What about the Magic Conch Shell? I mean, it's pretty unlikely that it was coincidental that the picnic supplies had to be dropped a few minutes after the shell said they needed to do nothing. Or maybe it is, and the shell is "just a stupid toy" as Squidward put it.
Edited by MrStranger616
So, Psychic Powers in Stellaris are real, and the two opposing views are the Spiritualists believing that Psychic Powers are of the Clap Your Hand If You Believe variety, while Materialists claim that they are instead Sufficiently Analyzed Magic. The game is ambiguous as to who's right, there is supporting evidence (though nothing definitive) going both ways, and the devs themselves have given a Shrug of God on the subject. Would the "Clap Your Hand If You Believe vs Sufficiently Analyzed Magic" debate be a Downplayed Trope there?
I'm new to this and so I felt it best to bring it up here instead of simply adding it, but doesn't the Event/Plague/Ect from Y The Last Man fit in here? It's never revealed if the cause of all the men dying out was a plague, the first human clone, or an ancient curse.
Wizzard
I'm not sure that the Discworld example is an example. It's fairly clear that when Magrat causes a door to explode, or Granny Weatherwax sends the kingdom forward in time (or, heck, when they fly on broomsticks), they clearly aren't using headology to trick people into thinking these things are happening; they're using magic to make them happen. In Maskerade Granny repeatedly says that it never occurs to anyone there might be mundane explanations for what she's doing, but the gag is that we know she is using magic ("That's not the point. There might have been something in my hand".)
I don't think the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane trope really applies to a completely magical world in any event; even the headology is a bit magical...
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Since no-one's responded to this, I had a bit of a go at rewriting it.
"In Mysterious Ways is when magic does it intentionally so that you can't tell whether it was Mundane or not."
The description of that trope talks about God doing things; it doesn't say a word about magic doing things.
Has there ever really been a suggestion that Snoopy's doghouse can really fly? Obviously, he's not really a World War I flying ace, because he's a dog and the strip's not set during World War I; that's just a fantasy. And calling his doghouse his trusty Sopwith Camel is part of that fantasy.
In a 1980 storyline, Snoopy "flies" Schroeder to music camp, but it ends with Schroeder specifically saying they haven't actually gone anywhere. And there's a very weird 1975 story where Peppermint Patty hires the doghouse to enter the All-Women Transcontinental Air Race, but while she seems to take this seriously, it also makes more sense to see this as a flight of imagination — young children aren't eligable to enter the race, regardless of whether their doghouses can actually fly or not, Snoopy is apparently the race official, and the "hotel" they stay at is the doghouse again.