#believability

When I’m editing, I expect to run into things that don’t make sense. But I’ve found that when something in a story sticks out as really not making sense, there’s a better-than-average chance the writer based it directly on real life. These unbelievable story elements could be cultural practices, political strategies, dialogue exchanges, you name it. At this point, I’m decent at spotting the issue in advance. When something just doesn’t fit with the rest of the story, straining suspension of disbelief, I already know that it’s ripped directly from the headlines. 

Although labelled a sports manga, Blue Lock does not follow the typical formula of its genre. Aside from the fact that they’re playing soccer, nothing about it is indicative of being a sports manga. You can substitute soccer for any fantasy game and it will still make sense. This becomes even truer in the NEL arc.

This would’ve been fine if we can take the story lightly and chalk all the “odd stuff” up as random cool elements added for hype—but we can’t. Blue Lock does not allow it.

Blue Lock takes itself very seriously, what with all its weighty critiques of capitalism and insights on the human psyche. This manga is so damn serious about itself that you are forced to take it seriously as well.

It’s really no wonder some people drop the show/manga so soon after starting it, claiming that it’s not “realistic.” And to some extent, they’re right. Blue Lock is a story that’s constantly threatening to break through the laws of reality and the genre it chose.

Such restrictions typically exist for the purpose of world building. When we’re creating a game, we’re trying to build engaging game systems - yes - but we are also creating believable worlds with their own nations, cultures, races, and even species that the players can believe in. It is important for this belief that these socio-political creations behave in ways that would make sense as if they were real, and that often includes constraints like gender, race/species, nation of origin, social class, and so on. A huge factor in how nations and cultures evolve is due to their local constraints - geography, resource availability, technology, and so on. Let’s look at an example of how this might apply.

Imagine a fantasy nation of sentient human-sized insectoids that established itself in our created game world. Such a nation might have developed their own form of martial arts over time that utilizes a four-armed fighting style and warriors from this race would be able to utilize up to four weapons simultaneously. They may have developed their own specialized weapons technology that requires three or even four simultaneous arm/hand motions to operate. They may have developed tail or wing weapons or technology. A humanoid with two arms couldn’t use this fighting style or these special weapons because they lack the hardware for it - they’re limited to two arms, two legs, and no tail or wings by nature of being a humanoid. In a game where we allowed players to control insectoid characters, it would likely cause significant narrative dissonance if non-insect characters could learn the insect fighting style or use the insect-specific weapons without any kind of in-game acknowledgement that it was out of the ordinary. 

We might extrapolate this example nation further. Insects in nature often exhibit sexual dimorphism (different physical characteristics between males and females of the same species), so it wouldn’t be out of place to have the females of the species be much larger and stronger than their male counterparts. In an organized society of such creatures, this might make the females the de-facto warriors within the society due to their innate physical differences. In such a situation, allowing for male warriors without any kind of in-game acknowledgement about how unusual it is would similarly bend or break the believability.

This isn’t to say that such constraints are set in stone by any stretch. All rules have exceptions. Our insect nation might have (rarer) male warriors serve in a majority-female military. We might have an unusually dexterous savant human who manages to wield four weapons at once, perhaps through telekinetic powers. The difficult part comes from acknowledging those exceptions. When a situation in a society is extraordinary, it is expected for those observing to acknowledge the extraordinary-ness of the situation. The acknowledgement of those differences makes the world feel believable. Visible lack of acknowledgement will make the world much harder to believe in. 

That is the difficulty - acknowledgement of lore in game costs dev resources to show. A conversation with an insect military leader would likely have different responses to a male insect warrior, a female insect warrior, or a human outsider. If the developers lack the resources to acknowledge those major societal outliers within the game, chances are good they won’t allow those outliers. Without notable (acknowledged) cultural and mechanical differences between societies/groups/nations/etc., they end up feeling very similar. In that situation, it reduces the player’s choice to one that is primarily cosmetic. That can be fine if that is one of the goal visions of the game, but we cannot assume that. There’s a tradeoff being made here. It is up to the game director to make that particular call.

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Tex: One of the perils of attempting to write about highly technical subjects is that you run into the issue of not understanding your writing. I do raise a nominal objection as your first sentence, because sensibility is a sliding scale based on one’s familiarity with a given subject. I don’t know crap about, say, textile art (however much I might have bluffed readers in the past - no, no, this is just good googling skills on my end), but that doesn’t mean the textile arts are an inherently incomprehensible subject.

Scientifically, automobiles were once thought to be insensible. Scientifically, phones were thought to be a flight of fancy. Scientifically, 3D printing was improbable. Scientifically, quantum computing was the stuff of sci-fi nerds who just wanted to slap the “quantum” label on everything.

And yet we are now on the verge of robotic vehicles, mostly functional smartwatches, laser printing cells (PDF), and quantum computers (VentureBeat, IBM).

So I would argue that the insensibility of a setting would be due mostly to, yes, a structural issue - on the part of the author. No matter what you put into your world, internal consistency is key; nothing, no matter how ostensibly outlandish, will make sense if you contradict yourself.

I’ll volley a few questions back to you:

“[...] when to intentionally ignore reality” - Are you ignoring reality entirely, or just parts of it? Why? How does that decision benefit your world? How does it detract from your world?

“Can’t bother to do research” - Is it because you are discouraged by the breadth of your comprehension of a subject, compared to the subject’s depth? Or is it because of something else?

“Don’t understand research” - Is this because you don’t understand the academic papers that turn up in your search results, or because you have a fundamental lack of or misunderstanding of the given subject? Or is it because of something else?

“When are such things considered to be offensive or overused cliche” - As someone who intentionally arranges their studying around the plausibilities of the future, I would quite frankly be delighted to see more conceptual stretches of the imagination in this regard, as do many others on this blog, and beyond it. Why have you already passed judgement on the offensiveness or clichéd-ness of incorporating scientific things? Is this related to your other comments?

“[...] or have a reader point out the impossibility and can’t get into the story?” - If you are writing to please a specific individual or demographic, you are inevitably always going to fall short, because it’s genuinely impossible to meet every single item on a group’s wishlist without devoting your life to it (not an entirely worthy pursuit, in my opinion, but alas). What made you decide to be so concerned over the potential reaction to your stories that you worry about it before the story is even written?

I think I will put the majority of my curiosity’s weight on the last bullet point, as I’m seeing similar themes with the other portions of your question. It’s a fruitless endeavour to tie yourself into knots over a possible (not necessarily probable!) reaction - and quite likely from a stranger, to boot. Education is a relatively easy situation to fix, so long as you’re patient with yourself; dealing with anxieties over readers is… not so easy.

I can really only recommend that you take a close look at the goals of your worldbuilding, and see where you contradict yourself - once you have that in hand, it’s a relatively simple yes/no process of what concepts you want to keep. If the issue of decision comes from a lack of understanding, then make a note to yourself to seek out either the million wikis we Pylons utilize ourselves like any other worldbuilder, or to chalk it up as a genuine lack of context.

Please understand that even someone who’s dedicated their life to a certain aspect of science won’t know everything about it - that’s the point of research! We’re constantly asking ourselves questions, and pushing the envelope of known boundaries. Star Wars has lightsabers, but we don’t need to know how they work; likewise with holodecks in Star Trek. So long as an audience is reasonably entertained with the least amount of head-scratching, you can get away with handwaving quite a lot.

Lockea: On a scale between Star Trek and Star Wars, how “hard” is your science fiction?

I mention that mostly to illustrate that science fiction exists on a continuum, wherein science fiction with more “science” than “fiction” drives a story towards the harder end rather than the softer end. Also, a story’s place on the continuum will change based on what we know and understand about science.

I feel like everyone always beats me to saying all the important stuff about questions, so I’ll just give a few thoughts from my personal experience as a science fiction fan with two engineering degrees and a thesis about robots on the moon (yes really, I wrote my thesis on AI for moon robots). I really, really, love the creativity of science fiction writers. I think so often in defending the genre, we can get caught up in saying things like “science fiction predicted XYZ!” Well, sure, I may have studied Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics in my introduction to engineering ethics course, but I was also greedily reading my way through “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins at the same time. The fact that I sincerely doubt Panem will ever happen didn’t dampen my enjoyment of Katniss’s story. It was a fun read and it gave my friends and I something to talk about that wasn’t “feasibility of Battlestar Galactica” during our daily lunches.

The thing about writing science fiction is that, without a doubt, there will be someone who knows more than you about a topic who reads your story. Most of the time, I end up being that someone since everyone likes to talk about Skynet and robots taking over the world to a roboticist who sincerely refers to artificial intelligence as artificial stupidity. Y'all are seriously overestimating the field, my friends. Nonetheless, I still enjoyed “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” even as I thought how impossible Project Insight would be. Honestly, something every READER of science fiction needs to make peace with is the fact that writers will get something wrong. Writers, despite their best efforts, are not always going to understand that a facial recognition algorithm will fail if you introduce tiny amounts of random noise and are thus going to treat The Algorithm™ as infallible in your crime drama novel.

It’s not the writer’s fault, though.

That deserves to be on its own line. It is not YOUR fault if you get something wrong. Would it be nice if science literacy was just better all around? Of course! But it’s not your fault if your science literacy isn’t up to snuff enough to parse the article I cited above. It’s also not your job. Your job as the writer is to tell the most interesting story you can and to maintain your own internal rules and logic such that the reader never breaks the willing suspension of disbelief.

I watch Star Wars and get really into the light saber fight scenes and forget that light sabers are basically impossible to make. Star Wars has the Force, which is basically magic, and that’s okay. Really. I KNOW it’s not possible, but I still have a lot of fun watching it!

So yeah, write that story about how the robots are going to take over the world. I’ll probably enjoy reading it even as I laugh off my friends telling me that I will be the first to die in the robot apocalypse (of course I will -- I have five robots in my living room alone).

Constablewrites: Tone and consistency are the biggest pieces of this for me. If it’s the kind of story where the answer to “How does this work?” is usually a detailed and plausible explanation, then getting an answer later that is implausible or slapdash will stand out more. But if it’s the kind of story where the answer to “How does this work?” is “You push that button and it goes whoosh” from the start, my expectations adjust accordingly. (It’s possible to have the latter version in a story that is mostly the former, frequently when it’s played for last. Again, tone is key.)

I think I’ve finally figured out a facet of why the ‘But X sometimes happens in real life!’/’X is realistic!’/’Not everything is good/has a happy ending/goes well in reality’ bugs me sooooo much.

One aspect is that this defence is only ever brought up to defend bad/negative things happening, even though ‘realistic’ would imply a balance of good and bad things. Like, you know. The real world.

But also...

It’s a lame defence for fictional media. 

In fictional media at least something in implicitly or explicitly not real, something not in our reality. This ranges from alternative history where one small thing is changed to like, Futurama and Sailor Moon and Lord of the Rings. And The Magicians.

Now because stories like that have elements that aren’t in the real world, one thing you really must nail is believability. You must get your audience or reader to suspend their disbelief and believe in your world, your un-realisms. Obviously Star Wars in not real, but a lot of that world feels like it could be real to me. It’s believable. 

Realism on the other hand, is almost like a specific genre of fiction. Realism, in my opinion, moreso means you want the world to be as close to our world as possible, usually with the exception of a sole/handful of speculative elements. Not many pieces of media are actually trying to go for ‘true’ realism, but instead a level of believability to make their media better. 

I think a lot of people say ‘realism’ when they mean ‘believability’.

So when people defend criticism of bad things happening in (not usually hyper-realistic) media as ‘Oh well it’s more realistic, because bad things happen in real life’, that is saying the show is better because it is less fictional. It’s kind of like saying the writers weren’t creative enough within the bounds of the world they’ve created, so for this particular situation they defaulted to the normal world. Or at least defaulted the tone to that of the ‘normal world’ (but actually a overly dour view of the real world). And that...uh...feels like a lame defence lol?

Saying it’s better because it’s ‘realistic’ feels like saying the media didn’t try hard enough to be fictional, and that was a good thing.