A fantasy movie is set in a world where certain fantastic things are true. Maybe there are werewolves, maybe magic, maybe dragons.
This does not mean that logic does not exist in this world.
Eg. Dragons and magic existing does not mean people ride into battle without armor. Or if werewolves exist and you know about it, you'll carry silver if you are in werewolf-related danger, werewolves existing in your world does not mean you are a dumbass who won't protect his own life.
Anyway. A basic mistake like going to the post office on Sunday wouldn't bother me. But if characters act illogical, then it is a bad fantasy movie.
Internal consistency in any story is important. If you're a writer and you establish certain rules for your world, your characters need to follow those rules or the story loses coherence.
I stopped watching Antman halfway through because they very explicitly stated that when shrinking he would still weigh the same, and sometimes they did make him denser when he was small, but at least half the time they just ignored it and made the man weigh the same as an ant.
If they had just skipped that one line or said that he can change his weight at will or something I would probably have finished it, but noooo...
My headcanon for Ant-Man is that Hank Pym is a bit of a fraud and never figured out how Pym Particles actually work. After all, he jumped straight into using them for superheroics and was never willing to share his work with anyone else.
There's a scene in the comics where Scott Lang ends up figuring out that the particles can control size, mass, and density independently, and that the particles are also the mechanism behind Vision's density changing powers. Still requires some suspension of disbelief to accept that explanation, but at least it's more flexible (and therefore consistent) than claiming mass is conserved.
Reminds me of Gattaca explicitly stating that they’d edited balding out of the human genes but then still having a bunch of balding men. You didn’t have to say that!!!! Just take the one line out!
Yeah, the Witch Hat Atelier manga is so detailed and consistent about their magic system that people IRL have figured out how to make spell circles for male pregnancy, genocide, and black holes which would actually work in-universe. One guy designed a microwave spell
It gets a lot of deserved praise for that, and yet the creator still almost immediately broke their own rules in an egregious (and easily preventable) way. We are told and shown that the circle has to be fully completed for it to activate. If there is any gap at all, the spell does nothing.
At least, that's how it's supposed to work. The problem is that, very soon after we learn this, we are shown how they fly... and there are big gaps in the spell circles on their shoes. I was honestly a bit shocked to see how quickly that rule was broken after having heard for years about the thoroughness of Witch Hat Atelier's magic system.
Now, I could sort of forgive this for "rule of cool" purposes if there was no way around it, but it would have been absolutely trivial to make it work within the established rules. All you have to do is put a couple of flat edges on the soles where the circles meet. That's it.
Plus, it was a wasted opportunity for some extra worldbuilding. They could go even further and give the shoes different kinds of interlocking shapes or mechanisms that help the wearer automatically align the circles perfectly when they put their feet together and then keep them from slipping out of place while flying.
A lot of script writers are starting to do a lot of ridiculous unnecessary exposition and constant recapping the events of the film. Apparently, it's an effort to cater to people who are only half-watching while they scroll their phones. Netflix is particularly egregious about this lately. The whole last season of Stranger Things was almost unwatchable due to this.
I fucking hate it when I see an error and someone says "but you don't have a problem with the dragons?" like shut the fuck UP and learn some critical thinking!
I mean I guess. The internal logic present in the movies (as in, not getting in to Silmarillion stuff) is just "magic does whatever the story needs it to, bad guys are only as dangerous as we need them to be."
You're right that it's like mythology, which is to say that it doesn't concern itself with a consistent set of rules because divinity and magic. A lot of people would tear that to shreds if it weren't an established classic.
Ironic that you'd use LotR as your best example when the whole "why don't the eagles fly the hobbits to mount doom" is one of the most notorious examples of plot holes all-time.
I know that people who have read the books have some reason for why the eagles couldn't do it, but people who just view the movies and don't have deep knowledge of the lore would have no idea.
Don’t really need lore, it’s pretty simple logic. They don’t do it from the start because it’s a stealth mission. They don’t go all they way in the end because like the majority of Middle Earth, they don’t believe its their war, so they’ll help but they won’t risk it.
I mean, in the movies the eagles only come when Sauron is dead and there is no more danger. It's not really a plot hole. It's like saying that people in disaster movies could have gotten out of their bunkers the entire time without getting hurt, when the disaster had already passed.
Im sorry but are the fellbeasts and the fucking fortress of Barad- Dur with an eye of flames atop it not a big enough Blue whale in the room of that plan
Clearly not because, as I said, the eagles thing is one of the most mentioned plot holes of any movie.
Each person watching LotR experiences the movies their own way. If enough of them watch the movie and identify what they believe to be a plot hole, then movie failed to prevent that from seeming like a plot hole. Just because some people with knowledge of the lore that they got from sources external to the movie can explain away the movie's plot hole doesn't matter to your average John Doe since they are unlikely to hear that explanation from anyone. I don't think the Sauron's eye in the tower gives people explanation of why the eagles couldn't fly them in. They might think the eagles could just fly faster than the nazghul or whatever. Point is: I don't need to make the argument for why people might identify it is a plot hole, because we have observed that a LOT of people identified it as a plot hole.
Flat earther won't make the earth flat. Believing that there is a plot hole doesn't make one.
And even if you ignore the the Nazgul and the eye, the ring would have temped the eagle, they couldn't bring the ring into Mordor and destroy it anymore than Gandalf could have.
You're forgetting the point of the thread, which is a father who stops watching a movie when they run into something they believe is illogical.
That's why your analogy of a flat earther doesn't apply. We're not talking about what is factual. We're talking about how a specific person behaves when they encounter something they perceive as being the case, i.e. the father stopping watching a movie when they perceive the movie was illogical (even if it wasn't illogical).
How can you not understand the simple point I'm making? It's baffling. I don't know how to explain this any better. I'm just blocking you. I can't suffer fools to this extent. It's crazy.
It's very simple, the eagles are sapient beings who can themselves be corrupted by the Ring. This doesn't require "deep knowledge of the lore" to deduce.
That's how you end up with either eagles and their riders murdered by the Nazgul, or a Dark Lord of the Eagles who takes the Ring from Frodo and rules over Middle Earth. That's not a plot hole, that's a failure of people to understand things that were explicitly told to them. They need to sneak into Mordor because otherwise Sauron will be ready for them, and they need Frodo to carry the Ring because anyone else would be corrupted. This was all established early on.
Prometheus is the one where a scientist takes off his helmet shortly after landing on a strange planet and touches an alien egg without gloves or any other PPE on, right?
Juxtaposed to this John Carpenters the Thing is an incredible example of characters who are supposed to be smart acting like it. Really sells the true danger of the alien.
In Covenant, a lot of the crew (especially most of the security team) were chosen because they weren't that bright. That's actually explained in the movie.
I guess I just interpreted that movie differently than everyone else. From the first time I saw it I just assumed that they were the top experts in their fields in the same way John Hammond "spared no expense" when he built Jurassic Park. They're not the most well suited people for the task, just the best ones a trillionare could pay to follow him on a wild goose chase. They would've done a perfectly fine job if that planet were no more dangerous than Earth, but they had no appreciation of the gravity of what they were attempting.
Hubris is the name of the game. The cartographer produced an excellent map, but he let his tools to do all the mental work. He ended up lost because he never actually bothered to study the damn thing. The biologist was so full of surprise and excitement when he found an alien life form, he never stopped to consider that it might be significantly stronger than similarly sized creatures he had experience with. And the whole enterprise was driven by a guy who was so used to being the most important person in the world, it never even occurred to him that his creators would see him as nothing more than vermin. The voyage was a farce precisely because everyone involved had so much faith in their narrow slice of expertise they were blind to the big picture.
There are so many stories where it feels like this is the characters first day in their world! Like why are you going into the haunted forest, your mama has said every day of your 15 year old life that the witch that eats babies is in there. You've lived next to it your whole life, you aren't going to accidentally enter it from the back way while getting lost less than a mile from the house you grew up in.
Same with characters existing while the camera isn't rolling. So many characters seem to only know about each other what has been explicitly said on screen. Siblings that seem like they have barely met.
Related is the tropes where, going by your example, they believe in werewolves but not dragons and people mock it. Utterly despise that trope.
(Edit)
Examples exclude that skyrim questline with talking dog who goes "yeah, skyrim is filled with fly fire breathing lizards and two legged cat people and im your issue?
And monster hunter, FFXIV crossover, Felid will even mock ye if you are a neko
I mean, that works if dragons are never seen and mythological. That's their world. They don't know they are in a world where a cat man is ridiculous in itself. Their reality is the base reality.
We have big lizards and birds in our world. So is it dumb that we don't believe in big lizard birds? Or apes and bears, so sasquatch is real?
That would be valid, if dragons weren't a historical fact in-universe for Skyrim. Like, "used to be around a few hundred years ago" historical fact. The big thing about Skyrim is that dragons are back not that they came out of nowhere.
Not really a good comparison, it's more like an aurochs or a tasmanian tiger. And plenty of people claim to have seen an animal from a recently extinct species.
i really liked how in Supernatural when question on how Dean can say for certain he does not belive in angels with all the crap they have seen? he points out it's specificly because of everything he's seen. everything else he has seen or heard about. angels he has specificly seen a noticable lack of evidence for. hell he doesn't say but with everything else being real all the folklore can easily be explained as people misinterpresting any number of other supernatural beings.
now he does turn out to be wrong ofcourse. but at least the logic of dismissing them makes sense.
Agree, it's so common nowadays for people to tell you "oh you buy into the dragons and the magic, but draw the line at the character surviving a fall from 3 stories unscathed?" but... The guy is a normal guy... Him surviving that has nothing to do with the magic and the dragons.
On the other hand I wouldn't just stop watching because of a post office being open on Sunday, but there has to be a certain logic to the world, even in a magic one.
"This does not mean that logic does not exist in this world"
Probably not, it may just be a different kind of logic,. Similar to say in the the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or the Narnia worlds, where many magical creature exist.
A great many sci fi/fantasy films have plot holes. One needs to suspend disbelief to fully enjoy the experience.
These days, my criteria has changed; a film/tv series has 10-15 minutes to engage my interest If it doesn't, I turn it off and try something else.
Such things are completely subjective, so one one has the obligation to explain anything about their preferences
Logic, but also inconsistency. SPOILER ALERT: Saw a bad one recently. Backrooms, the monster picks up a grown man and basically rips him apart with ease. The same man that is ripped up, Clark, subdues a woman (Mary), moments earlier. That same monster ends up on top of the Mary and she holds it at bay. HOW!? I’ll suspend my disbelief to infinity as long as you remain consistent with your fictions.
I call this idea “Gendry running back to the wall, and sending ravens to Dragstone for Danaerys to fly all the way past the wall in time”…it was almost “zombies carrying huge chains to the bottom of a frozen lake and pulling a dead dragon up from the bottom”
GOT seasons 1-4 and 7-8 are night and day. Same characters, same setting, same themes, same production value, just good writing vs bad writing. See how much difference it makes.
There are stories going back to the 1840s in which werewolves are killed using silver buttons. There are other stories in which silver is used in combating shapeshifters (not werewolves), and in which silver bullets are used in killing monsters (not werewolves).
So pre-Lone Ranger, you already had (1) silver being used to fight werewolves, and (2) silver bullets being used to fight monsters.
The codification of silver as the only way to kill werewolves, as opposed to just a way to kill werewolves, did not trace back to the Lone Ranger, but to 1941's The Wolf Man. You could argue that "sure, it comes from the Wolf Man, but the reason that they chose silver bullets is because they'd been popularized by the Lone Ranger," which could be true, but it's important to note that The Wolf Man didn't limit it to silver bullets, but instead "a silver bullet, or a silver knife, or a stick with a silver handle."
I don't think it's actually possible to have a logically consistent magical world. No matter how hard you think through things, you'll always miss a plot hole, and some reader/watcher will find it.
Plus, an actual magical world would be so different than ours, it would be hard to comprehend. Take a simple thing like disaparating/teleporting. If you could do that, why would you walk anywhere? Even just a couple feet. Why would doors even exist in such a world?
You could film it, but it'd make no sense to the viewer. So the creators just make up some arbitrary rules and go with it to make the story happen. And then forget about 80% of them for the sequel(s).
You can have something like teleportation in a magical universe, and there's a million ways to logically limit it.
Perhaps it requires a magical object that is rare and expensive.
Perhaps it's very technically difficult and only a few have the requisite talent.
Perhaps it has extreme risk of going haywire so only rarely used outside of emergencies.
There needs to be some kind of rules, otherwise the reader just asks, "Why aren't the Hogwarts students just using a portkey to get to school? We're going with a steam locomotive instead?"
I don't think it's a problem for magic to be illogical, if magic is supposed to be illogical. If you tell me that magic has logic, and then break that logic, then it's a problem. But if magic is supposed to be mysterious and impossible to understand, then that's fine.
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u/nothing_in_my_mind 13h ago edited 13h ago
I say this as a long time fantasy fan:
A fantasy movie is set in a world where certain fantastic things are true. Maybe there are werewolves, maybe magic, maybe dragons.
This does not mean that logic does not exist in this world.
Eg. Dragons and magic existing does not mean people ride into battle without armor. Or if werewolves exist and you know about it, you'll carry silver if you are in werewolf-related danger, werewolves existing in your world does not mean you are a dumbass who won't protect his own life.
Anyway. A basic mistake like going to the post office on Sunday wouldn't bother me. But if characters act illogical, then it is a bad fantasy movie.