It's about making sure that the 'facts' are straight.
I find this to be very true with cinema. When watching a movie, if there's real facts getting botched, I lose enjoyment. An example is the first time I saw "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." The movie is about a married couple who both work for separate spy agencies. While the action is great, a good amount of humour and romance mingled in, the one fact that pushed it out of the 'enjoyable' category for me was the shoes that Mrs. Smith was wearing. Anyone who had to do sneaking around, running, and practical work could not feasibly accomplish much in her shoes.
It's the little details that can ruin the overall image.
So when making fantasy worlds too; make sure the basics are in order. If something happens, it has to happen each time the conditions are met (when water condenses, clouds form). If one time, clouds do not form... why? It can't be "Because it didn't." I need a reason. And that's what makes believable fantasy world. You can have your dragons, centaurs, unicorns. I don't care. I just want to see a working, functional, believable world where the things that need to make sense, do.
"It's fantasy," doesn't excuse the basics.
So, bring the whole herd of three-legged imps and get to it!
Could not agree with you more. Plot inconsistencies like that really bug the hell out of me. All it says to me, besides rudely pulling me out of whatever I'm reading/watching is that the author/director/whoever didn't care enough about their work to think everything through. And why would I want to waste my time on something the creator didn't even want to spend time on? There's fantasy, and then there's illogical, and I need logic in what I'm reading/watching. It can be logic completely unique to that setting, but by god it had better be there. Keep everything consistent, yes.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a point often missed; created logic. It doesn't have to be logical, just logically consistent. If I make the sky green, and the grass purple, it needs to stay like that. Logic says that the sky changes colour through the day and night, and that the grass changes colours when it dies; what colours would a green sky change to as the day passes? What colours do purple grass change as it dies? What is the world's colour of 'dying' foliage? If the grass is purple, are leaves too? What makes the leaves different, if not?
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