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Willing Suspension of Disbelief
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and author, called drama "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith ..." Any creative endeavor — certainly any written creative endeavor — is only successful to the extent that the audience offers this willing suspension as they read, listen, or watch. It's part of an unspoken contract: The writer provides the reader/viewer/player with a good story, and in return, they accept the reality of the story as presented, and accept that characters in the fictional universe act on their own accord. In other words, an author's work does not have to be realistic. It only has to be believable and internally consistent (and even the last requirement can be relieved to some extent). When the author pushes an audience beyond what they're willing to accept, the work fails in the eyes of that particular audience. Viewers are usually willing to go along with creative explanations for things, which is why people don't criticize your faster-than-light wormhole travel system or wonder how a shrinking potion doesn't violate the laws of matter conservation, but even in the more fantastical genres, suspension of disbelief can be broken when a work breaks its own established laws or asks the audience to put up with too many things that come off as contrived. A common way of putting this is "You can ask an audience to believe the impossible, but not the improbable." For example, people will accept that the Grand Mage can use a magic spell to teleport across the world, or that the spaceship has technology that makes it completely invisible without rendering its own sensors blind. But the audience won't accept that the ferocious carnivore just happened to have a heart attack and die right before it would have killed the main character, or that the hacker guessed his enemy's password on the first try just by typing random letters. Without some prior detail justifying it or one of the Rules listed below coming into play, an audience is going to cry foul, and their suspended disbelief is now at the forefront of their mind. What is impossible in Real Life just has to be made the norm in the setting and kept consistent for an audience to accept it. To put the above in layman's terms: all stories are contrived by their very nature (since the writer has to move characters from plot point A to plot points B, C, D, and so on), but stories can only retain viewers' suspension of disbelief insofar as the contrivances feel justified in-universe. Stories break viewers' suspension of disbelief when the contrivances start to feel forced onto the story by the writer. There are two major factors that decide how much the audience is willing to suspend their disbelief. One is the very premise of the work that lets the audience know what to expect from the work. The other is the introduction that sets the tone for the work and establishes the rules on how the world works. In more grounded works, the audience's suspension of disbelief can break much more easily. In the other end, if the work establishes itself to be very wacky and surrealist, then the audience may not even question the unfolding events and even the character's motives. Of course, different people will have different thresholds for what they're willing to accept in a work, and what may break one person's willing suspension of disbelief may not necessarily have the same effect on another. Most action movies push this trope almost to the breaking point; for the sake of action, the heroes can do virtually anything, given enough Phlebotinum. As always, the various Rules override nearly all other considerations. When the audience's disbelief, which was suspended during the show, gets reinstated some time afterward, what you get is Fridge Logic. When the means of "fixing" the Plot Hole just end up making it worse and/or opening up a new one, that's a phenomenon known as the Voodoo Shark. This trope dates back at least as far as William Shakespeare and Henry V, in which the narrator directly asks the audience to "on your imaginary forces work" in order to accept a few actors running around a stage as kings and princes and the battle of Agincourt. The MST3K Mantra is an exhortation to reinstate your Willing Suspension of Disbelief even if it's been broken, because "it's just a show". Similarly, Bellisario's Maxim calls the audience to reinstate their WSOD by ignoring whatever Plot Holes or other inconsistencies broke it, or that those things really aren't as important as the audience member(s) may think. Incidentally this is one of the more controversial elements of, believe it or not, Professional Wrestling, and is heavily tied to Kayfabe. When a true story is so bizarre and/or over-the-top that only its veracity enables this, that's Reality Is Unrealistic. |
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