Expecting all of the details to work in a FANTASY story is just ludicrous. This is why a lot of people that are not fans shy away from fans having these types of conversations.
Expecting all of the details to work in a FANTASY story is just ludicrous. This is why a lot of people that are not fans shy away from fans having these types of conversations.
I'm not interested in such lazy writing.
One of the great things about LOTR is the ring is ascribed various powers, and then the consequences of that play out. The rules within its world are consistent.
HP has no consistency.
Probably why I also prefer hard scifi - it must follow the known rules of physics, or at least have plausible extensions.
I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
Well, if you're going to put in plausible extensions instead of following the rules then "i'm not interested in such lazy writing" as you stated. In any fictional story telling, there's going to be some creative licensing involved to tell the story. Hell, even in biopics and "based on true" there's a lot of creative license just to make the story interesting. Following the rules of known physics just limits the imagination to make for bland stories.
> I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
From the very off of the show, the resurrecting dead people was involved in the story. If it wasn't, "the night is dark and full of terrors" and "winter is coming" would be pointless. Just because the dead coming back was timed to happen with the story is just part of it.
I mean, next, you'll tell me that Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead were pointless since they were resurrected dead people too.
I think you've moved into the comic book guy territory of "worst book/movie/comic ever" type of meme
While I watched all the episodes, my interest in it dropped dramatically after that.
While the resurrection is probably going to happen if Winds ever comes out, it's not clear if Jon will actually be the Jon we know, or even Jon, after he comes back. Warging into Ghost will probably play a role, as that's a common theme in Dance.
Oh and, we had wights right from the very first book, maybe even Prologue ...
So it's not "convenient", nothing for GRRM is convenient currently, otherwise Winds would be out by now ...
If this could happen in the GoT universe, wouldn't you think that there'd be a massive effort by kings and others to resurrect dead family members? Or even talk about resurrecting them? There was no hint of that.
(Zombies violate the laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which makes it sad that most zombie movies try on some hackneyed explanation for them being the result of some virus. If you're going to try a scientific explanation for them, don't blatantly violate fundamental laws of physics.)
The capability of priests of the Lord of Light was established as was the stage for Melisandre to grasp on to the Jon after the defeat of Stannis.
To be fair, though, it was established before then that it was true, unless you didn't believe that Dondarrion had actually been repeatedly resurrected, and that it was just a story they told to make him more fearsome. Which is also fair, but it still feeds into the point of the suspense: if you had trouble buying the fact of the Dondarrion resurrections, then you finally got your answer when Jon got his treatment.
Also recall -- if you read the books and aren't just relying on the TV series -- Catelyn Stark was also resurrected after her death during the Red Wedding, though her resurrection didn't go quite so well physically, since her body had already partly decomposed in a river, or mentally/emotionally, as she turned into a non-empathetic vengeance machine.
I liked the GoT where it was about human power plays, action, politics, intrigue, alliances, betrayal, love, death, etc. Suddenly mixing random magic into a well established structure just didn't work for me.
I get not being interested in that theme, but being surprised and disappointed that the series progressively turns out to be about exactly the thing it tells you is the lurking force that most in the setting disregard that it is going to be about is... well, surprisingly poor media literacy.
The (inconvenient, in context, for anyone who might be considered a protagonist) resurrecting of dead people is a major point in literally the first sequence of the first episode of the series, which is literally telling you what is coming that the people making mundane human decisions based on mundane human foibles and passing off anything more exotic as superstition were ignorant of to their peril. The return of that kind of magic to a largely unprepared world was telegraphed as the central theme of the series.
It is also poor form when you are trying to make a point.
> HP has no consistency.
Perhaps so. Then why did you not choose to criticise something which happens in the actual books?
LOTR has not one but three people rescued in the nick of time by enormous flying eagles that can talk. That's technically all fine within the rules of the universe, but it hardly seems any less of a stretch than flying cars in Harry Potter.
But I forgive Tolkien because of the many hours of enjoyment I derived from his books!
That is just plain false. The rules are not as clearly defined in HP (because it's not trying to be a hard magic system), but when Rowling makes a rule she follows it. For example, you can't bring people back from the dead. That's a rule which is clearly stated and is followed through the series.
In your example, no rule was broken. The book never said "things can't fly in this world". In fact, it's established pretty early on that broomsticks can fly by means of specific enchantment spells. The fact that someone got the idea to apply those enchantments to a car doesn't break the rules of the world. The fact that Harry's friends showed up to rescue him at the right moment is certainly convenient, but also doesn't break the rules of the world. The book explains why they were worried and came to check on him, after all. No rules were broken in this scene, you just don't like it. Which is certainly your right! But it's not poor writing which breaks the rules of the world.
The Munsters had a running gag where Herman would look into a mirror and it would shatter. I'd still laugh every time.
Or, think how in many-words interpretation there is a universe for any arbitrarily unlikely development. The writer picked one that floats her boat.
It's a problem many book series have - one character keeps being the centre of the universe and surviving insurmountable odds repeatedly to the point of incredulity and usually the ante keeps ratcheting up as well so your original ordinary-human character ends up with some kind of godlike powers.
To me, Harry Potter is actually fairly good in this regard, as the character development is at least not utterly unlike 11-18 year olds at school during the re-outbreak of a traumatic civil war, and from the start, there's a clear, in-universe reason why the main character is always the one near the action in the depicted timeframe.
Star Wars did this quite well originally ("why is this rando farmhand at the centre, oh, cool, that's why"). The prequels did a little worse ("here's how the farmhand's father got to the centre, ok well maybe it's awfully convenient the ship broke down right there and a simple blood test reveals The One, but ok") and the recent films rather worse ("these people are at the centre...how? Why? Genetic predestination?"). Notably, the less you explain the Force, the easier it is to keep the story believable and consistent. Again, Harry Potter's vagueness over the specifics of magic helps it.
Something that seems to be getting more common, though it's not new, as series lengthen in real-world time is to do a Star Trek: TNG and start an in-universe subseries where you can have things happen to someone else entirely for a change, but as part of the overall universe's story. It can be tricky if the universe is very predicated on one person, like Harry Potter is. Star Wars has not done well at this, but have tried. I think they keep trying to bootstrap interest from existing fans by character reuse, but the better series like Andor pick a whole new story to tell.
Iain M. Banks was especially good at this and didn't even really have a main narrative, as he'd hop all over the Culture in time and space so you could have the cool stuff happen that he wanted to show the reader, but didn't need to keep powering-up one person (or ship) endlessly. But space opera has the advantage that you can just go and be somewhere and somewhen else very easily. It's a bit harder if you need the subseries to be nearby without constantly dragging the other main characters in, especially when they're further along their upgrade path as you need to explain why they don't just pick up the phone, pop round and stomp the "mortal threat" flat and it's another kind of deus ex machina. Doubly so if the threat is very obvious and world-ending, because surely they'd turn up to that!
(FWIW, I don't really object to this particular part in the story; I think a flying car is pretty consistent with the Harry Potter universe. And the poster upthread must have misremembered the scene; his friends merely came to "rescue" him from being locked in his room. He wasn't hanging out a window and wouldn't have died.)
Hmmm. When exactly does that happen? Are you referring to the very start of chapter 3 in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Because Harry most definitely is not hanging out of a window before his friends arrive.
He is kept locked up by his aunt and uncle. Because of that he is not answering his friend's letters. His friend has access to the magical means of busting him out (a flying car) so they do. If he would have decided to rescue him a day earlier or a day later he would have found Harry in basically the same situation.
This is the same in both the film [1] and the novel. Soooo what are you talking about? I think you made the scene up, which seriously undermines your point.
1: relevant scene in the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Yi49pHlEo
The problem is the existence of the magical car was not previously mentioned.
If Ron had told Harry about the car in some random conversation in a previous book, you would probably then complain about some bit of obtrusive foreshadowing ruining the plot line. Okay, maybe not you specifically, but that's another common trope of criticism of fiction.
A flying car seems utterly unsurprising, especially when we've already seen flying broomsticks. I think I'm more surprised that we didn't see more of the flying car.
The good example of that "suspension of disbelief" is The Last Jedi, where the film kept breaking rules established within the franchise, so as someone familiar with Star Wars you have to keep suspending your belief to enjoy the film - and at a certain point it becomes too much.
Like if LotR ended with Aragorn just smashing the one ring with a sword, that would be an extremely unsatisfing ending to the story, partially because the books made it very clear earlier that the ring cannot be destroyed this way, so it breaks your set of beliefs that were established. You could say "why does it matter, it's all made up anyway!" but every story requires being consistent to be enjoyable.
I agree with your hesitation to start a debate about The Last Jedi, but I think your point about what rules are ironclad is why reactions to that movie were so mixed. For me (and many others), the mechanics of the Star Wars world are paramount. I have trouble experiencing strong in-universe emotions when those mechanics are broken, because when that happens, I'm pulled out of the story and have trouble immersing myself in what's happening to the characters. But to others, the emotional impact of what happens to the characters, and how they act, is the most important thing, as you suggest, with all other concerns secondary.
The writers of the Star Wars sequel trilogy had a very tall order on their hands: the "original" Star Wars fans are older (some might say much older) now, and they needed to tell a story that could appeal to those people (such as myself), but also appeal to children and young adults. It's very hard (some might even say impossible) to create a narrative that speaks to superfans who have been steeped in the mythology and mechanics of a world for decades, but also attracts a more casual viewer who just wants to watch a cool story with lightsabers and spaceship battles. My opinion is that they sacrificed the first bunch in order to attract a fresher audience, but it doesn't really matter if my opinion is "correct" or not; the fact that the movie (or entire trilogy, even) was so controversial, with so many opposing views, is all we need to know: they tried to appeal to too many different types of people, didn't do a great job of it (if a great job of it is even possible) and in the end a lot of people were unhappy.
With the Last Jedi, I honestly don't think the central problem is that the creators were trying to appeal to everybody at once. I think that better describes the Force Awakens, which miraculously succeeds at doing so at the cost of being kind of forgettable (see my point about Star Trek 2009 above). I think the issue with the Last Jedi is that it makes a very specific set of choices that don't please everybody.
The thing is, in some ways I'm the kind of old fan you're talking about, though I may be younger than you. I pored over books of EU spaceship schematics, read the Star Wars Legacy comics, played the video games, etc. Maybe my experience was different than yours because I watched the prequels at a similar age to the originals, because they were coming out in theaters when I was a kid.
I am not a casual fan, but I'm also not a superfan. I think it's easy to dismiss people who liked The Last Jedi as casual, but Star Wars is such a dominant cultural phenomenon that there is a massive spectrum of how much people care about it and what it means to them.
This has all been kind of a scattered argument. I'm not sure what my conclusion is. Maybe that the real issue with The Last Jedi for many people isn't that it ignores the lore. The prequel trilogy already directly contradicts loads of aspects of the original trilogy that EU creators and fans had to no-prize away. I think it's more to do with how The Last Jedi conceives of Star Wars as a story, and what it considers important and what it does not.
I disagree: in LoTR, it was made abundantly clear that the ring could not be destroyed this easily. Gimli even tried it with his axe. Ending this way would have been internally inconsistent.
However, I don't remember anything in Wizard of Oz which prevented Dorothy from clicking her heels together to go home. She just never knew this trick until the end, and it's not an immediately obvious thing to do anyway.
FWIW, Gimli trying to destroy the ring with his axe is a Peter Jackson invention -- it's not in the books, and it's not at all consistent with the Ring's effect on people in the rest of the story, e.g. Bilbo was not capable of casting the ring into his fireplace (that was nowhere near hot enough to melt gold). So Gimli even attempting to destroy the Ring with his axe required me to suspend disbelief in an annoying and immersion-breaking way.
I mean on the base universe level there are tiny ink blobs on paper. There is no Frodo, there is no Middle Earth, there is no words or sentences just ink marks on paper. Anything other than that is the "suspension of disbelief" already.
Any story -- fiction or non-fiction -- that is written down is just tiny ink blobs on paper. I don't need to suspend my disbelief to read a textbook about anatomy.
Reading fiction isn't about believing that the created world it's real, only that it's plausible, given the natural laws, constraints, and logic present in the world that's been built.
Put another way, when I read LoTR, I don't believe that Tolkien is asking me to suspend my disbelief that elves, dwarves, and fantastical creatures once populated our Earth; instead, he's built a world where such things exist, and he's asking me to read a story about them, while promising that his stories will maintain the internal consistency of the world he's built.
I like the GP's use of the term "secondary belief"; I think it very much encapsulates that middle ground where an author creates rules for a fantastical world that are always obeyed during storytelling, vs. an author who creates a fantastical world, but bends and breaks that world's rules (if there even are any to begin with) in order to serve the story they want to tell, which does require suspension of disbelief.
But that is the thing. We all learned that in order to enjoy a story we kinda pretend to believe it. Just sticking with Tolkien, you read the first line of the Lord of the Rings: “When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” And you can right there and then say: “What a load of bollocks. There is no such a place as Hobbiton.” And then you close the book. And you are right! There is no such place as Hobbiton.
Of course you will be poorer for it. But that thing, where for the sake of the enjoyment of the story we pretend that “Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End” exists enough to hear the next sentence is the suspension of disbelief! Where you keep reading instead of calling the writer a liar is where you suspended your disbelief. It is the basis of all fiction. It is so inherent that you often don’t see it. The same way a fish don’t see the water. But it is there.
What you are talking about, the importance of having an internaly consistent story, is not where suspension of disbelief is, but where by abusing it the writer breaks it. And suddenly as it is shattered you realise its previous existence.
The goal is not to not have suspension of disbelief. Because you can’t tell any fiction without it. The goal is to not abuse it in order that the reader can enjoy the work.
Japanese fantasy works on a system where you look at whatever novel is currently popular, copy every surface/world detail from it, then add exactly one thing you wanted it to be all along and just talk about all the time. It's basically done for SEO reasons, but it means you can save all the setup time if every story is in the same medieval isekai that vaguely feels like Dragon Quest.
So yes, there are stories that are just about forex speculation with elves or whatever. Spice and Wolf is one.
I feel like Western writers also used to do this, but the difference is they'd copy D&D and instead make the story about the super complex magic system they made up, and frankly I don't want to hear about your magic system.
They do have many more fantasy worlds though, not being as unique means they have room for many many more and better ones. I do feel western authors focuses too much on being different so often they make things bad just to not be like the others.
(Although iron ore is plentiful, it is expensive to refine and smelt.)
Even the relatively few Spanish gold ships hauling gold to the Old World resulted in massive inflation, not wealth.
Might explain why the land around the Lonely Mountain was unforested*. This is what happened in ancient Greece -- deforestation largely due to charcoal production for smelting iron. Topsoil got eroded and it still hasn't recovered today. Prior to metallurgy, Greece was densely forested, and must have had some biggish trees, judging by the construction of temples etc.
* IIRC. Also a fire breathing dragon taking up residence probably didn't help.
On the gripping hand, having read through various histories, it's nuts how often historians get things mixed up or wrong, or obsolete with emerging evidence. Our histories, even evidence-based, tells a story of our past, and no narrative can fully describe what happened.
Indeed; the similarity of "history" and "story" is no mere coincidence, they share a root. And in German, both are the same word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Geschicht