Basic Trope: The veracity of a supernatural event is purposely left to the criteria of the audience.
- Straight: Alice claims that the wind guides her movements. Whenever she follows the direction of the wind, she is taken to the place she needs to be at the right time, but whether this is just an impressive stroke of luck or there is actually some supernatural force at work is never disclosed.
- Exaggerated: Alice has not just been guided by the wind, but has accomplished outright unbelievable acts such as flying thanks to her relationship with it, yet the narrator and the other characters still treat this as something that could be explained rationally.
- Downplayed:
- While it is true that the wind has led Alice to important events the opposite is also true, with various instances of her following the wind only to find nothing of interest. Therefore, the most likely explanation is that Alice was wrong about the wind guiding her movements.
- Magic and the supernatural are known to be real and are accepted fields of study. Alice's ability to be "guided by the wind" is outside of any well-documented school of magic, and she does not show any other of the expected supernatural abilities. Some mages still admit it's possible under certain theories of magic, however.
- Justified:
- The story is being narrated by Alice herself, so the dilemma boils down to whether or not the audience decides to believe her.
- Alice dies before it can be elaborated upon and nobody else has similar apparent abilities to confirm or deny it.
- Inverted: The veracity or falsehood of Alice's powers is confirmed from the beginning and is never presented as ambiguous to the audience.
- Subverted: Alice never had any powers and there was never anything mysterious about it, the Big Bad has actually been manipulating Alice's movements with a weather-control machine.
- Double Subverted:
- However, in the climax of the story, the wind actually acts out, and it appears to help Alice find a way to beat the bad guy, thus raising the mystery again.
- The weather control machine itself claims to be about manipulating temperature gradients through channeling power but they find it is consistent with accounts of druidic geomancy. It is left uncertain if the device was magical or if the druids stumbled upon the same technological means.
- Parodied: Whenever Alice arrives a place, even if it was a place that was obviously logical for her to visit and there is nothing of importance to find, the event is treated as if it was a fated encounter and the other characters react with bewilderment.
- Zig Zagged:
- Alice's powers are finally explained, but the explanation only raises further undisclosed paranormal implications.
- Alice never had any powers and there was never anything mysterious about it, the Big Bad has actually been manipulating Alice's movements with a weather-control machine. However in the climax of the story, the wind acts out and appears to help Alice find a way to beat the bad guy, thus raising the mystery again. It is eventually revealed that a previously unseen good guy was using his own weather-control machine to guide Alice, but he then reveals that he found the machine by following the wind.
- Averted: Alice is eventually either outed as a charlatan who simply used analytical methods to track important events or the supernatural properties of her skills are confirmed.
- Enforced: The work features supernatural events based on Abrahamic religious beliefs. If the writers explicitly show them to be false, it risks angering Moral Guardians by implying that Religion Is Wrong and that Belief Makes You Stupid. If they reveal said events to be true, the work will instead be criticized as an Anvilicious Author Tract. As such, the writers deliberately keep it ambiguous to avoid any complaints.
- Lampshaded: "Just like the wind who is constantly in movement, refusing to stay in one place, there are some things that just refuse our explanation", muses a philosophical character when questioned about Alice's powers.
- Invoked: Alice makes sure to act as mysterious as she can about her powers, never giving consistent answers to people who ask about them.
- Exploited: Another character takes advantage of the mysticism that surrounds Alice to catch people with their skepticism in suspension and sell them snake oil.
- Defied:
- Even though the true nature of Alice's powers is never explained the narrator insists there is an explanation behind it all.
- Alice's friend Bob continues his investigation in Alice's powers to discover what the hell is going on and is eventually vindicated — either he or someone who picks up his investigation long after, once technology has improved and a more thorough analysis can be done finds the answers. If it is something supernatural, then okay, it's supernatural. If it is mundane, then okay, it's mundane. If for some weird reason it's a combination of the two options brought upon by coincidence, then okay, it's coincidence. What Bob absolutely refuses to do is to just shrug it off.
- Discussed: "Let me guess, we will never find out if Alice has powers or not, will we?, It's as if reality purposely kept some things from being explained as to keep things interesting".
- Conversed: "You know, the problem with this kind of resolutions is that nine times out of ten it is lazy writing: not wanting to bend whatever rules you set for the supernatural, not thinking through whatever rules the supernatural is supposed to have before the writing starts, or thinking it's a good idea for characters to be idiots for once and just go "it's a miracle!" when you should have saved it for, I don't know, the Red Sea parting or something."
- Implied: The veracity of Alice's powers is never questioned by the narrator or characters, but neither it is assured, leaving the audience to speculate about it.
- Deconstructed: Eventually, the inability to decipher the mystery about Alice's powers leads other characters to question other unrelated simple or logical explanations, trying to find supernatural subtexts where there are none and getting more confused, ultimately leading to the message that one should not stop trying to make sense out of things or everything falls apart.
- Reconstructed: However, Alice intervenes and convinces them that not being able to explain every single mystery or acknowledge that something is supernatural doesn't devalues simple or rational explanations, much less it means they should abandon their rational train of thought.
- Played For Laughs: As a Running Gag, Alice rambles about wind.
- Played for Drama: Alice saves Bob's elderly mother from becoming a casualty of a car chase and explains her coincidental appearance as "the winds told me to come". Bob, feeling extremely grateful, is conflicted about where to stand between the believers that decry this as a minor miracle and the skeptics who are willing to go so far in their disbelief as to accuse Alice of endangering a defenseless old lady to sell her crackpot beliefs to the idiots of the world.
- Played for Horror: It's a recurring mystery whether or not an area is haunted.
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