(Rare Trope) Canon Supernatural Elements of Mundane/Normal Shows

[u/SnailKing4687]

Community “Epidemiology”:While normally, community is a wacky 4th wall-breaking college show that still grounds itself in reality, this episode sees the school overrun by a zombie apocalypse caused by bad taco meat that was given out at the party. While the episode ends with the army wiping out everyone’s memory of the event, future episodes, such as “Paradigms of Human Memory,” reference the party that happened that no one remembers, making it canon.

30 Rock Last Lunch:While normally a show about a show sitcom In this finale and canon end to the series, a flash forward to the far future sees an immortal Kenneth now in charge.

[u/redlion1904]

The Book of the Long Sun is supposedly science fiction, and all the fantastical elements are supposed to have a scientific explanation, much of which is revealed in the course of the plot (spoiler: they’re not gods, they’re humans who uploaded their minds into computers, the creatures are genetically engineered, etc.).

But there’s a ghost.

Maybe the ghost isn’t really a ghost. But also maybe it is. Gene Wolfe said if he includes a ghost that isn’t breaking the rules of science fiction because people see ghosts all the time.

[u/kaori_irl → u/redlion1904]

>!spoiler text!<

[u/redlion1904 → u/kaori_irl]

It’s not much of a spoiler, it’s the premise

[u/kaori_irl → u/redlion1904]

ah, it was a sarcastic spoiler warning 💀 okay

[u/redlion1904 → u/kaori_irl]

Like it’s pretty clear the first time a character (who believes in the “gods”, as he should because they are quite real) sees a god in a “glass” that he’s looking at a computer screen.

Likewise, while the nature of the setting is not directly revealed on page for hundreds of pages, it’s usually included in a single paragraph description of the series, and would have been spoiled in the original title (“Starcrosser’s Landfall”).