Welcome to my twisted ass

Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.

5 people linked hands to save the dog, but there are only 4 in the statue...

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.