| I get the impression that you're seeing the word "belief" and assuming that you understand what they're talking about. I apologize if I've offended you, I'm really not trying to be pedantic, or a dick. I just believe that your intepretation lacks some critical context. Now, I admit, I'm feeling a little confused, and I suspect that I may have missed something you said earlier. I think my key point is that the human capacity for a willing suspension of disbelief is totally unrelated to how realistic or factual we believe the story to be... Most of us regularly consume wildly unrealistic fiction that we KNOW is pretty far from reality. Consider Game of Thrones and Star Wars... both massively popular, and neither making any claims of factual realism. Our social primate brains are wired to be constantly trying to understand each other. We're driven to try to predict the reactions of the peers, mates, competitors, and enemies in our social groups. The details are informed by our own learning and life experiences, but at the core is an obsessive, hard-wired anxiety about what is going on in everyone else's heads. Literature exploits our internal empathizing behavior by presenting us with depictions (on screen, on stage, in text, etc) of characters exhibiting human-like behavior. In response, our social mind instinctively starts to try to make sense of whatever is depicted. Our minds are drawn into attempting to model what is going on inside the characters, just as if they're normal human beings. For believeability, it's not really relevant whether the characters physically resemble human beings... We can equally empathize with robots, animals, gods, etc. The important thing is that the characters perform in ways to which our brains can assign some human meaning. When Nicola Morgan points out that factual truth isn't relevant to believeability, she's talking about the fact that real humans sometimes behave in ways that don't compute, and our empathizing process fails to model them for us. Does that make sense? Are we actually in agreement here, and maybe I just misunderstood something on your end? |