Suspension of disbelief and education

[MarkB]

And sometimes it doesn't take much education to make your save to disbelieve. Hey Reacher, Captain America called - he wants his super-serum back.

 

[Bedrockgames]

And sometimes it doesn't take much education to make your save to disbelieve. Hey Reacher, Captain America called - he wants his super-serum back.

I would say one of the biggest things to change how people approach suspension of disbelief is the internet. You can google anything now. Before figuring out if something that happened in a movie was plausible you would need to sift through books to get the information

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Another aspect of suspension of disbelief is "what was set up in the premise?"

If FTL travel and space wizards is part of the premise, and knowing this one goes into it anyway, then FTL and space wizards is just fine. But if something goes against the premise, yeah, I'm out very quickly. I would be very unhappy with space wizards suddenly appearing in my kitchen sink drama set in 1970's Australia.

The thing I struggle with is characters not operating within their own set of established behaviours.

Re. the OP. Education is part of it definitely. Although I would like to mention this doesn't have to be formal education. My brother will get all types of bent out of shape if he sees an anachronistic model of car. "That's '67 Chevy! There's no way it could be in 1966!"

 

[GMMichael]

I understand that in a game like Battletech the weapons have ridiculously short ranges. Seriously, a vehicle mounted machine gun today has an effective range of 2,000 meters but the same weapon in Battletech has a 90 meter range. A lot of table top miniatures war games, like Warhammer 40k, have very short ranges partly due to practical reasons. Most of us don't have a 20 foot table to allow ranges to scale as they should. But despite the ridiculousness I don't mind suspending my disbelief like I do with steampunk.

I'm going to call on a different kind of education here: 4 years army.

Sure, a mounted MG may have an effective range of 2000 meters, but good luck trying to hit a moving (defending) target at that range. It takes time for a round to go that far. Whereas at 90 meters, you're effectively hitting exactly what you aim at.

And what drives me nuts: shooters with their fingers off the trigger while engaging. Do today's actors know that the trigger is what makes it go "boom?"

Don't get me started on that movie where they'd swing their arms to make the bullet trajectories curve.

 

[MGibster]

Sure, a mounted MG may have an effective range of 2000 meters, but good luck trying to hit a moving (defending) target at that range. It takes time for a round to go that far. Whereas at 90 meters, you're effectively hitting exactly what you aim at.

In Battletech, there are modifiers to a mech's to-hit roll based on weapon range, speed of the target, speed of the firing vehicle, terrain, and even the pilot's skill. i.e. They already cover the fact that it's more difficult to hit targets at the extreme of your weapon's range. Depending on what brand of anti tank guided missile you're using in the real world, it should have an effective range between 2,500 and 5,000 meters. Long range missiles used by mechs in Battletech have a maximum effective range of 630 meters. I simply chose machine guns as it was the easiest way to illustrate the ridiculous ranges in the game.

 

[Clint_L]

Hmmm...whether or not the factuality of a claim is important to me really depends on the context in which it is presented. Like, if you want to tell me that dragons on the Forgotten Realms can fly because magic, sure. I'll go with it. If you try to tell me that they can fly because they have wings, I'm going to be looking at the mass, the size of their wings, the strength of their joints, and now I'm out of the story.

But because my main field is literature, bad writing takes me out of a story faster than anything else. Characters behaving in ways that don't make sense, just to advance the plot, instantly take me out of the story. Cliches. Expository dialogue. Mary Sue/Gary Stu-type characters. All that stuff is super cringey to me, if it's being done unintentionally.

But that doesn't mean that I am less able to suspend my disbelief. It just means that I need higher quality writing than I used to, writing that wouldn't have engaged me when I was younger.

 

[grankless]

I simply do not approach fiction in this way. Whywould you care if a dragon's wings let it fly or a bullet can go further than it would in real life? It's not real life. It's fiction.

 

[MGibster]

Another aspect of suspension of disbelief is "what was set up in the premise?"

Bingo. In a movie like Dawn of the Dead, in order to buy into the story, we have to accept the premise that the dead have risen and seek to satiate their hunger by chowing down on the neighbors. But although the audience accepts this fantastic premise, it doesn't follow that they'll accept additional fantastic elements as well. If a dragon were to show up and burn through a horde of zombies I'd have a lot of questions.

One of the things that killed me was reading the Batman story Hush. It's not that I expect whole lot of realism from comic books, but in this one Batman is swinging from a great height when someone shoots the cable sending him plummeting to the ground and suffers from a fractured skull. It's a grevious injury, and they have to summon one of the most skilled brain surgeons in the world to remove fragments of Bruce Wayne's skull from his brain. Within a week or two Batman is back out on the streets doing his thing. It took me completely out of the story. I can accept some dude from another planet becomes super strong because of our yellow sun, I can accept someone getting powers through radioactive arachnids, and I can even accept a billionaire in a fetish suit beating up criminals to get over his mommy and daddy issues. I simply could not accept Batman coming back from a fractured skull so quickly.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Bingo. In a movie like Dawn of the Dead, in order to buy into the story, we have to accept the premise that the dead have risen and seek to satiate their hunger by chowing down on the neighbors. But although the audience accepts this fantastic premise, it doesn't follow that they'll accept additional fantastic elements as well. If a dragon were to show up and burn through a horde of zombies I'd have a lot of questions.

My first would be "Are they remaking Game of Thrones?"

 

[Larnievc]

So, the nitpick thread got me thinking: Is there a correlation between a person's level or education/knowledge and how much you're willing to give on suspending disbelief in entertainment?

I’d have to review the research before I made a decision.