the.com/suspension of disbelief
The deal you cut with a story: I know it's fake, now make me forget that.
means The willing choice to accept impossible or improbable things within a story so you can actually enjoy it, instead of picking it apart.
from Coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, describing how he tried to give his supernatural poems enough 'human interest and a semblance of truth' that readers would grant them, as he put it, 'that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.' The phrase escaped poetry criticism long ago and now covers any audience's unspoken agreement to not heckle the plot's flying men or talking swords.
- origin
- Coleridge coined it in 1817, about poetry
- breaking point
- one bad plot hole can snap it instantly
- not blindness
- you still know it's fiction, you just allow it
- genre dependent
- sci-fi gets more leash than courtroom dramas