Tolkien himself had a different point of view. In his opinion, if suspension of disbelief becomes necessary, it's a sign that the writer has failed. He preferred "secondary belief" instead. The idea was that the reader should remain immersed in the fictional world, confident that the world works consistently according to its internal logic. That the logic is there, even if the reader doesn't know it, and that the writer doesn't break it for their own convenience.
> In his opinion, if suspension of disbelief becomes necessary, it's a sign that the writer has failed
I mean on the base universe level there are tiny ink blobs on paper. There is no Frodo, there is no Middle Earth, there is no words or sentences just ink marks on paper. Anything other than that is the "suspension of disbelief" already.
Any story -- fiction or non-fiction -- that is written down is just tiny ink blobs on paper. I don't need to suspend my disbelief to read a textbook about anatomy.
Reading fiction isn't about believing that the created world it's real, only that it's plausible, given the natural laws, constraints, and logic present in the world that's been built.
Put another way, when I read LoTR, I don't believe that Tolkien is asking me to suspend my disbelief that elves, dwarves, and fantastical creatures once populated our Earth; instead, he's built a world where such things exist, and he's asking me to read a story about them, while promising that his stories will maintain the internal consistency of the world he's built.
I like the GP's use of the term "secondary belief"; I think it very much encapsulates that middle ground where an author creates rules for a fantastical world that are always obeyed during storytelling, vs. an author who creates a fantastical world, but bends and breaks that world's rules (if there even are any to begin with) in order to serve the story they want to tell, which does require suspension of disbelief.
But that is the thing. We all learned that in order to enjoy a story we kinda pretend to believe it. Just sticking with Tolkien, you read the first line of the Lord of the Rings: “When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” And you can right there and then say: “What a load of bollocks. There is no such a place as Hobbiton.” And then you close the book. And you are right! There is no such place as Hobbiton.
Of course you will be poorer for it. But that thing, where for the sake of the enjoyment of the story we pretend that “Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End” exists enough to hear the next sentence is the suspension of disbelief! Where you keep reading instead of calling the writer a liar is where you suspended your disbelief. It is the basis of all fiction. It is so inherent that you often don’t see it. The same way a fish don’t see the water. But it is there.
What you are talking about, the importance of having an internaly consistent story, is not where suspension of disbelief is, but where by abusing it the writer breaks it. And suddenly as it is shattered you realise its previous existence.
The goal is not to not have suspension of disbelief. Because you can’t tell any fiction without it. The goal is to not abuse it in order that the reader can enjoy the work.
It's the exact opposite though - the world presented a set of rules and then followed them, so it requires your belief not disbelief.
The good example of that "suspension of disbelief" is The Last Jedi, where the film kept breaking rules established within the franchise, so as someone familiar with Star Wars you have to keep suspending your belief to enjoy the film - and at a certain point it becomes too much.
Like if LotR ended with Aragorn just smashing the one ring with a sword, that would be an extremely unsatisfing ending to the story, partially because the books made it very clear earlier that the ring cannot be destroyed this way, so it breaks your set of beliefs that were established. You could say "why does it matter, it's all made up anyway!" but every story requires being consistent to be enjoyable.
I don't want to start a debate about the Last Jedi, but I will just say that the rules that are ironclad in franchises tend not to be the mechanics of the world but rather the emotional expectations of the audience. The kind of rules breaking you describe of Aragorn just smashing the ring is not so different from Dorothy learning she could click her heels together to go home all along, an idea that is silly and also deeply emotionally resonant.
>The kind of rules breaking you describe of Aragorn just smashing the ring is not so different from Dorothy learning she could click her heels together to go home all along
I disagree: in LoTR, it was made abundantly clear that the ring could not be destroyed this easily. Gimli even tried it with his axe. Ending this way would have been internally inconsistent.
However, I don't remember anything in Wizard of Oz which prevented Dorothy from clicking her heels together to go home. She just never knew this trick until the end, and it's not an immediately obvious thing to do anyway.
> in LoTR, it was made abundantly clear that the ring could not be destroyed this easily. Gimli even tried it with his axe. Ending this way would have been internally inconsistent.
FWIW, Gimli trying to destroy the ring with his axe is a Peter Jackson invention -- it's not in the books, and it's not at all consistent with the Ring's effect on people in the rest of the story, e.g. Bilbo was not capable of casting the ring into his fireplace (that was nowhere near hot enough to melt gold). So Gimli even attempting to destroy the Ring with his axe required me to suspend disbelief in an annoying and immersion-breaking way.
LotR is such a lightning rod for these kinds of debates because there are so many layers of "true fans." I know two fantasy nerds who are boomers with a deep attachment to Tolkien's work, one of them loved the movies and one of them hated them. It's not about how much you do or do not care about "immersion." I suspect it's a facet of personality. I'm not enough of a know-it-all to try and armchair analyze these two men, but I am enough of a know-it-all to gesture in that direction and slink off.
Just to be clear, I love the movies! I think they're incredibly well done and a great adaptation of Tolkien's work. I find that one bit with Gimli striking the ring to be one of the most irritating part, because it's so obviously inconsistent with the rest of the story -- but it's just one moment that I can easily ignore without it affecting my enjoyment of the movie.
I think it's different for different kinds of stories. To borrow your example, one possible interpretation of The Wizard of Oz is that it's a political and economic allegory around the gold and silver standards. Allegories often by their very nature have to stretch and bend reality (even an internally-defined one) to tell the story they want to tell.
I agree with your hesitation to start a debate about The Last Jedi, but I think your point about what rules are ironclad is why reactions to that movie were so mixed. For me (and many others), the mechanics of the Star Wars world are paramount. I have trouble experiencing strong in-universe emotions when those mechanics are broken, because when that happens, I'm pulled out of the story and have trouble immersing myself in what's happening to the characters. But to others, the emotional impact of what happens to the characters, and how they act, is the most important thing, as you suggest, with all other concerns secondary.
The writers of the Star Wars sequel trilogy had a very tall order on their hands: the "original" Star Wars fans are older (some might say much older) now, and they needed to tell a story that could appeal to those people (such as myself), but also appeal to children and young adults. It's very hard (some might even say impossible) to create a narrative that speaks to superfans who have been steeped in the mythology and mechanics of a world for decades, but also attracts a more casual viewer who just wants to watch a cool story with lightsabers and spaceship battles. My opinion is that they sacrificed the first bunch in order to attract a fresher audience, but it doesn't really matter if my opinion is "correct" or not; the fact that the movie (or entire trilogy, even) was so controversial, with so many opposing views, is all we need to know: they tried to appeal to too many different types of people, didn't do a great job of it (if a great job of it is even possible) and in the end a lot of people were unhappy.
I don't disagree that there is a divide between people who prioritize mechanics and those who prioritize emotions, but I think it's overstated. I think if you're thinking about mechanics, it's because the emotions failed you on some level. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed the JJ Abrams Star Trek, even if I don't think it's a great movie, because it's basically dramatically functional. Halfway through Into Darkness I was squirming in my seat thinking about the plot holes, because the movie doesn't work on any level.
With the Last Jedi, I honestly don't think the central problem is that the creators were trying to appeal to everybody at once. I think that better describes the Force Awakens, which miraculously succeeds at doing so at the cost of being kind of forgettable (see my point about Star Trek 2009 above). I think the issue with the Last Jedi is that it makes a very specific set of choices that don't please everybody.
The thing is, in some ways I'm the kind of old fan you're talking about, though I may be younger than you. I pored over books of EU spaceship schematics, read the Star Wars Legacy comics, played the video games, etc. Maybe my experience was different than yours because I watched the prequels at a similar age to the originals, because they were coming out in theaters when I was a kid.
I am not a casual fan, but I'm also not a superfan. I think it's easy to dismiss people who liked The Last Jedi as casual, but Star Wars is such a dominant cultural phenomenon that there is a massive spectrum of how much people care about it and what it means to them.
This has all been kind of a scattered argument. I'm not sure what my conclusion is. Maybe that the real issue with The Last Jedi for many people isn't that it ignores the lore. The prequel trilogy already directly contradicts loads of aspects of the original trilogy that EU creators and fans had to no-prize away. I think it's more to do with how The Last Jedi conceives of Star Wars as a story, and what it considers important and what it does not.
When you sense a deus ex machina ruining your immersion in a story, just think of it as observation selection effect: “if it went the other way, and hanging Harry was not rescued by a friend in a flying car, there would be nothing to write about in the first place”.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. If the writer paints themselves into a corner where they need a deus ex machina in order to continue the story, then they've done a poor job of it, and need to back up and reconsider where the story was going. The argument isn't "Harry needed to be rescued in an unbelievably fantastical manner because otherwise he would have died and the story would have ended", the argument is "the story shouldn't have taken Harry to a crisis where he couldn't have gotten out of it in an in-universe-believable way".
(FWIW, I don't really object to this particular part in the story; I think a flying car is pretty consistent with the Harry Potter universe. And the poster upthread must have misremembered the scene; his friends merely came to "rescue" him from being locked in his room. He wasn't hanging out a window and wouldn't have died.)
Well, that’s the idea, to look at it the other way, like the anthropic principle does. Whether you consider that “wrong” is up to you, I think it is highly subjective.
Then I'm mentally making notches for every “the story would have ended there”. The story runs off its rails and needs the hand of god to set it back onto the track, and that diminishes the enjoyment of the world-building.
Maybe that's why I never liked Batman. He always just happened to have the exact very specialized tool on his belt to escape whatever contrived setup the Joker trapped him.
Invert the logic. The universe is in state X with narrator in it to tell the story because a super unlikely chain of events occurred. Call it anthropic principle.
Or, think how in many-words interpretation there is a universe for any arbitrarily unlikely development. The writer picked one that floats her boat.
I think it becomes intrusive into the storytelling when it becomes a constant chain of "and then yet another, even crazier thing happened to this one character". Especially when the character started as an everyman.
It's a problem many book series have - one character keeps being the centre of the universe and surviving insurmountable odds repeatedly to the point of incredulity and usually the ante keeps ratcheting up as well so your original ordinary-human character ends up with some kind of godlike powers.
To me, Harry Potter is actually fairly good in this regard, as the character development is at least not utterly unlike 11-18 year olds at school during the re-outbreak of a traumatic civil war, and from the start, there's a clear, in-universe reason why the main character is always the one near the action in the depicted timeframe.
Star Wars did this quite well originally ("why is this rando farmhand at the centre, oh, cool, that's why"). The prequels did a little worse ("here's how the farmhand's father got to the centre, ok well maybe it's awfully convenient the ship broke down right there and a simple blood test reveals The One, but ok") and the recent films rather worse ("these people are at the centre...how? Why? Genetic predestination?"). Notably, the less you explain the Force, the easier it is to keep the story believable and consistent. Again, Harry Potter's vagueness over the specifics of magic helps it.
Something that seems to be getting more common, though it's not new, as series lengthen in real-world time is to do a Star Trek: TNG and start an in-universe subseries where you can have things happen to someone else entirely for a change, but as part of the overall universe's story. It can be tricky if the universe is very predicated on one person, like Harry Potter is. Star Wars has not done well at this, but have tried. I think they keep trying to bootstrap interest from existing fans by character reuse, but the better series like Andor pick a whole new story to tell.
Iain M. Banks was especially good at this and didn't even really have a main narrative, as he'd hop all over the Culture in time and space so you could have the cool stuff happen that he wanted to show the reader, but didn't need to keep powering-up one person (or ship) endlessly. But space opera has the advantage that you can just go and be somewhere and somewhen else very easily. It's a bit harder if you need the subseries to be nearby without constantly dragging the other main characters in, especially when they're further along their upgrade path as you need to explain why they don't just pick up the phone, pop round and stomp the "mortal threat" flat and it's another kind of deus ex machina. Doubly so if the threat is very obvious and world-ending, because surely they'd turn up to that!
Making up random arbitrary things whenever needed to get out of a fix is just bad storytelling.
One of the great things about LOTR is the ring is ascribed various powers, and then the consequences of that play out. The rules within its world are consistent.
HP has no consistency.
Probably why I also prefer hard scifi - it must follow the known rules of physics, or at least have plausible extensions.
I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
> I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
The (inconvenient, in context, for anyone who might be considered a protagonist) resurrecting of dead people is a major point in literally the first sequence of the first episode of the series, which is literally telling you what is coming that the people making mundane human decisions based on mundane human foibles and passing off anything more exotic as superstition were ignorant of to their peril. The return of that kind of magic to a largely unprepared world was telegraphed as the central theme of the series.
>One of the great things about LOTR is the ring is ascribed various powers, and then the consequences of that play out. The rules within its world are consistent.
LOTR has not one but three people rescued in the nick of time by enormous flying eagles that can talk. That's technically all fine within the rules of the universe, but it hardly seems any less of a stretch than flying cars in Harry Potter.
That is just plain false. The rules are not as clearly defined in HP (because it's not trying to be a hard magic system), but when Rowling makes a rule she follows it. For example, you can't bring people back from the dead. That's a rule which is clearly stated and is followed through the series.
In your example, no rule was broken. The book never said "things can't fly in this world". In fact, it's established pretty early on that broomsticks can fly by means of specific enchantment spells. The fact that someone got the idea to apply those enchantments to a car doesn't break the rules of the world. The fact that Harry's friends showed up to rescue him at the right moment is certainly convenient, but also doesn't break the rules of the world. The book explains why they were worried and came to check on him, after all. No rules were broken in this scene, you just don't like it. Which is certainly your right! But it's not poor writing which breaks the rules of the world.
> Probably why I also prefer hard scifi - it must follow the known rules of physics, or at least have plausible extensions.
Well, if you're going to put in plausible extensions instead of following the rules then "i'm not interested in such lazy writing" as you stated. In any fictional story telling, there's going to be some creative licensing involved to tell the story. Hell, even in biopics and "based on true" there's a lot of creative license just to make the story interesting. Following the rules of known physics just limits the imagination to make for bland stories.
> I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
From the very off of the show, the resurrecting dead people was involved in the story. If it wasn't, "the night is dark and full of terrors" and "winter is coming" would be pointless. Just because the dead coming back was timed to happen with the story is just part of it.
I mean, next, you'll tell me that Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead were pointless since they were resurrected dead people too.
I think you've moved into the comic book guy territory of "worst book/movie/comic ever" type of meme
How does that change anything? If anything that adds a suspense element to the story: we're not sure if all the Lord of Light stuff is true, but finally when Jon is resurrected, we find out that it is.
To be fair, though, it was established before then that it was true, unless you didn't believe that Dondarrion had actually been repeatedly resurrected, and that it was just a story they told to make him more fearsome. Which is also fair, but it still feeds into the point of the suspense: if you had trouble buying the fact of the Dondarrion resurrections, then you finally got your answer when Jon got his treatment.
Also recall -- if you read the books and aren't just relying on the TV series -- Catelyn Stark was also resurrected after her death during the Red Wedding, though her resurrection didn't go quite so well physically, since her body had already partly decomposed in a river, or mentally/emotionally, as she turned into a non-empathetic vengeance machine.
I didn't like the Catelyn Stark resurrection, either. My interest in the books waned at that point, and I didn't finish it.
I liked the GoT where it was about human power plays, action, politics, intrigue, alliances, betrayal, love, death, etc. Suddenly mixing random magic into a well established structure just didn't work for me.
Both the book series and the show open with magic. It (and the fact that the people doing human squabbling, despite having a huge history of warnings about it that have faded into myth, were unprepared for it, and how they respond) is fairly overtly the theme of the series, and marketed as such.
I get not being interested in that theme, but being surprised and disappointed that the series progressively turns out to be about exactly the thing it tells you is the lurking force that most in the setting disregard that it is going to be about is... well, surprisingly poor media literacy.
It very, very clearly came not out of nowhere, even in the show. We had the Brotherhood of Banners resurrecting Bendric several times using the same magic, and in the book we had Lady Stoneheart to show what can also happen after being resurrected.
While the resurrection is probably going to happen if Winds ever comes out, it's not clear if Jon will actually be the Jon we know, or even Jon, after he comes back. Warging into Ghost will probably play a role, as that's a common theme in Dance.
Oh and, we had wights right from the very first book, maybe even Prologue ...
So it's not "convenient", nothing for GRRM is convenient currently, otherwise Winds would be out by now ...
The JS resurrection was not related to the zombies, as JS was able to resume a normal life.
If this could happen in the GoT universe, wouldn't you think that there'd be a massive effort by kings and others to resurrect dead family members? Or even talk about resurrecting them? There was no hint of that.
(Zombies violate the laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which makes it sad that most zombie movies try on some hackneyed explanation for them being the result of some virus. If you're going to try a scientific explanation for them, don't blatantly violate fundamental laws of physics.)
> lost all interest in Harry Potter when he was hanging outside a window, helpless. Then, his buddy appears with a flying car to rescue him.
Hmmm. When exactly does that happen? Are you referring to the very start of chapter 3 in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Because Harry most definitely is not hanging out of a window before his friends arrive.
He is kept locked up by his aunt and uncle. Because of that he is not answering his friend's letters. His friend has access to the magical means of busting him out (a flying car) so they do. If he would have decided to rescue him a day earlier or a day later he would have found Harry in basically the same situation.
This is the same in both the film [1] and the novel. Soooo what are you talking about? I think you made the scene up, which seriously undermines your point.
Why would you mention something while it was not relevant? The Weasley's dad was known to be intrigued by things of the Muggles, and was known to collect items such as the specific Ford (car not available in the US so the reference was a bit lost).
If Ron had told Harry about the car in some random conversation in a previous book, you would probably then complain about some bit of obtrusive foreshadowing ruining the plot line. Okay, maybe not you specifically, but that's another common trope of criticism of fiction.
I don't really see that as a problem, though. This is a world where magic is a thing, and is commonplace. That's the entire point of the world and the story wouldn't exist without it.
A flying car seems utterly unsurprising, especially when we've already seen flying broomsticks. I think I'm more surprised that we didn't see more of the flying car.
If you don't like that, definitely don't read the first Frontlines series by Marko Kloos! I find it enjoyable, but the main character is like a one-man quantum immortality thought experiment.
