Basic Trope: Trying to understand something prevents people from seeing its beauty.
- Straight: Bob and Alice come across a rainbow. Alice is a scientist and knows exactly how the rainbow is formed, but only sees it as a series of equations and processes, while Bob knows nothing about it, but is amazed by its beauty.
- Exaggerated: Alice shows no emotion whatsoever at even the most amazing things, while Bob becomes a gibbering mess when he looks at completely mundane objects.
- Downplayed: Alice comments she's tired of flowers after she studies them.
- Justified:
- Alice works for a Mean Boss, and anything to do with science reminds her of her job, which she'd rather forget.
- Science requires objectivity, so Alice has to put emotional distance between herself and her subject.
- Inverted:
- Bob sees a tree and quickly dismisses it as boring, while Alice knows exactly how complex the tree is, and how low the chances are it actually came to exist, and is awed by this.
- Bob and Alice see a mathematical equation. The Book Dumb Bob immediately dismisses it as "boring math stuff" whilst Alice, who's studying mathematics, is enraptured by the complexity of the equation and awed at how it was flawlessly solved regardless.
- Subverted: Bob and Alice see a rainbow. Bob acts overexcited and amazed, while Alice remains quiet. However, it's revealed that Alice was just embarrassed about showing Bob her nerdy side, and is later shown enthusing about how much she loves science to her friends. Bob however, was only pretending to be interested to get the attention of Alice.
- Double Subverted: However, it turns out Alice's field of research has nothing to do with rainbows. She actually studies flowers, which she finds dull and uninteresting.
- Parodied: Education is deemed to be a health hazard, and all schools are shut down for fear of knowledge damaging people's sense of beauty.
- Zig Zagged: Bob likes the rainbow and Alice doesn't... but Bob was actually thinking about pandas the whole time... but Alice knows everything about pandas too and doesn't like them... because she was bitten by a panda once, not because she knows too much about them... but she still doesn't like the rainbow.
- Averted: Both Alice and Bob enjoy the rainbow and flowers equally.
- Enforced: The creator wants to paint a picture that Science Is Bad and uses this to do so.
- Lampshaded: "Maybe you'd appreciate it more if you weren't focusing on silly things like light refraction, Alice."
- Invoked: Alice begins her course by telling her students that by the end of it they won't see things the same way again.
- Exploited: Bob knows that Alice doesn't get excited by rainbows and flowers, and thus trusts her to give him an honest answer about their mechanics since she must know enough to view them as boring.
- Defied: Sometimes, after a long day in the bio lab, Alice goes to an arboretum to relax and remind herself why she got into botany in the first place.
- Discussed: "Try getting excited about something you stare at in a lab all day."
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Bob shows Alice a picture of a flower he took earlier that day. She quickly names the species and flatly remarks that they're common to the area.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice's increasing cynicism and dispassion for her subject of study begins to negatively affect her motivation to work, and eventually loses her job.
- Alice is on the quick road to becoming a Straw Vulcan, with all of the fallacies it involves. It's also not that her point of view is wrong; it's that she goes to war with everybody else because of it — the fact said others annoy her by trying to push their own 'touchy-feely' views does not justify the utter enmity she flings back at them.
- Reconstructed: Alice realizes that she isn't as interested in her chosen field as she thought she was, and finds another subject that genuinely sparks her curiosity. Or, by studying something extensively, she learns to appreciate its beauty even more.
Back to Measuring the Marigolds.
