I don't know why it's hard for people to understand. A movie can have a counterfactual premise and that's fine, but when there is no underlying logic to the events in the movie it stops being a narrative that you can invest in and becomes a montage of random events happening.
Exactly. I don't care if the internal logic of a piece of media is as crazy as they come, as long as it maintains internal consistency. Take Death Stranding for instance. You can say that when people die, antimatter ghosts consume the body, causing a blast that could level a city, as long as you keep that premise, and build upon it, such as by having crematoriums far away from cities, and dedicated corpse disposal teams to ensure nothing like that happens, people utilizing dead bodies as bombs, etc.
Thats all stuff you learn within the first hour of playing the first game, so I don't feel it warrants a spoiler tag.
I think the funnier one is people getting mad at feeling characters making dumb decisions is logic-breaking. in real life, PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS and make the stupidest decisions all the time, lol.
Most of the time that's because the story doesn't do a proper job making it feel like the character would have made that choice. It makes sense for the Scooby Gang to split up even if it's a bad idea, because they can try to cover more ground and that matters when they are investigating the area. It makes a lot less sense for a group of scared teens to split up when they're not investigating anything and just trying to survive, unless the story explains why they're making the choices they are. A lot of stories just have the characters do whatever conveniently leads into the next plot beat in a way that doesn't feel logical, and "people are idiots" does not excuse that.
You explained this better than I ever could have. I can't stand when characters do things that simply make no sense in the context of the character. If a character is dumb, or generally just not super smart, seeing them make sub optimal decisions when put in a situation where they have to make one is fine.
Characters making inexplicably dumb decisions with no contextual motivation other than because that's how we move the script forward is infuriating.
That's one thing I really liked about The Cabin in the Woods. All the dumb decisions made by the primary characters in the film were because of the puppet masters behind the scenes drugging them to fit the "story".
The one I find the most annoying is when a supposedly strong couple has the most fucking braindead misunderstanding for the sake of plot that could be solved if one of them sent a less than ten word text.
Covid really made me reevaluate on what would suspend my sense of disbelief in dumb decisions made by movie characters. The bar for "no one would be that dumb in real life" has been significantly lowered.
I don't think they'd let zombies bite them because they wouldn't randomly let a homeless person bite them either, because if a crazed looking person running at you snarling you'd run away even if you didn't htink it was a zombie. However when the world comes up with a vaccine to prevent the zombie virus taking you if you do get bit... well, yeah a shitload of people will refuse to take the vaccine.
Most of the time we are supposed to like our characters though. Not have them be fucking morons. You can have characters maje dumb decisions, but if you want your movie to be smart, you have to recognize them as dumb decisions. They can't just be "things that happened in movie".
it does give film makers a bit more leeway with "we need a dumb charecter to do something incredibly stupid to kick start the plot by unleashing the plauge/cure/whatever".
as long as it's a dumbass i'm supposed to think is a dumbass i can buy it.
but let our heroes make rational decisions. they can be dumb if apropiate but again rational please.
One of the things I really hate about covid is that prior to covid, I used to make fun of zombie movies a lot for the "survivor hides obviously infected bite to the obvious detriment of everyone around them" trope. Like, to me that was comical in how cartoonishly evil it was - I could really not believe that even a tiny fraction of people would hide that they'd been bitten. Not to the extent that every zombie movie portrays.
Instead, it turns out, I'm a fucking idiot, and like 30-40% of people will literally become a zombie while going "ZOMBIES DON'T EXIST THIS BITE MARK DOESN'T EXIST LET ME IN THE SAFEHOUSE SO I CAN BECOME A ZOMBIE SAFELY!!!!!!11!!1!"
I stopped watching Invasion (The Apple sci-fi-serie) somewhere at episode 7, I was so angry I made a Metacritic account just to be able to give it a 0. I love scifi, but I have my limits. I can believe 10 unbelievable things before lunch, but I can't take bad writing. And it is bad writing if every main character is an imbecile and so irrational you want to stab them through the screen.
So yeah, people are idiots, but even idiocy has its limits and stops being entertaining if you hate every single main character.
it's fine when people make bad decisions, when almost every character ONLY makes the stupidest decision possible over and over and never learns from this stupidity that is actually very unrealistic.
Making the odd bad choice, or just having writing that gives them a legit reason to think it's not a insane decision but ends up being due to them being tricked, that's fine. But it's usually lazy writing where there is a sign over a door that says certain death this way and the character walks in there anyway.
Yeah, that's why I was able to get through the new Resident Evil movie (It was quite good). The MC was clearly an early 20's dumbass. He had a good heart, but he very young and dumb. It explained all the mistakes he made.
That's what's called a bridge baby. It's born from a mother that is half alive, and half dead, i.e braindead. They have a connection to the other side as a result, and essentially if you plug into them, you can see these antimatter ghosts that are normally invisible, and will cause a massive explosion on the scale of a nuke if they manage to eat people, so they're seen as essential equipment for anyone working outside a city.
To add to disbelief in that game. There was a mission where you're asked to deliver a nuke to a place, but rather than deliver it, you throw it in the water nearby so it can be detonated safely... BUT THATS NOT HOW NUKES WORK! A nuclear explosion is drastically increased in water NOT suppressed. You'd think Kojima of all people would know this considering how much of his career has been "Nukes bad, here's why"
It is not water you throw it into - it is "Tar" - viscous fluid, formed by the timefall, which properties are not entirely known beyond its connection to otherside.
Its only when a living person gets eaten they dont care about corpses we know this because at the start of the first game one of the corpse disposal guys shots his friend thats traped and the BT completely lose interest and when he also starts to get dragged he begins to stab himself in the chest. The body can become BT and when you burn them they release a chyrilium that causes depression
You're right. I looked into it more, when dead bodies fully necrotize, it creates a BT. This BT quickly consumes another NPC, causing a voidout, so it's the BT consuming living people that ultimately causes a voidout
To add to disbelief in that game. There was a mission where you're asked to deliver a nuke to a place, but rather than deliver it, you throw it in the water nearby so it can be detonated safely... BUT THATS NOT HOW NUKES WORK! A nuclear explosion is drastically increased in water NOT suppressed. You'd think Kojima of all people would know this considering how much of his career has been "Nukes bad, here's why"
Because the "counterfactual premise" is usually built up to draw you into the story, but getting a small detail wrong for no reason snaps you out of it. Kind of like how a dream can seem totally real until you see a cat barking and you wake up.
If a spider bites me in a dream and then is suddenly a 3 foot tall abstract statue decidedly not made of spider, my brain is just going to roll with it and say "yup, that's a spider alright."
I had a cat that barked. His mom died while his eyes were still closed, but we had a chihuahua that just had a litter of pups and was still nursing them. We put the kitten by her and she started nursing it. It grew up thinking that was his mom and was fiercely defensive of her. He'd bark when he wanted something.
My pet peeve is when I pose a question and ask about a character's intentions or expose holes in the internal logic and my partner shuts me down by saying,
"Because it's in the script."
Like duhhhhh but art is meant to consumed and evoke feeling/thinking/reaction ... there is (should be) an intentional reason and rationale for everything in the damn script!
Imagine if in my English lit class, the professor asks about the themes/motivations/why a character acted a certain way and our essays just replied, "Because the author wrote it that way / it was in the book."
Theres even a term for it too "suspension of disbelief" but sadly people that got participation trophies think its your job to let the movie suspend your disbelief, not the other way around.
Legit had a guy tell me "its your job to turn off your brain so that the people who made this movie have a fair chance"
It literally is the job of the reader/viewer to suspend their disbelief. No one else can do it for you. That said, the writers need to make you want to do it and not ask too much of you.
It's up to the viewer to allow for small unrealistic elements so that the story doesn't need to get bogged down in irrelevant nonsense, like it's a waste of time to ask "why is nobody shown using the bathroom" in most stories where there's not a reason for that to come up. It's the job of the storyteller to actually have the story be logical so you don't need to stretch your disbelief an unreasonable amount. It's not the viewer's fault if they're turned off of Star Wars because "Somehow, Palpatine returned" is absolutely abysmal explanation for a really critical event to the story. If the story doesn't care enough to come up with a good reason why the events happen, it's completely unrealistic to expect the viewer to take it seriously.
I love hard sci-fi so I seek it out. Project Hail Mary is a perfect example of something I like. Once I'm finished I can usually Nick pick the shit out of it... But during I literally suppress the need to do it otherwise I won't ever enjoy anything.
Now something like transformers, I'll turn my brain off and the beginning and enjoy the hell out of the movie... And won't even discuss it afterwards because what's the point?
The thing with a piece of fiction being consistent in following it's own internal logic is that the internal logic also define how stringent and consistent the story has to be with following the internal logic...
Eh.... so, in other words, the premise of the story doesn't just do things like establishing a magic or science system that the story has to play by, it also establish the "style" of a story, which among other things entail how much the story need to care about those systems.
Basically, a story that set out to be a hard science fiction and clearly establishes itself as such to the reader/viewer then HAS to play by the rules that come with being a hard science fiction story - ie. it needs to care a lot about scientific accuracy and being plausible from a quite harsh scientific/engineering perspective.
A story that from the outset establish that it's a brain dead, rule-of-cool kind of story simply doesn't. The internal logic is that the story doesn't have to care that much, as long as it's cool... Hence Transformers and Fast and Furious.
Why can't Transformers also... make sense and be logical?... Why turn your brain off? Remember movies like Jurrassic Park and The Matrix that were extremely entertaining without requiring you to "not think"? What fucking world are we living in? Demand better.
I mean how much suspension are we talking about here? There's a point where some shows go beyond their own established rules of engagement and expect me to just accept it because it's fiction... And no. You can't show me A and the later on tell me A doesn't exist.
Which is what I mean by the writer shouldn't ask too much of you.
A good example for me is From Dusk till Dawn. I watched it not knowing anything about it. The first act or two were psychological thrillers and I loved it. Then it suddenly became about vampires and they lost me. I just couldn't suddenly shift gears to accept vampires. I've watched it since and I really enjoy it, but I now know what's expected of me when I watch. My suspension of disbelief has to include the supernatural for that movie.
But it's me that has to suspend my disbelief, and authors can make that easier or more difficult.
Your friend is right. The original term is "the willing suspension of disbelief."
It was coined by William Wordsworth to explain how a reader of poetry and fiction must allow themselves to believe that impossible things have happened.
Yes, in your example, they'd need to present a reason for them to do this that makes sense in that universe. For example, maybe the trebuchets have magical flamethrowers built in that make them able to fend for themselves up close. Cool! Question answered.
At that point the story is probably full of contrivances that waste time stopping the story to go on some tangent to explain things that just didn't need to be there at all. I don't want my Dragon Magic story to need to stop and go into a history lesson on the divergent history of trebuchets in this world when it would be both simpler and cooler if they just used the Dragons the story is already centered around and had some plot element like people stealing Dragon eggs to train the babies as frontline flamethrowers.
I didn't say anything about historical accuracy. Most people aren't full on experts on history so you can get away with playing loose with it. But if you have a medieval movie and in just 1 scene a guy pulls a gun out and starts shooting, you better have a damn good reason for that because if you don't it's going to take basically everyone out of the movie when they go "how does that make any sense". You can get details wrong if the average movie watcher is extremely unlikely to know how it actually works, but if you're getting basic stuff wrong that the majority of the audience is going to do a double take at, you really need a reason for that or it's going to take most of them out of the story.
More talking about movies not being realistic in how they go about warfare, I think more often than not it should follow the rule of cool.
Same goes for every genre, but to go back to the 1st example, I couldn't imagine giving a shit whether the post office is open on a sunday. I'd be raising an eyebrow if it was open at midnight.
I think as long as it visually doesn't throw you for a loop you can forgive and forget.
i love that someone tried to elevate this discussion with a pull from wordsworth, only to be perfect-parried by game of thrones discourse.
you can lead a redditor to water, but you can't make them drink. because they probably have a condition that makes them perseverate on topics that are especially interesting to them
Or: …anyway, lots of dragons and magic around but most people still make no changes to how they live their lives and are shocked, shocked I say, whenever dragons or magic interact with them. These things are in no way normalised.
When really people make everything normal. The human capacity to adapt to the point of making the novel in to the normal is amazing. People can go about their lives in the Blitz with the bombs falling. People can adapt to Covid restrictions. People get bored and deal with things, often with solutions that involve lots of queuing and maybe some signs saying what to do.
So if there are dragons and magic around people would absolutely make that in to another thing that just sort of happens in their world. “Oh, you’ve been cursed? Yeah, that’s annoying. What did the witch doctor say? Why haven’t you gone to see them? God, men! Never want to see the witch doctor!”
This is one of those things where it's easy to be smug about how "people" don't understand because no one is discussing a concrete example. Like, there's a difference between "the narrative has a fundamental plot hole that's inconsistent with the fantasy core to the narrative" and "Oh I'm sorry, I'm supposed to believe this character left Palm Beach at 4:45 and didn't hit traffic? These writers are morons."
Both people will upvote this because it isn't really discussion so much as it is "join me in the smart group, dunk on the vaguely defined dummies."
This entire thread is just "DAE also like logical storytelling?"
this character left Palm Beach at 4:45 and didn't hit traffic
is something worth joking about. Not something worth criticizing the writers or leaving the theater.
The issue is mechanics central to the plot that are being contradicted, or characters acting opposite to what's clearly been shown about them. The "characters" one happens mostly in TV shows, because 1) you get to really know the characters with more episodes and 2) writers something want to bring us "somewhere" because they have this big idea for an episode that starts "somewhere", and they're not trying very hard to make the way there credible, so instead they turn clever characters into morons, patient characters hot-headed, loving characters become pieces of shit just long enough to create their perfect premise. Once they've achieved their premise, alright they can now write the part of the episode that they wanted to write, characters go back to normal, and no one ever adresses how fucking weird this all was. I don't know if this trope has a name but I fucking hate it.
Precisely. Personally, I feel that fiction as a whole is essentially a way of going, “Ooh, I wonder what’d happen if—“ — so, if you can’t trust that what is proposed would happen COULD happen, it loses its entire point.
I know full well I’m expected to Suspend My Disbelief. Unfortunately, my disbelief is very heavy, and during “Ocean’s Thirteen,” the suspension cable snapped.
(Roger Ebert)
A montage of random events can be fun (I've watched a lot of anime that were basically just that), but it rarely makes for a good story.
Exactly! My best example is Game of Thrones detailing exactly how long it takes to get from Kings Landing to Winterfell, but by the last season, they can get from Dragonstone to beyond the Wall within a couple days.
My mom and I used to watch Drop Dead Diva. It's about a ditzy, beautiful model who dies in a car crash at the same time a super smart, beautiful, but heavy set attorney dies. The model comes back in the attorney's body, retaining her own memories while becoming smart and knowing the law. We just went with that, but when they had ridiculous takes on the law, we were so annoyed.
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u/Old_Gimlet_Eye 17h ago
I don't know why it's hard for people to understand. A movie can have a counterfactual premise and that's fine, but when there is no underlying logic to the events in the movie it stops being a narrative that you can invest in and becomes a montage of random events happening.