About: Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction   Sponge Permalink

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Next time you get a chance, pop into your local jewelry store and take a look at the gems. Notice anything about them? They're all tiny, on the order of the size of a pinhead. If you pried every stone in the place loose from its setting and piled them up, you would be arrested the entire heap would probably fit in a soup pot. In Real Life, gem-quality stones larger than a person's fingernail are so rare that they are almost never for sale on the open market. This doesn't apply in fiction, where a single gem can easily be the size of your fist... head... torso... you get the idea. It's also not very uncommon if gems that are mined are already cut.

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  • Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction
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  • Next time you get a chance, pop into your local jewelry store and take a look at the gems. Notice anything about them? They're all tiny, on the order of the size of a pinhead. If you pried every stone in the place loose from its setting and piled them up, you would be arrested the entire heap would probably fit in a soup pot. In Real Life, gem-quality stones larger than a person's fingernail are so rare that they are almost never for sale on the open market. This doesn't apply in fiction, where a single gem can easily be the size of your fist... head... torso... you get the idea. It's also not very uncommon if gems that are mined are already cut.
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  • Next time you get a chance, pop into your local jewelry store and take a look at the gems. Notice anything about them? They're all tiny, on the order of the size of a pinhead. If you pried every stone in the place loose from its setting and piled them up, you would be arrested the entire heap would probably fit in a soup pot. In Real Life, gem-quality stones larger than a person's fingernail are so rare that they are almost never for sale on the open market. This doesn't apply in fiction, where a single gem can easily be the size of your fist... head... torso... you get the idea. It's also not very uncommon if gems that are mined are already cut. When it comes to gold, the problem is not size (unless you're talking City of Gold quantities) but weight. Most of us only ever see gold in tiny quantities (and usually alloyed with lighter metals) so it's hard to notice that it's more than twice the density of lead. A standard gold bar weighs about thirty pounds, so if the guys pulling off The Caper are carrying more than one or two at a time, they're not going to be hard to catch. In Video Games, it gets even more ridiculous. Not only are gemstones enormous, but the same thing largely applies to money or even pieces of jewelry, especially in platform games. In video games, this is also often done for convenience because finding coins, jewelry or rings as small as a thumbnail can be rather hard since that would often mean that they would take up a space of a size less than a pixel. (Compare Units Not to Scale.) Of course, characters themselves have enough Hammerspace to fit a lot of them in their pockets. Additionally there is often some You Fail Geology Forever (or possibly Everything's Better with Sparkles) in cartoons referencing valuable minerals, particularly diamonds. In fiction you'll often see a mineral faceted, polished, and/or sparkling straight out of the ground. In Real Life, clean and perfectly formed crystals are rare in nature, and most rough gems (at least to the inexpert eye) just look like dirty pebbles. We call this All-Natural Gem Polish, a closely related trope. Examples of works with huge gemstones:
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