Suspend Disbelief Abuse (advice for all fiction writers)

I agree, I was being facetious.

 

Lol. Can you tell I've given that monologue too many times?

 

You are quite right about suspension of disbelief being subjective. Some people can swallow: "There is a secret magic race of aliens who have joined in a conspiracy with ALL of earth's governments' to time travel." But for me (and many others) that's a bridge too far.

 

That is exactly the point I was trying to make. Well said!

 

Limiting suspension of disbelief is an effective tool and something everyone needs to be cautious of. The addendums, however, are really important:

1) There's a difference between "limiting suspensions of disbelief" (which is valid) and "don't do crazy stuff!" (which is invalid). The prime example I cited earlier is Michael Underwood's Geekomancy series - which basically is a world where fandom is literally magic and people run around with lightsabers while using Dungeons & Dragons cards as emergency magic fuel. The reason that it works is that all the crazy actually only ticks off of one simple premise - magic being defined as the extraction of emotional energy imparted by people into objects. Once you accept that one thing, it's really easy to define comic book fandom as a hugely powerful source of magic, and you're off to the races. It may be too crazy for some people from an aesthetic point of view, but there's only one central suspension of disbelief, and you can't count every new magic trick as a new suspension when critiquing.

2) Not everyone suspends disbelief at the same level, and you can't please everyone. I'm always going to run into that one guy that can't suspend his disbelief over the fact that my characters still carry cell phones in the year 2034. The fact that his individual tastes make it impossible for him to accept something that is eminently plausible (and, frankly, extremely probable) does not mean I have to change it for him.

 

I remember watching the first Lord of the Rings movie with my dad, and the only comment he made was (referring to Legless) "he would have run out of arrows by now". It seemed a strangely specific loss of suspension of disbelief in a movie as fantastical as The Fellowship of the Ring. You can never please everyone.

 

That's only 17 years away. Of course there will be cell phones. Cybernetic implants that give us telepathy won't dominate the market until 2035."

 

Ha ha! In fact, I thought the same thing while watching that film. It never struck me while reading the book, though.

That's the one big disadvantage to archery as a weapon, isn't it? You run out of arrows pretty quickly. In actual battles, massed 'archers' would fire volleys of arrows at the enemy in order to kill off a large enough number so their infantry could finish the job with swords and axes, etc. So once they were out of arrows, the archers were out of the battle.

Do you remember that scene in The Return of the Jedi, where Princess Leia and Luke were zooming through the forest on those landspeeders? I think the sequence went on for at least 5 minutes, maybe even ten. When they finally dumped the speeders, a guy behind me in the cinema said "Well ...they've got a long walk back." It got a big laugh, but he was right. Disbelief didn't quite suspend there....

 

Talking of which... why in every Star Wars movie do they always land miles away from the place they are heading, and then walk? Why not just land at their destination? Seriously, this happens over and over.

 

Yes, but at the same time you say Star Wars requires only two suspensions, whereas to me it requires multiple suspensions throughout the course of each film. So I think you can tolerate a lot more than you feel you can.

In my view, the strength of the overall story impacts this. For a great story that engages me and makes me want to read more, I'll suspend disbelief often just like with the Star Wars movies. For a poorly executed story I'm not going to do that. The flaws will be much harder to get past.

 

If you listen carefully, this is usually explained ahead of time in dialogue. If my memory serves me... Han, Luke, and the gang had to land far in the woods, away from the protected generator on Endor, to avoid detection from sensors (or something like that).

The reason the bad guys (Imperial troops) had to land far away on that snow world (Hoth) and walk/drive to the good guy's (Rebel's) base is explained in this scene just before Darth chokes someone.

 

Plus, to a certain extent, I suspect the multiple suspensions were intentional. It was supposed to be a fun movie, not as serious as it eventually got. I still love the original about 10x more than all the others. Okay, it was fun following Luke, Leia and Han, but if it had stopped at that first movie, I would still have loved it to bits.

 

Yep. The fact that it is so much fun makes the suspensions easy. I'd guess are a good dozen things to suspend disbelief over in the original, but they didn't really bother me much. I noticed them, but then got past them.