universe is missing the point of fiction media!" then they’ll turn around and mock visionary shows like NCIS for scenes in which the detectives enhance the resolution of an image. Oh, computers can’t just do that? Who cares! Lock in! The point is not that the story makes internal sense, it’s what the story communicates!
The degree to which I’m willing to excuse unrealistic shit in media depends on the degree to which that media purports to be reflecting reality.
Fantasy stories, yeah whatever magic.
SciFi? Unless you’re trying to write a hard SciFi I’m willing to excuse some bizarro tech.
Action or horror film. Eh, I can suspend my disbelief.
Cop shows? I mean considering how cop shows shape people perception of real life cops, yeah I’m gonna scrutinize them a bit more.
Show that’s supposed to be about the agency that investigates internal crime within the US Navy? The fact it’s gotten so ridiculous seems weird to me.
I think that also applies to extremely fictional stuff, whereas how it says it is vs how it actually is.
Like Harry Potter’s magic system, the books act like it’s a hard magic system, with laws and rules, but it’s one of the softest magic systems ever written, so I’m going to criticize Harry Potter’s magic system (you know, in addition to everything else).
But if all media is a reproduction of ideology it’s still the same no? Something more “grounded” is still built upon innumerable fictional meta narratives that we convince ourselves to believe every day. Something more fanciful and “out there” is still built upon the exact same things and merely adds some superficial differences like putting up a different color of wallpaper. Not to be all
about it but I think those are all just different aesthetic presentations of the same thing that require an equal suspension of disbeliefOkay, but I think misrepresenting how, say, forensic technology works is more likely to have more immediate negative impacts on society than how a warp drive works. I’m far more likely to interact with the former than the latter.
This is totally fair but the sci-fi props aren’t just potatoes in a sack. They are part of a cohesive whole that is unified with an ideological, meta-narratory paste. The warp drive isn’t just a warp drive, it’s a symbol of the capacity of future technology to bridge space and time: will it be used to bring all intelligent life together? Will it be used as a tool of space-faring imperialism? These considerations inform how the narrative goes on to shape reality when it is consumed as mass media.
The interesting thing is that it doesn’t require suspension of disbelief to consume ideology you already fully believe and are submerged in.
I do agree but would prefer to say that the disbelief still exists, it just becomes reflexively directed outwards. When someone who is fully bought into ideology is confronted with contradictions it’s the external evidence that is somehow wrong. The disbelief is always still there but their conviction to ideology is strong enough to deflect and refuse to engage honestly with anything that questions it. Consuming the ideology, of course, comes as naturally as breathing but in the context of fiction such things can be examined and engaged with from a more comfortable perspective. You are examining a fictional world where you can at least pretend to be a neutral observer free from the ideological convictions of that world. By putting up sci fi themed wallpaper we are able to ever so slightly distance ourselves from the reality that the fictional ideology presented is simply a mirror of our own and explore various contradictions without truly confronting our own ideological convictions. I think the degree to which fiction is “grounded” is simply a tool to help the audience distance themselves from their ideology a tiny bit more but the most important thing is that it’s all still fiction where discussion and examination of ideology can exist without disrupting the viewer’s own personal beliefs.
Idk I’m just spouting bullshit in the badposting comm, I’m still like a little baby when it comes to understanding ideology
That’s an excellent observation, and I think it ties very neatly with comrade @ReadFanon@hexbear.net’s own observations about how liberal cultural hegemony is actually a negative form of cultural hegemony.
SciFi? Unless you’re trying to write a hard SciFi I’m willing to excuse some bizarro tech.
On the other hand, if you’re claiming to be making hard scifi about an alternate completely realistic and plausible historical timeline then put the Space Shuttle Orbiter in lunar orbit, you are a hack and an idiot.
Where do you stand on “There was room for both Jack and Rose on that door. Jack didn’t need to freeze to death in the Atlantic” discourse?
While set in a historical setting, Titanic is a melodrama, Jack has to die at the end. Plus I don’t think misleading people on door buoyancy is going to have much negative affect on society, unless you and your partner end up in a freezing body of water with a door as your only flotation device.
I’d say a bigger inaccuracy in Titanic that is actually bad and worth criticizing is that one crewman who shot a dude and then killed himself. He was based on an actual crew member of the ship but in reality neither shot anyone or killed himself, his family was pissed about that.
You mock NCIS for unrealistic zoomhance. I mock it for being Israeli propaganda.
Well if the story communicates that police have magic super powers maybe it’s just not a good story and deserves to be ridiculed innit. Some crime is cool but they wont mention that
GOOD comment
who is scraeming “suspension of disbelief is a two way street” at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never break my own immersion
Suspension of DIS NUTS
ENHANCE
What the story of NCIS communicates is that police are virtuous heroes who must be permitted to trample every civil liberty in sight to protect you the viewer from hordes of vicious criminal Others always lurking.
correct, now we gotta get the media literacy people to understand dialectical materialism so they can be annoying in the ideologically correct way.
I’m just waiting for the surgery scene on tv where the surgeon goes “The cancer is metastasizing” cut to scene of tumor in the shape of a laughing skull “hand me a second scaple and jack in another line”. Then the assisting surgeon sticks an IV cannula into an existing fluid line.
As someone who has just heard that term and done exactly 20 minutes of skim-reading a Warhammer-based explanation of diegetic essentialism and why it’s bad (this is the theory needed to bring about the revolution) couldn’t the deckhead merely argue that the themes and aesthetic for this story (whichever the two proponents are whining about) are reliant on appearing self-consistent and its failure to do so undermines those two critical components of fictional narratives and thus undermining it as media as a whole. Obviously, this argument doesn’t work for all media, but the type that would attract someone who is a deckhead likely could have them stretch some application of this argument for it. However, another caveat is this would very much depend on what aspect of lore and self-consistency is being argued about.
Edit: Actually, I found an example. As someone who spent too much internet time in rationalist adjacent internet spheres as a teen (the sphere the Zizzians originated from) something like HPMOR only conveys its themes when appearing internally consistent, (however ironically it often comes into contradiction with aesthetics due to this, and understanding that is not as comprehensive as needed for the scientific topics it covers leading to inconsistency). If it fails to appear consistent, it undermines its own themes and values and the conveying of them.
I think you might be writing a check with your mouth that your proverbial behind may not cash. If a piece of media stops being effective because it is reliant on self-consistency, and failure to be consistent undermines its effectiveness as a piece of art, then I think you’d actually find that any art that isn’t explicitly absurdist or minimalist would cease to be effective. Any attempt to portray reality is necessarily inconsistent because it will either fail to accurately portray reality, or it will accurately portray reality which is itself inconsistent and absurd. This is one of the themes of Synecdoche New York, which I think makes the rest of my argument for me.
Anyway, I recommend you read out the rest of that essay when you have time and patience, it’s really good.
I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek and don’t personally buy the argument fully myself and I’m partially just killing time between meetings and got tired of arguing on
. The argument I was proposing wouldn’t be though that all media is reliant on that consistency (and I agree with your points about attempts at portrayal) but rather the argument is the particular thematics and aesthetics of the work being argued about at that moment. I was using a piece of media in a particular sense as opposed to the general. It is actually why my edit mentions the rationalists and HPMOR as due to how rationalists’ belief functions (from my admittedly hazy recollection) not attempting nigh-seamless consistency would undercut some of the rationalist messaging particularly about storytelling norms.Obviously, this check fails against broad-spectrum storytelling if someone has seen the word Aesop before. I am also assuming someone who is being a deckhead and isn’t just using it as a veil to prevent a change they don’t personally like (which then I ask you why are you arguing with them) and isn’t just yanking your chain to fuck with you, (I know, I’m really shifting goalposts here eliminating 90% of them) I presume they would try to either narrow their deck-headedness into a slimmer category to attempt to shore up their argument, especially since much of the consumerist identity culture mentioned in the Warhammer essay means they likely are not invested in whether their argument functions for art as a whole and only needs some form of it to hold for the things they like and are invested in.
If you want my actual personal thoughts on this, the entire ideology can basically just be undermined with this section of your comment:
or it will accurately portray reality which is itself inconsistent and absurd I used to have friends who would criticize media in such a fashion and I managed to convert one of them by obnoxiously noting such criticisms and then pointing them out every time I heard a story from reality that vaguely followed the same principles. I find the diegetic portion of fiction to be indispensable for many works and my enjoyment, but in a similar manner to like idk Game Theory (the YT), I find it to be insanely difficult to actually break those elements as if you genuinely are treating it as if it was a world (or anything vaguely approaching it) a lot of details can be handwaved and retconned in reasonable manners assuming the issue was anything short of the omniscient narrator contradicting itself (assuming that the diegetic element also is explicitly not supposed to be meta in nature either in the storytelling manner or in an internal metaphysical form, and about a dozen other reasons that I’ll probably think of later).
Having written and critiqued as a hobby on and off for years, I really have gone the way of interpreting this as “you have a point, I’ll stop making fun of the computer enhancing the evidence.”
The rule of cool should supercede the internal consistency up to the point it interferes with actually communicating a narrative. Chosen ones are fine, but relying on a patron’s power to overcome someone ideologically opposed to you is Zzzzzzzzz
When a show only asks you to suspend disbelief in moments where it suddenly and “unexpectedly” negatively impacts the protagonist I’m gonna riot. Especially because that means they’re gonna ask me to do it exactly one more time when it again “unexpectedly” negatively impacts the antagonist.
You’re always suspending your disbelief, though, because you’re watching fictional media.
I don’t want to suspend multiple layers of disbelief because the studio got lazy and didn’t want to write something more compelling
