(It's actually a much narrower trope than that!  Keltham even explained it in an offhand remark-lecture at dinner, one time, discoursing upon dath ilani fiction, all of whose tropes seemed so alien and inapplicable that the Chelish Conspiracy paid it little mind.

Keltham said to his Chelish hosts, that night, that in dath ilani fiction, authors often had to resort to visibly contrived means, to prevent the incredibly Lawful characters from simply negotiating a move to their multi-agent optimal boundary.

In dath ilani fiction, whatever improbable setup causes the characters to somehow not be able to solve all their conflicts just by talking to each other, you're not supposed to question any improbabilities leading up to the setup.  You can question if the setup itself has a loophole, obviously, that a sensible character ought to find; but if events weird and unlikely led into that arrangement, literary convention says not to question that.

After all, if you can't somehow impose exotic conditions averting the theorems about agents coordinating on multi-agent-optimal outcomes, you don't have a novel, do you?  You have a short story ending in an anticlimax.  Something has to happen that wouldn't happen in real life; in real life, after all, sensible people put arbitrarily huge efforts into making sure that nobody ever ends up fighting instead of negotiating.

But Abrogail Thrune is not seeing it as strange in the right dimensions, the pass to which she's come; she hasn't remembered Keltham's key words from that offhand lecture.  To Abrogail Thrune, "a conflict that has some weird exotic reason it can't be solved by everyone talking honestly at each other" is nothing new at all.)

(It's actually a much narrower trope than that!  Keltham even explained it in an offhand remark-lecture at dinner, one time, discoursing upon dath ilani fiction, all of whose tropes seemed so alien and inapplicable that the Chelish Conspiracy paid it little mind.

Keltham said to his Chelish hosts, that night, that in dath ilani fiction, authors often had to resort to visibly contrived means, to prevent the incredibly Lawful characters from simply negotiating a move to their multi-agent optimal boundary.

In dath ilani fiction, whatever improbable setup causes the characters to somehow not be able to solve all their conflicts just by talking to each other, you're not supposed to question any improbabilities leading up to the setup.  You can question if the setup itself has a loophole, obviously, that a sensible character ought to find; but if events weird and unlikely led into that arrangement, literary convention says not to question that.

After all, if you can't somehow impose exotic conditions averting the theorems about agents coordinating on multi-agent-optimal outcomes, you don't have a novel, do you?  You have a short story ending in an anticlimax.  Something has to happen that wouldn't happen in real life; in real life, after all, sensible people put arbitrarily huge efforts into making sure that nobody ever ends up fighting instead of negotiating.

But Abrogail Thrune is not seeing it as strange in the right dimensions, the pass to which she's come; she hasn't remembered Keltham's key words from that offhand lecture.  To Abrogail Thrune, "a conflict that has some weird exotic reason it can't be solved by everyone talking honestly at each other" is nothing new at all, not even a visible trope.)

(It's actually a much narrower trope than that!  Keltham even explained it in an offhand remark-lecture at dinner, one time, discoursing upon dath ilani fiction, all of whose tropes seemed so alien and inapplicable that the Chelish Conspiracy paid it little mind.

Keltham said to his Chelish hosts, that night, that in dath ilani fiction, authors often had to resort to visibly contrived means, to prevent the incredibly Lawful characters from simply negotiating a move to their multi-agent optimal boundary.

In dath ilani fiction, when some bizarre setup causes the characters to somehow not be able to solve all their conflicts just by talking to each other, you're not supposed to question any improbabilities leading up to the setup.  You can question if the setup itself has a loophole, obviously, that a sensible character ought to find; but if events weird and unlikely led into that arrangement, literary convention says not to question that.

After all, if you can't somehow impose exotic conditions averting the theorems about agents coordinating on multi-agent-optimal outcomes, you don't have a novel, do you?  You have a short story ending in an anticlimax.  Something has to happen that wouldn't happen in real life; in real life, after all, sensible people put arbitrarily huge efforts into making sure that nobody ever ends up fighting instead of negotiating.

But Abrogail Thrune is not seeing it as strange in the right dimensions, the pass to which she's come; she hasn't remembered Keltham's key words from that offhand lecture.  To Abrogail Thrune, "a conflict that has some weird exotic reason it can't be solved by everyone talking honestly at each other" is nothing new at all, not even a visible trope.)