de5144 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e5c5bc22 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e5c5bc22 | comment |
GURPS details the stats needed for monsters of various impossible sizes with an eye toward the Square Cube Law (how the creatures can be so big is left up to the GM). | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e5c5bc22 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e5c5bc22 | featureConfidence |
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GURPS (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_e5c5bc22 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e71c3f24 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e71c3f24 | comment |
Invoked in Shadow of Doubt as Salli and Ali watch their culture's version of a Kaiju movie. Salli complains that such a creature shouldn't be able to move, and Ali responds that the aliens who made it, "... laugh at the Square-Cube Law!" | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e71c3f24 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_e71c3f24 | featureConfidence |
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The Red Vixen Adventures | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_e71c3f24 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ec52a5b9 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ec52a5b9 | comment |
In Transformers (2007), in truck mode, Optimus became a conventional tractor (one with a hood) instead of his original cab-over design, to give him enough extra mass to get to 30 feet tall when in robot mode, rather than 25 feet like the other Autobots. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ec52a5b9 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ec52a5b9 | featureConfidence |
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Transformers (2007) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_ec52a5b9 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ed64983f | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ed64983f | comment |
Similarly, André the Giant was in constant pain for most of his life because of his gigantism and the strain it placed on his body. It eventually killed him, though he still lived more than twice as long as Wadlow. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ed64983f | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_ed64983f | featureConfidence |
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André the Giant (Wrestling) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_ed64983f | |
Square-Cube Law / int_eef5470a | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_eef5470a | comment |
Rurouni Kenshin: Kenshin invokes this law during his match with Senkaku by goading the latter into a Flash Step oneupsmanship contest. While he's every bit the Lightning Bruiser, Senkaku is more than twice the size of Kenshin, and eventually, his knee couldn't take the strain of having all that mass keep up with Kenshin's godlike speed. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_eef5470a | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_eef5470a | featureConfidence |
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Rurouni Kenshin (Manga) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_eef5470a | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef076a36 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef076a36 | comment |
Justified in the Star Trek: Voyager novel Ragnarok, where Chakotay explicitly notes that the creatures in question must have evolved in a low-gravity environment. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef076a36 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef076a36 | featureConfidence |
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Star Trek: Voyager | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef076a36 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef7b3325 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef7b3325 | comment |
Fantastic Four: A plot point in one story; Reed Richards encounters an alien able to absorb energy to grow to gigantic size and notices that its footprints aren't getting any deeper, so its weight isn't increasing, therefore its mass isn't, either. It's just puffing up like a balloon. So he manages to "overinflate" the alien by feeding it too much energy. Note that the footprints should have actually become shallower if his feet grew and the mass (and thus weight) did not increase, so we will have to assume Reed Richards deemed this bit too trivial to mention (for him to not realize this would be out of character). In another story, the Four found themselves in an enormous alien environment with human giants that were many miles tall. Reed Richards thought that what they were seeing was not real, as the human body would be unable to support its own mass if it grew to that height. When Gladiator lifted the Baxter Building, Richards theorized that his powers weren't merely physical strength, as there's no way the building could survive being lifted and supported by one of its corners. In Ultimate Fantastic Four, Warren Ellis justified Ben Grimm's "Thing" appearance in this way. For Ben to be as strong and durable as he is, his size and weight were correspondingly scaled up to around nine feet tall and eight tons, with super-dense skin and hyper-efficient organs (handy, as Ben sinks like a stone in open water). His mass and strength are so great that the mere act of walking around measures on the Richter Scale, leading Reed to develop a body suit lined with a new type of shock absorber to act as a Power Limiter for Ben. Otherwise, Ben taking a stroll through Times Square could result in the destruction of New York City itself. |
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Square-Cube Law / int_ef7b3325 | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_ef7b3325 | featureConfidence |
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Fantastic Four / Comicbook | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef7b3325 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef8bd4a5 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef8bd4a5 | comment |
Played with in the Mega Man franchise. Large Robot Masters and their counterparts from the spinoff titles can jump much higher than your character and pull off some moves, even if they aren't equipped for flight. However, large bosses in the later portions have size and power, and can manage limited movement, but they can't maneuver for crap, sticking them in basic movement patterns most of the time. In the Mega Man X series the bosses of the opening stage are generally titanic Mechaniloids with the maneuverability of a brick and are much weaker than their size would dictate. The few exceptions are Gigantic Mechaniloid CF-0 from X2, which could jump extremely high and hit pretty hard; Egregion from X4, a huge dragon Mechaniloid that could fly very fast; and Mega Scorpio from X7, a centaur-like scorpion Mechaniloid who could turn and charge fairly quickly. |
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Square-Cube Law / int_ef8bd4a5 | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_ef8bd4a5 | featureConfidence |
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Mega Man (Franchise) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_ef8bd4a5 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f0688fff | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f0688fff | comment |
Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire introduces Wailord, the largest Pokémon ever at 14.5 meters (47 ft. 7 in.) long. It weighs only 398 kg (877.4 pounds). For comparison, a male sperm whale averages 16 meters (52 feet) long and weighs 40 tonnes (45 short tons). In fact, doing the math shows that Wailord is lighter than helium. Float Whale Pokémon, indeed. Though that would explain how they can participate in land battles without collapsing under their own weight. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f0688fff | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f0688fff | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (Video Game) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f0688fff | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1360d68 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1360d68 | comment |
Mobile Fighter G Gundam generally has issues with scaling weight up linearly from human to massive robot; with their given weight figures in that series, the average Gundam is made of material with the density of styrofoam. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1360d68 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1360d68 | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
Mobile Fighter G Gundam | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1360d68 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1853fcd | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1853fcd | comment |
Justified in Cannon God Exaxxion, where the titular colossus has a gravity control device powered by Antimatter. It also addresses the problem of weight distribution on the feet by replacing them with invisible forcefields that distribute the machine's (still considerable, even when mitigated by gravity control) weight over a wider area, which has the unfortunate side-effect of flattening innocent bystanders who are dozens of feet away from the mech itself. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1853fcd | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1853fcd | featureConfidence |
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Cannon God Exaxxion (Manga) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f1853fcd | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f3464a68 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f3464a68 | comment |
Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: Subtle aversion. Devastator, a large, gorilla-like robot made from nine smaller robots combining, is so massive that he cannot stand up straight without risking his legs caving in on themselves. It was for that very reason that the folks at Hasbro and ILM opted to go with the gorilla-walk. This even contributes to his death - a single blast from a railgun is enough to damage his leg and knock him off balance, and his weight means that the resulting fall tears him to pieces. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f3464a68 | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_f3464a68 | featureConfidence |
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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f3464a68 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f69f2dc7 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f69f2dc7 | comment |
Discussed extensively in Heaven's Design Team when the team tries to deal with a rampaging creation by modifying a gorilla. First, they double its size, causing it to collapse due to heat stroke since the internal body heat it generates increases thanks to its much larger volume. Then, the team shaves its fur and gives it a cockscomb as a cooling element to resolve the heat issue, the creature collapses again because its leg broke. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f69f2dc7 | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_f69f2dc7 | featureConfidence |
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Heaven's Design Team (Manga) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f69f2dc7 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f6e776bb | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f6e776bb | comment |
Kong: Skull Island: As with most Kaiju-type creatures, a one-hundred-foot-tall gorilla would be incapable of doing anything besides lying there with his skeleton being crushed by the weight of his musculature, and the flying creatures would be incapable of doing so. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f6e776bb | featureApplicability |
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Kong: Skull Island | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f6e776bb | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f9742e61 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f9742e61 | comment |
Dragonriders of Pern: Dragon bones are specifically mentioned as a very different and much stronger material than Terran animals' bones, and larger dragons don't move much when they don't need to. Then again, they are alien enough to generate lots of concentrated phosphine without any harm. Likewise, The Dragonlover's Guide To Pern shows that the skeletal structure of a dragon is very different from any Terran animal's. The design looks like it allows for a greater distribution of weight. Of course, this trope suggests that their skeletal structure (and other anatomy) should also be very different from that of their native fire lizard cousins... Then to go along with the telepathy and teleportation powers of the dragons it was revealed that they have telekinesis as well, so at least part of their flight is likely a result of self-directed telekinesis to augment their wings. It was implied that there were once natural dragons on Pern and that the fire lizards are either descendants of them or have a common ancestor, so it makes sense they would keep an unnecessarily complex body structure despite their smaller size (see the human appendix and whale leg bones). |
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Square-Cube Law / int_f9742e61 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f9742e61 | featureConfidence |
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Dragonriders of Pern | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f9742e61 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f98c0423 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f98c0423 | comment |
Giant Robo: Ginrei Special has one robot whose weight was 2/3 armor, and needed to use its Jet Pack just to stay standing up. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f98c0423 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_f98c0423 | featureConfidence |
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Giant Robo | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_f98c0423 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fa5e90fd | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fa5e90fd | comment |
Made a plot point in the City of Heroes book "The Web of Arachnos". The massive army of robots are defeated when they're unable to do things the smaller bots were able to do due to their size, which leads one of the two creators to yell at the other for forgetting the Square-Cube law and going for Rule of Cool/Intimidating over practical. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fa5e90fd | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fa5e90fd | featureConfidence |
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City of Heroes (Video Game) | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_fa5e90fd | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fcf34eec | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fcf34eec | comment |
Full Metal Panic! hangs a lampshade on this fact; although it glosses over the existence of relatively small Humongous Mecha, an extremely huge example appears on the villains' side in one episode, and accordingly a character points out that it ought to collapse under its own weight. And indeed, that's how they defeat it: They destroy the particular bit of Applied Phlebotinum that holds it together, and it quickly falls apart. Bonus points for the mecha not simply falling over; rather, its legs rupture and collapse outwards under the weight. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fcf34eec | featureApplicability |
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Full Metal Panic! | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_fcf34eec | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fe5f7909 | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fe5f7909 | comment |
In Guards! Guards! almost all the characters realize right away that the dragon can't possibly fly under its own power... unless it's fueling itself with magic. The descriptions specifically point out that its flight looks completely unrealistic compared to a bird's, because it's actually magically levitating itself. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_fe5f7909 | featureApplicability |
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Guards! Guards! | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_fe5f7909 | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ff9ab17f | type |
Square-Cube Law | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ff9ab17f | comment |
Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spinoffs justify their sometimes impractically large spaceships with the structural integrity field, a sci-fi gizmo and occasional Plot Device that allows ships to endure more stress than their structure alone could withstand. | |
Square-Cube Law / int_ff9ab17f | featureApplicability |
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Square-Cube Law / int_ff9ab17f | featureConfidence |
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Star Trek: The Next Generation | hasFeature |
Square-Cube Law / int_ff9ab17f |
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