A justified
trope is one which, in its common usage, runs counter to the normal laws of logic and probability but in a particular instance has a concrete reason
In-Universe for applying to the story. In other words, a trope is "justified" if it is
required by other pre-existing elements in the story—otherwise the explanation is a
Hand Wave.
Note that there are varying degrees of justifying a trope and a spectrum of justification from the completely logical to
A Wizard Did It. For a justification to be more than just
A Wizard Did It, there has to be reasons that make it make sense
in context.
Here's a couple example scenarios:
The justified case:
- The protagonist uses a glowy sword because he fights sentient shadows.
- The car blew up upon crashing because of the nitroglycerin that was put in the trunk in an earlier episode as part of a ploy to blast through a bank vault.
Now, how would these same scenarios look if the justifications were
Hand Waves that
raise more questions and require you
to turn your brain off?
A
Justified Trope has common ground with
Lampshading in that both often deal with tropes that are typically illogical or otherwise problematic.
Remember that a trope being justified is not about it ultimately being good or bad or effective or ineffective — it's about whether or not it
makes sense from an in-universe point of view. A trope can be perfectly justified and still ruin a show. Contrarily, a trope may be completely unjustified and
make the story better.
Do not assume that the existence of a trope is inherently a sign of bad writing.
See
The Watson, whose job is to explain justifications, and
Meta Trope Intro which compares this with many other ways that a trope can be used. If the Justified Trope falls short, it's a
Hand Wave. If the justification just makes the illogic of the trope
worse, then it becomes a
Voodoo Shark.
One thing to note, if you think a trope is "justified", you should never use a Justifying Edit. If you were
Pot Holed here by a
Justifying Edit, integrate the potholed text to the main text or delete it outright. See
Justifying Edit for more on this.
Some justified tropes are tropes of their own.
Don't put any examples here. Wicks on other pages
must be in-universe and also
Not Arguable. (That is, when writing one, resist the temptation to use
Weasel Words like "possibly" "probably," "somewhat" or "part[ial]ly") If you want to see examples, you'll have to look for them elsewhere. Or you could go into the
Playing With Wiki for hypothetical examples.
Notably, instead of redirecting here, the single-word
Justified is a
disambiguation page. If you're looking for the FX series, you're looking for
Justified.
