Suspension of Disbelief

[Lorizael]

So one of the complaints levied against the show Game of Thrones is that characters are often able to travel very long distances in very short periods of time without any apparent means of doing so. Now, others push back against this kind of criticism by saying, hey, you accept ice zombies, dragons, and vagina demon shadow assassins, but anomalously fast travel is too much?

This is an amusing rebuttal, but I think it misses the mark. For example, here's something we don't accept in Game of Thrones: people spontaneously catching fire and dying without any apparent cause. But here's something we do accept: dragons breathing fire on someone, who then catches fire and dies. To me, suspension of disbelief requires an explicit conceit that is acknowledged in the story. I accept that there are dragons, therefore I accept that people are going to be burned alive a lot when dragons are around.

Anomalously fast travel, however, doesn't seem to have the same kind of explicit conceit (at least in GoT). Characters that appear on the other end of a continent after little more than a scene change aren't first seen unfurling a scroll and calling out magical incantations. No one ever remarks that it's weird how X manages to get places so quickly, or wonders why some people travel very quickly and others are much slower. Without a conceit to ground this phenomenon, I'm less willing to suspend my disbelief.

But on the other hand, the extent to which you're willing to suspend disbelief probably also depends on how much you think an unbelievable thing impinges on the plot. I am not really bothered by people zipping about Westeros because I think little is lost except scenes of walking/riding/sailing. The more a story element affects the plot, though, the less willing I am to accept it without some acknowledged conceit.

Thoughts? What determines whether you're willing to suspend disbelief in your fantasy and science fiction?

[BlackCat]

Wild guess - they have decided that four hour long time lapses of an army moving from one point to another in a couple of months isn't worth showing ?

It could also be that distances isn't that long. Viking raids against the british isles could probably take some months but the actual travel from coast to coast only took a couple of days.

[loinburger]

The biggest problem I have with suspension of disbelief is when disruptive new technologies are magically introduced midway through a sci-fi book (or more often a series), for example in Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" series and in Alastair Reynolds's "Revelation Space" series the universe was set up such that slower than light space travel was a defining part of the universe, but halfway through the series faster than light travel was magically introduced (in Card's case some hicks on a backwoods planet developed the technology, in Reynolds's case the technology was developed thanks to a wormhole that let people talk to people in the future) and completely ****ed everything up. If the FTL travel had been introduced from the start, or if it had been introduced after a long time lapse (as in Cordwainer Smith's "The Rediscovery of Man" collection of short stories, or when the evolution of super-psychic powers was introduced in Card's "Worthing Saga" collection of short stories - in both cases the development of the technology took thousands of years), then I'd have had no problem with it - but as it was it seemed like the author had written himself into a corner and figured that FTL travel would help write himself out of it ("I need the protagonists to get from point A to point B really fast" - in Card's case this was so that the species on a planet that was about to be destroyed could colonize distant star systems, in Reynolds's case this was so that he could have a thrilling starship chase which wouldn't have been very exciting if all of the ships were accelerating at 1G).

I haven't watched GoT, but I'd have a problem with some new technology/magic being introduced midway through the series that let armies teleport around willy-nilly. If instead the fast-travel was just the director winking at the audience and saying "we're omitting the travel scene" then I'd be fine with it.

[Proteus_MST]

As Black Cat says .... there often are long amounts of time within and between the episodes and seasons.

Example:
We know from Edmure Tully (in the middle of the 6th season), that his wife Roslin has already given birth to a son
So, between the end of the Red Wedding (end of season 3) and the middle of the 6th one, most probably more than a year has passed.

Another example is the growth of Rickon Stark ... in the beginning of Season 1 he seems to be a little boy of maybe 5 or 6 years ... in the end of season 6 (when he is killed) he is around 11/12.
The 2nd example lets it seem likely, that each season encompasses arond 1 year in Westeros Time (with varying amounts of time passing in and between each episode)

So, with regards to GoT I see it, that they just jump from one interesting event on the timeline to the next, and often let varying amounts of time pass between those events

[rah]

The traveling doesn't bother me that me that much, and the aging of characters even less, but what bothered me the most was that in the time it took Theon and Yara to cross the see can head back, the iron islands under Euron were able to build the largest fleet ever from SCRATCH. If they could do that on top of the fleet they had previously, they would already rule the world.

[Proteus_MST]

True. One wonders where they got all the wood from ... building such a huge fleet surely requires whole forests to be felled, in order to provide the wood.
(actually shipbuilding in roman times (and the resulting erosion) IIRC is the reason why the italian peninsula has such a sparse vegetation)

The iron islands themselves don't seem to possess much arboreal landscapes which could have provided all the wood

[rah]

Yeah, the description of the Iron Island did not include the word trees. So as Jamie mentioned they had to steal them. Hard to do without any ships.

[BlackCat]

Here is an article about travel times in the Mediterranean area in roman-greek ancient time.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/TAPA/82/Speed_under_Sail_of_Ancient_Ships*.html

[rah]

Yeah, that was helpful and I think Columbus only took around 5 weeks to cross the ocean, So Yara could have made it back and forth in 10 weeks. Even if you double it, it's very unlikely that the residents of the iron island could accumulate all the materials and have the labor to construct a "1000" ships. YEAH, RIGHT.

[BeBMan]

I remember that Troy movie with Brad Pitt as Archill - one typical point of criticism was that it didn't feel like they depicted the thing which took 10 (? IIRC) yrs acc. to the non-Simpsonian Homer as epic as it's supposed to have been. I have to say I agree.


But I find it difficult to come up with some kind of a rule for this. I didn't noticed it in GoT early on, but for example found it rather "rushed" when Aria suddenly made it to the Twins to kill that old guy (host of the red wedding). For me it's not somuch about unrelatisitc travel, but it seemed more like a deux ex machina moment.

I am afraid these things are happening in many shows increasingly later on when

a) the cast gets bigger (so that screen time gets divided more)

b) needs to be reduced drastically to have another shock moment which however never hits as hard as Ned Stark's death because there was no time to build up the character in the same way due to a) (unless it hits other key characters like Tyrion, Dany, Jon etc. )

c) the creators maneuvred themselves into a dead end (hopefully not happening with GOT so much)

[Garth Vader]

Suspension of disbelief is a little different from something being logically inconsistent. Dragons you can accept because that's the suspension of disbelief. But if they all of a sudden whip out a computer that's not logically consistent with the established story. GOT travel times haven't bothered me because they don't seem to use it as a plot point. Somebody heads off somewhere, the story moves to other characters, when they move back to the character that was traveling they are now where they want to go, in my mind enough time has passed because of the cut to other stories obscure how much "real" time has actually passed.

Time and space issues always bothered me in Star Trek (of all flavors) because it was always a plot point and never consistent. In one case they can detect a ship when it's days away, then another episode their detection time is minutes. Oh we can't do X because it will take days to get there, next episode everything is 5 minutes away. Communication times vary wildly as required by the story.

[Lorizael]

...the iron islands under Euron were able to build the largest fleet ever from SCRATCH. If they could do that on top of the fleet they had previously, they would already rule the world.

Agreed, and this gets at something that irks me in a lot of SF. Whenever the shields are about to fail or the star is about to go supernova, the science/engineering crew are always able to pull out a last minute magical solution that gets them out of the situation. But why are these solutions only ever available in times of crisis? If an engineer can come up with a brilliant workaround before the end of the episode, why can't they also engineer things so that solution X is always in place, or always readily available, or spend more time later working to make X a reliable feature?

[Dauphin]

The traveling doesn't bother me that me that much, and the aging of characters even less, but what bothered me the most was that in the time it took Theon and Yara to cross the see can head back, the iron islands under Euron were able to build the largest fleet ever from SCRATCH. If they could do that on top of the fleet they had previously, they would already rule the world.

Maybe they had some Great Engineers waiting to be used, and they wasted them on hurry production of triremes. Typical AI type move.

[-Jrabbit]

Agreed, and this gets at something that irks me in a lot of SF. Whenever the shields are about to fail or the star is about to go supernova, the science/engineering crew are always able to pull out a last minute magical solution that gets them out of the situation. But why are these solutions only ever available in times of crisis? If an engineer can come up with a brilliant workaround before the end of the episode, why can't they also engineer things so that solution X is always in place, or always readily available, or spend more time later working to make X a reliable feature?

Theoretically, they can and do. Who knows how many dramatic plots were made unnecessary by the insightful preparations by Data, Geordie, Spock, and their ilk.

"Yes, Captain, we were attacked by a space squid arriving via our transporter, but our established protocols took care of the issue in short order. Would you like to see the video logs?"
"That won't be necessary, Number One. Well done."

Sadly, those stories are dead boring and rarely get published.

[The Mad Monk]

I remember somebody (a cardassian, maybe?) commenting on the Federation's penchant for overbuilding and backing up everything ("redundancies for redundancies!"). He wasn't being complimentary...