Playing With / Doing In the Wizard

Following

Basic Trope: A "magical" incident is retroactively explained as not being magic.

• Straight:
  • Agnes finds that there is a secret passageway to the room where a ghost supposedly appeared, and it contains materials to fake the luminous glow.
  • Stage magician Baldwin stands outside a home, plays a pipe, and summons three golden fish statues inside to him. They do vanish, but Detective Charlotte deduces they were removed earlier by mundane means; the "summons" was to distract.
• Exaggerated: An entire high fantasy world is revealed as an elaborate live-action role-playing game with good special effects.
• Downplayed:
  • Baldwin says that a ghost told him where an accident occurred. Agnes observes that he might have seen evidence earlier and only put it together in his sleep, but this is not established as the truth.
  • A fae, who appears to be magical by nature, is revealed to be just normal old Baldwin, who has learnt the art of witchcraft and obtained his magic by study.
  • Here There Be Dragons, but the dragons themselves are explained away as advanced azhdarchids that evolved towards terrestrial animal-based diet as opposed to piscivorousness, and accordingly evolved sharp teeth, scaly hide and bulky muscles in order to aid in dispatching tough land-lubbing prey. Their fire Breath Weapon is based on ejecting a jet of pyrophoric fluid mixture that spontaneously combusts when in contact with air, which they use in nature to burn down tracts of brushland and forest to drive prey out of hiding, whence they are picked off by the dragons, in a manner similar to the strategies used by some Australian raptors like black kites. With regards to civilization, dragons burn down cities to drive out human prey. Of course, the dragons are real animals, not works of magicianship and trickery.
• Justified:
  • Anything that we don't yet know the true science of would certainly look like magic at first.
  • A Sham Supernatural wanted us to think something magical was actually happening.
• Inverted: Agnes discovers a new element after much research, but then it turns out she had the assistance of a fae to give her more knowledge that would allow her to discover the element.
• Subverted:
  • Agnes shows that the mirrors would reflected strange patterns that would have looked ghostly in the room. But when the windows that were the light sources are covered up, the strange lights still appear.
  • Charlotte’s explanation turns out to be a lie to uphold The Masquerade.
• Double Subverted:
  • Agnes was just mistaken about where the light came from.
  • Said masquerade turns out to be made-up too, with several people who are “upholding” it actually being just normal people and not people with supernatural powers.
• Parodied:
  • Agnes operates a Ghostbusters-esque company that works to expose supposedly supernatural happenings as mere follies with mundane reasons.
  • Baldwin insists that he has debunked the wizards whenever he manages to perform something vaguely like their spells; the wizards ignore him and go on casting spells as convenient.
• Zig-Zagged:
  • Some fanciful elements are revealed by Agnes to actually be the product of science and some are genuinely magical.
  • It becomes ambiguous whether or not something is scientific or magical in nature, with various dropped hints supporting both possibilities.
  • Baldwin’s abilities were explained as nanomachines and not magic, simply a strain of rogue Grey Goo and Ice-9. Except real life discredits them. Antimagic fields later disrupt them. It is stated that nanomachines don't work on the actual principles suspected but actually involve unwittingly stumbling upon symbolic magic. Except later technology is found which meddles with the same forces as magic. Both mages and current scientists are described as partially right but hopelessly wrong when it comes to understanding the whole.
• Averted: Nothing seen as fanciful is given a logical explanation.
• Lampshaded:
  • "Gee, Agnes, if it weren't for your sound observations, I probably never would've realized that this ghost was just a spotlight and a fog machine."
  • "Looks like Baldwin isn’t really as magical as he thinks…"
• Invoked:
  • Agnes seeks out mystical incidents to prove they are hoaxes.
  • Detective Charlotte’s partner Danilo points out that Baldwin’s “magic tricks” have some suspicion to them and suggests that Charlotte check it out.
• Exploited:
  • Agnes works to erase all belief in the supernatural in her town by exposing them as mere complicated tricks.
  • Baldwin has show-downs with local shamans and comes off victorious. Then he shows how it's done to the people, to undercut their power.
• Defied:
  • The ghost proves itself to be real by appearing even after Agnes shuts down the mechanism creating the illusion of a ghost.
  • Baldwin proves that he really has magical powers by taking the golden fish statues outside, standing far from them, and performing a spell that causes them to float, twirl, and land right by his feet.
• Discussed: "Have you ever thought that all these stories about magic may be fake? Like, they’re actually created by some mechanism or something."
• Conversed: "Oh, so that’s how it happened. Quite disappointing, I really wanted this film to be a little bit on the paranormal side…"
• Played for Laughs:
  • Agnes and her friends face a terrifying Eldritch Abomination that screeches in their faces. While her friends panic, cower, and beg for mercy, Agnes walks up to the Eldritch Abomination and pulls out the skin from its face, revealing it to be merely a hundred men in an elaborate costume, with some controlling the face and the others controlling the limbs.
  • Baldwin the Miles Gloriosus has his magic related exploits explained in ways that reveal him to be a deluded and depraved loser. The "mermaid" he slept with? Turns out she was a manatee. The dryad he slept with similarly was just a tree he humped while stoned out of his gourd.
• Played for Horror:
  • Agnes’s encounters with the supernatural are revealed to have been delusional, and there is heavy implications that the murderer she is pursuing is actually herself while under a psychotic episode.
  • Baldwin is a deranged Criminal Magician who creates the illusion of “magic” to distract the public from his crime sprees and even murders.