Willing suspension of disbelief, or How do you type with boxing gloves on?
 

This came about while around a friend of mine. I was goofing around on the computer, and she was playing on her PSP, when she finally turned to me and said, "Okay, this is bugging me. How does [Genesis in Crisis Core] fly with one wing?"

I thought about this for a second. I don't know, how would anyone fly with two wings? That's just as doable, but there are a lot of depictions of humans or human-like beings who fly with two wings, and usually we can accept that. Besides, don't those people operate under totally different physics anyway?

I told her as much. "Pah," she said, "jumping 100 feet in the air is perfectly normal."

So then I started wondering why I accept certain things and not others. Overall, I'm pretty lenient. What I care about is how well you get across whatever you want to get across, and I want to meet you halfway. In fact, it's often better if you don't try too hard to explain something. As long as it's internally consistent, or at least not too egregious, I can imagine the existence of some unknown factor that makes whatever's happening work. When you give some weak explanation that illuminates why it doesn't, you take that away from me. That said, some things do bother me. I tried to find some kind of general guideline, but really, it seemed pretty arbitrary. I can tell you when a given example crosses from "acceptable" to "really stupid," but I can't define it in the abstract. I did come up with some contributing factors, including:

1) The medium. Different media have their own unique characteristics which lend themselves to different things, and each medium develops its own set of conventions. Works are created for specific media, which is why so many movie adaptations have ended in tragedy. Theater shares the most similarities, but even then you have to be mindful. For one thing, plays are a lot more limited in how they present something, so you're willing to accept some impressionism, but the same thing in a movie would seem really ridiculous.
2) Genre conventions.
3) Cultural conventions.
4) How much you appreciate the work overall. If you generally like a lot of elements--the ideas, the story, the characters, the aesthetics, the music if it has music, the gameplay if it's a game, etc.--then you're more likely to forgive weaker elements or occasional transgressions.
5) Similarly, creative liberties are acceptable when they're completely awesome. Example: when I was getting into Dr. McNinja, I linked someone to this because somehow the last panel struck me as the best thing ever. His response was to wonder how a dinosaur got to exist in the modern world and how it ended up around a bunch of zombies. Granted, it was out of context, but my feeling was basically, look. It's a raptor. And it's owning a bunch of zombies. What the hell more information do you need?
6) Knowledge/familiarity. For example, a lot of stories posit a world other than our own, but which is inhabited by humans or beings with essentially human psychology. Thus, to me, characterizations become one of the bigger sticking points, because I don't have a direct reference for a lot of other aspects of the world but I do have a reference for how people act. This is why I can't tolerate sitcoms that rely on characters acting stupid in ways people don't ever act. It's a different case if the characters aren't assumed to be basically like people going about in real life, in which case it's more important that it makes sense in context.

...And that's enough from me at the moment, since I'm overthinking this by a lot. What about the rest of you? What liberties are acceptable/unacceptable? What makes them okay/not okay?

I'm pretty much on the same page as you. I mean, let's take comic books. When you start introducing a lot of pseudo-science as explanations for your characters powers abilities etc, the minute I find something in real-science that contradicts those explanations, I get turned off.

The trick (again I'm being specific to comic-books or even sci-fi in general) is to leave it vague enough that you can't help but say, "well, damn, I can't DISPROVE it, so what the hell, why not?". Qualifying examples include; Technology that doesn't exist/ isn't developed enough to work yet (Iron Man, Star Trek), Genetic engineering (Ultimate Spider-Man(?), Ang Lee's Hulk movie), Evolution - as, controversy aside how the hell would it actually manifest itself? (X-men, Heroes).

I mean, repulser technology. What is that even? I don't the hell know, do you? Good. Now that we're all in the dark, we all think Iron Man rocks.

As an alternative - and this is Otaku-esque breeding ground - If something isn't fortified well enough with the impregnable vague explanations, or if it is explained so well that you find contradicting information in reality, I like to create my own explanations. This is only for media that is too awesome to me to let someone bother me with petty questions of plausibility. Dr McNinja is exceptional in this respect because I have yet to meet a person who asks "Why is there a Raptor in his office?" who actually wants an explanation. There's too much going on there to be troubled with it. That comic is a fucking roller-coaster.

Let's take your wing'd example and apply it to Archangel from X-men. Now, He has wings, but a human shaped body. Presumably, this wouldn't really lend itself to flight as birds know it, which is what we are supposed to believe. Since they haven't commonly provided an explanation for this (we know the vague x-gene explanation gives us the 'why', but we want to know 'how' in this instance) I might say "Well, he has hollow bones, or he is somehow built more like a highly-evolved bird which enables his wings to support his body during flight, etc..."

There's some similar stuff with Superman, but I could write a book on that.

As with the case of Dr. McNinja, context is a HUGE part of suspension of disbelief. I cite as example the RBMFS (Really Big Mother-F***ing Sword). The most well-known example over here in the west (aside from Bleach, InuYasha, etc.. fan info) is Cloud from FFVII.

Now, look at Cloud. Look at him. Well-muscled, sure. His frame, though, is tiny. Almost spindly. With 1% bodyfat and the rest being muscle and organs, he STILL wouldn't be able to lift that much, much less swing it about like he does. Yet we pretty much never questioned it. Why? Context.

Wielding a RBMFS was acceptable in FFVII because reality worked way, way differently. A RBMFS was acceptable because the next guy was Sam Jackson with a gun-arm. HE was acceptable because a tiny little thing of a woman could pseudo-bareknuckle kung fu kickbox gigantic deathmachines into oblivion. All of THAT was acceptable next to your characters being shot with a machine gun for minimal damage, giant roboscorpions, a talking lion-thing, huge angry variants of Captain Planet, a highly effeminate villain with an equally RBMFS, sentient meteor-things, the fact that the Turks never, ever died no matter how many times you stabbed or electrocuted or burned or froze or shot or beat or bit or otherwise magicked or hurt them into oblivion. Let's not forget the goth guy who could turn into Frankenstein's monster, Texas Chainsaw v2.0, a demon thing, and I forget the fourth. You could bring people back from the dead, even, except when story-line said "Nope, this one's all outta extra lives". Next to all this, a little dude throwing around a sheet of metal as big as he is is a drop in the bucket. Any ONE of those things was all acceptable simply given the pretty absurd facets of the world it was surrounded with.

The question isn't "Why can Genesis fly with one wing?" Look at the other parts of it. Question should be "Why is THAT the part that makes you wonder?"

...Gotta admit though. One-winged toons always gave me the funny little image of them flapping around in a circle all one-sided canoe style.

Yes.

Yeah, everything depends on context. If the setting is a world where pretty much everything is backasswards, we just accept it. Anytime something directly contradicts the laws of physics, I just think of the physics as being different as per that particular universe.

All y'all need to go to TVTropes. Info and such on everything like this, and moreso.

Just sayin'.

Yeah, that's pretty much my feeling.

True, it's largely a matter of context. I can pretty much accept video game reality for what it is, though occasionally it's fun to examine it in more depth. I always enjoyed the bizzare cast of baddies Final Fantasy games randomly throw at you... they sort of try to make them fit in the situation, but I can't even guess why sentient houses are running around Midgar. My favorite, though, is the Buddha-statue heads you fight in FFVI.

Story/gameplay segregation falls under that, if it's not too outrageous. Cutscenes and battles function differently as part of the game, it's not a huge leap for me to assume some fundamental in-game differences at work. When things don't work the same between cutscenes, that's more of a standard plot hole, but I'm not going to get into that now.

Exactly, although I think

is the answer in this case.

TVTropes is indeed a good resource for this kind of stuff, but I have an unhealthy relationship with it. When I ended up browsing it one day for several hours straight, I knew I had a problem.

Sometimes though, something deviates from even the fictional laws of the universe it had set up for itself.

For example, the boiling rock episode of "Avatar." All of a sudden you've got Zuko and Ty Lee being capable of jumping 50 feet through the air. I am then no longer capable of suspending disbelief, due to the fact that Avatar broke our laws of physics, then went on and broke their own laws of physics.

That's where I draw the line as well. It's fine if you ignore real physics, but you have to at least obey your own.

In it's defense, that's really the only kind of relationship it's capable of having with anyone. Site's bloody addictive.