Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Difference between revisions

{{tropeUseful Notes|wppage=Suspension of disbelief}}

An author's work, in other words, does not ''have'' to be realistic, only believable and internally consistent (see [[Magic A Is Magic A]]). When the author pushes the audience too far, the work fails. As far as science fiction is concerned, viewers are usually willing to go along with [[Techno Babble|creative explanations]] unless the show tries to use real science, at which point it's fair game, though this is because Science Fiction is just that: Science [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|FICTION]]. Attempting to use actual science to explain something you made up removes the story from its own fantasy universe and places it in the context of reality. That's why [[Physics Goof|people critizecriticize your wormhole travel system]] or [[Applied Phlebotinum|how shrink potion doesn't violate the laws of matter conservation]]. Suspension of disbelief can be broken even in science fiction when a show breaks its own established laws or places said laws outside of fiction.

A common way of putting this is "You can ask an audience to believe the impossible, but not the improbable." For example, people will accept that [[A Wizard Did It|the Grand Mage can teleport across the world]], or that [[Stealth in Space|the spaceship has technology that makes it completely invisible]] without rendering its own sensors blind, but they won't accept that the ferocious carnivore [[Ass Pull|just happened to have a heart attack and die]] right before it attacked the main character,<ref>Even the monster in ''[[Monty Python and the Holy Grail]]'' didn't have an improbable heart attack; it was the ''animator's'' heart attack [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|on the other side of the Fourth Wall]] that impossibly saved the day.</ref> or that [[Hollywood Hacking|the hacker guessed his enemy's password on the first try just by typing random letters]], at least without [[Chekhov's Gun|some prior detail]] [[Justified Trope|justifying]] it or one of the Rules listed below coming into play. What is in [[Real Life]] impossible just has to be made the norm in the setting and kept consistent.

[[Category:Tropes of Legend{{PAGENAME}}]]