#willing suspension of disbelief

[pomeraniandancer]

Frostpunk broke my brain. So, I like gaming, and I like a lot of games, and I've kind of had Frostpunk as a game that I want to play eventually on my backburner for a while now. Just recently I happened to see the opening cut scene for the entire game. And it completely confounded me.

Like, I get it, for game storyline purposes and stuff, they kinda need the population to go to the nearest oil supply, etc., and apparently that nearest oil source is the North Sea or something (don't at me if I'm getting some storyline stuff mixed up, all I've seen is the opening scene and the music).

The entire opening thesis is that the world has been plunged into a very sudden Ice Age. I highly doubt Ice Ages actually impact the Earth as suddenly as this one in-game did, unless triggered by some external cause (a meteor, for example). But I digress, willing suspension of disbelief and all that. But. Then the narrator and his colleagues decide that their only choice is to pull everyone together and go...NORTH?!?! WHY. The HELL. Would ANYONE. Go NORTH. After being PLUNGED into a BRAND NEW ICE AGE. That's the point where my brain went blank. They're not in South Africa or South America -- from what I can tell, they're from somewhere in England, considering the new city they found is called New London. Going north from England in the depths of a new Ice Age makes no logical sense, and that was the point where I dropped my willing suspension of disbelief. Like, I'll still buy and play the game at some point. But the foundational thesis of the game is nonsensical.

That's setting aside the questionable usage of steam-powered engines in Ice Age Scandinavia (again, just a guess there), but the reasons for that -- and I how I know it -- is a post for another day.

[devotedlyvaliantchild]

Still wondering why no one on the Revenge spotted Blackbeard's ship the whole time it was following them 💓🤣

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

It’s been suggested that the BOOTH creates new buttons for new functions in order that the audience doesn’t suspend its belief in the programme.

This actually dates back to the days when Leslie French portrayed the Inspector, as he insisted that eagle-eyed viewers would notice if he pressed a different button to get the BOOTH to activate the viewscreen from one serial to the next.

[thejohnfleming]

"Late Night With The Devil". Not really a movie movie, but the eyes have it...

Late Night With The Devil poster I don’t normally post reviews on here, but I saw a preview of Late Night With The Devil earlier this week. It opens in UK and US cinemas today and it opens up a whole can of interesting worms.  I guess the elevator pitch was something along the lines of The Exorcist meets The Blair Witch Project on a late-night US chat show – although ads are plugging it as…

[mckitterick]

Yes to all this!

Speculative fiction requires the audience's willing suspension of disbelief to work. As soon as a reader / viewer is pulled out of the narrative to say "I don't think so," it begins to fail.

Science fiction (especially the variety that sits at the hard-science / engineering pole of the spectrum) has much greater demands on the writer to show how we get there from here. If we pick up a hard-SF story about something novel, we need to believe it could be a thing to not get distracted by that novum. Science fiction is realistic fiction that includes realistic changes from the here-and-now - Arthur C Clarke called SF "the only realistic fiction," because it accounts for change whereas mainstream fiction assumes things do not fundamentally change.

Star Trek (and much other space opera) gets away with using phrases that sound science-ey but aren't necessarily realistic because we all know its tropes by now: warp drive, artificial intelligence, hyperspace, plasma cannons, aliens, deflector shields, ringworlds, time travel - these are all things audiences are familiar with after a century of seeing them in SF narratives, so such narratives don't require much to get the audience on board with the whole willing suspension of disbelief thing.

In fantasy, the author needs to make their world believable and internally consistent, but it doesn't need to work in our world. We don't need to know how we get there from here (in portal fantasies, for example, we need to see the doorway, but that's really it). As long as we understand that the magic or whatever other fantastic elements in your story do work in the narrative's world - and they can be wildly different from ours! - the fantasy audience is willing to suspend their disbelief.

Magical realism and surrealist fiction are often particular blends of fantasy and the mundane world around us. Its audience is more willing to accept one unlikely or even impossible thing, but we don't need to know how or why. The novum just is. The unlikeliness or impossibility of the weird thing is in fact the appeal.

So when faced with the question of a walrus or fairy showing up at your door, the question becomes in what world are you imagining this situation taking place? If it's hard science fiction or other realistic fiction, you need to understand how a walrus could possibly end up at your door and ring the doorbell. If fantasy, the fairy is probably more likely than the walrus. In magical realism or surrealist fiction, either works just fine and the author needn't explain anything.

Of course, horror blows all this out of the water, because the unexpected is the source of the thrill and appeal, so a walrus is likely to be the better authorial choice - we know what they are, and if one is ringing our doorbell something has gone horribly wrong. But that's the point.

I suspect the results of that poll say more about the respondents' preferred mode of looking at the world. People who prefer to understand how we get this choice will answer differently from those who prefer the surprise, delight, or horror of the visitor.

Absolutely fascinated by the Fairy Walrus Discourse. Naturally, I have a take:

This actually is also a fantastic illustration of a truism about Telling Stories that we all implicitly know but rarely acknowledge aloud: the improbable is far less believable than the impossible.

When you invoke the impossible, you silence the critically thinking, reality checking, lie detecting circuitry. Simpler rules reign supreme.

The Walrus, however implausible, is a thing which is real, and so whatever narrative you imagine either precedes or follows the reveal will be constrained by the envelope of the possible.

This is a webbed site all about Narrative.

The person answering the door to a Fairy is in a fairy tale, and frankly most of us would be overjoyed to find ourselves in a fairy tale. Fairy tales have sensible rules, structures we understand, tropes we love and hate.

A Walrus on your doorstep is just one more giant reminder that the world is a maelstrom of chaos, incomprehensible in its complexity, full of moving parts which obey no narrative. It’s another dose of “what fresh hell is this?”

A Walrus on your doorstep is a burden. A Fairy on your doorstep is an escape.

[doctorkinktraveller]

[ehj3]

UNFUNNY PAGES

“The country is doing well in so many ways. But there’s such divisiveness.” —DJ trump THE FAT MAN WAS FUNNY a long time ago when he was merely a sleazy buffoonish playboy-entrepreneur, but he got into politics and killed what few norms there were there and thereby let loose all the depravities kept in check by them. There were racists and sexists, authoritarians and opportunists, before the…

[jeanmoreaue]

as a non-sports fan, i totally thought that the aftg in universe fans were so unrealistic and that nobody would care about sports players personal lives that much. until i met my boyfriend who is into sports and i can 100% confirm that not only is it realistic, but i think people would be even crazier.

what’s happening rn with Shohei Ohtani from the Dodgers and his best friend betraying him and stealing millions from him is such a good example. it’s all i hear about lol. not to make light of a bad situation in real life, but it’s very Kevin Day and Riko Moriyama coded and i think fans would’ve been reacting similarly in universe lol

[mckitterick]

keep in mind that a fantasy world's language (or far-future one, etc) isn't what you're writing in, so it's all assumed to be a translation anyhow. the magic of literary immersion and willing suspension of disbelief and all that

there's plenty of room to invent new words and idioms that can't be translated, and it's fun to re-think obvious phrases that refer to our world. but if you try to avoid every possible wrongo-logism, your text will sound awkward as all heck

Trying to avoid obvious orphaned etymologies is a good idea, but the only way to completely avoid it is to make up your own conlang (and not everyone is Tolkien-style obsessive).

Which is to say, "geez" is now the invocation for the great god Geezer. If you want it to be.

[vaguely-concerned]

*sigh* this is arguably going to be slightly cursed so don't go blaming me if you fail to avert your eyes at this my dire warning. still here? ok let's go. do you guys think kremy could light a post-coital cigarette off of gideon's... let's err on the side of discretion here and call it happy trail. like if he were down there anyway and really craving the first smoke of the day in celebration of a job well done. do you think gideon would mind. probably not right. just impatiently waiting for a cooldown smooch like 'c'mon up here already, the fuck are you still doin' down th -- oh ok, fine. just don't get any ash in my pubes this time alright it gets itchy'

[averagemrfox]

Everyone is talking about the terrible tan lines team rwby will end up with but I haven’t seen anyone talking about Yang’s prosthetic being made of presumably some kind of metal and there’s no way that wouldn’t get toasty in the desert heat

[kookygobbledygook]

Daniel, you have a compromised immune system during a pandemic, why the hell are you going out to eat in so many restaurants, shoulder to shoulder with strange men. At least mask up my guy 😷 social distance or something

[redshiftsinger]

Everyone who has social anxiety about things like "wow I say um a lot", run-on sentences and repeating themselves, how often they stumble over their own words when speaking, etc etc, should be given transcription software and a court recording as part of their therapy, for perspective.

I'm so serious. You wouldn't think that judges and lawyers would say um or stumble over their own sentences often, right? But speaking as a legal assistant whose job sometimes involves transcribing hearings I CAN ASSURE YOU, they absolutely 100% do. A lot.

The "um"s and minor stammers just get left out of the transcript so it's actually fucking readable.

And the run-on sentences. My GODS the run-on sentences!

Real life legal people don't talk like TV legal people. TV legal people are delivering practiced (and dramatized) lines to entertain you.

And when you're listening to other people, if you're not thinking about it, your brain tends to filter a lot of that out. Transcribing REALLY makes it obvious how much people are repeating themselves, tripping over their own sentences, etc.

Anyway if a senior partner at the law firm where I work can get away with a bucketload of "um"s and stammers and run-on sentences and starting a sentence, getting halfway through, then cutting it off and starting a new sentence, in court, and be no worse than the judge or the opposition lawyer by any of those metrics... I guarantee, your friends will forgive you for not talking like an actor delivering practiced lines in casual conversation.

[emilyaxford]

okay the poet dean fic was bad but beat sheet is incredible. i started reading it this morning without looking at the chapter count and i got so giddy i had to check, thinking i was almost done, but in fact there are 9 chapters of like 100k more words to go