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by Retric 586 days ago
That’s not a question about the underlying rules of a fictional work but your perception of how they are created. It’s possible to have a completely well defined fantasy setting with exact rules without the reader being aware of what those rules are or even knowing it’s using well defined rules.

Consider The Martian, early versions where posted online and the author changed what resources the character had to work with at the beginning. So what feels like a creative solution to limited resources was really giving the character exactly what they needed after a solution was found. Only examining a work we can’t distinguish ‘soft’ physics updated as the plot demands from a story based around fixed rules.
1 comments
exe34 586 days ago
You seem to confuse the creative process with the final product. The rules can change during the creative process. It's the final product that I judge as a reader - I won't bother going over the inconsistencies in Harry Potter here, it's been done ad nauseam elsewhere. The physics doesn't change over the course of the story of the Martian.
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Retric 586 days ago
What you view as inconsistencies are based around assumptions for how the underlying rules work and what happened that don’t necessarily apply.

One of the more interesting science fiction short stories I read seemed to have very inconsistent time travel, but on closer reading you find the two different methods involved had two different sets of rules. It’s easy to say something is inconsistent, but any possible story has a corresponding set of rules that work.

It’s rather similar to considering what characters may have been lying in a story.

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exe34 585 days ago
When it comes to Harry Potter,

> but on closer reading

does not make the inconsistencies go away, but they multiply.

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Retric 585 days ago
> they multiply

Again based on specific assumptions. The universe of possibilities includes very strange places.

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exe34 585 days ago
> universe of possibilities includes very strange places.

that's an unjustified assumption.

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Retric 585 days ago
Why? I mean if we and the characters are unsure what the underlying physics is then the possibilities are literally endless.

If nothing else pure randomness is a unsatisfying possibility as is a full branching search of every possible state for a universe.

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