What is exactly being "realistic"?

Conventional wisdom would say that the closer to real life a story is the more " realistic" it is. But when fiction is involved the line of what makes something "realistic" seems to blur.

Furthermore what is "realistic" seems to be consodered better than what is too fantastical/silly

But what is exactly being Realistic?!

Fiction vs fiction

Some could claim that Harry Potter feels more "realistic" than twilight despite the fact that both are entirely fictional.

Why is sometimes something fictional more "realistic" than another fictional setting?

Saving Peivate Ryan sure is more "realistic" than  the lord of the rings. But how is star trek more "realistic" than starwars( or viceversa) ?

The plot

Sometimes people feel fine with  most fantastical elements on an story and very unconfortable  with some minor plot devices.

To give an example: The avengers movie 

1. a norse god being a super hero?, sure why not?
2. A man building a superarmor with a box of scraps?  Totally pausible!
3. A green  giant man with super strenght based on gamma radiation? Seems logical!
4. Alien invasion leaded by an evil norse god that is actually a frozt giant? So what?
5. the archer having super aiming? He must practice a lot!

The archer holding the bow wrong? That's totally unrealistic and fake!!!

The characters

Surprisingly speaking colored magical ponies have much more personality  than shows with supposedly  "realistic" females 

Compare My little pony Friendship is magic with your average show with flat female charcters in a more "realistic" setting

Capatin Planet's girls  vs My little pony girls for example

My little pony Friendship is Magic vs Ultimate Spiderman the tv show?

Conclusion

Considering that has raised the question to me. What exactly makes something feel "realistic when everything is fictional?

The plot? The settings? The characters?

edited 19th Jun '12 11:13:49 PM by FallenLegend

Make your hearth shine through the darkest night; let it transform hate into kindness, evil into justice, and loneliness into love.

The big problem with the term "realism" in talking about fiction is that it can mean two different things:

a) the work completely adheres to the physical laws of our world: no magic, no ghosts, no telepathy, etc.

or

b) the work, even if speculative fiction, contains realistic characterisation and character reactions, and rigorously adheres to the laws it sets up, even for things such as magic or psychic powers.

The fact that the word can have these two meanings makes it rather hard to talk about works that are realistic in one sense, but not the other. There are other terms, of course, but I'm a bit out of the loop. I know that some critics use "naturalism" for type a), but that's a bit problematic, since it's closely tied to a very era-specific literary moment (Émile Zola and his school of writing).

I think probably it's more about how complete you are with your setting in terms of being "realistic". If you have a certain type of magic in your land and you really thought fully about the kind of effects it would have on people, history, social development, economics and so on, versus another guy who just shoe-horns in a type of magic and assumes no change to society, the former is more realistic.

Star Trek thought fairly heavily about the type of effects that technology may have on future humanity. Star Wars made everything up completely and whether it would actually work or not, nobody really cared. It's not necessarily bad, Star Wars is a very complete setting and the number of differences from our real world is fairly significant, so it would have meant an inordinate amount of time spent on trying to determine social differences. Also, Star Wars technology makes zero sense with respect to physical laws.

Some plot elements, be they fantasy or sci-fi or normal drama fiction, can be taken as is via suspension of disbelief. People are psychic. Okay fine. But when you go "all Canadians ride around on polar bears and live in igloos", hey wait a sec, they actually exist and they aren't like that. It's when you know that something is actually just wrong that you can say it is wrong. You can't say a person is being psychic wrong, the setting/work sets the rules and that's it.

edited 20th Jun '12 1:42:14 AM by breadloaf

Reality = Suspension of Disbelief being broken. The Premise is the thing that is least needed to be realistic.

edited 20th Jun '12 8:18:38 AM by MrAHR

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"Realism" isn't about how real your world is as much as it's about how logical it is, as in, it should relate to itself in such a way that makes sense.

For example, one person who reviewed The Hunger Games was mostly alright with an oppressive regime or whatnot, but couldn't get past the fact that the tesserae system was so easily broken it was ridiculous, or the fact that Prim was poor and starving even though her family had a goat, or the Fact that Katniss could shoot a squirrel in the eye.

It makes sense that Hawkeye, with enough dedication and training, would be able to hit a small target X meters away with an arrow. It doesn't make sense that an arrow will fly where you want it to fly if you're not holding the bow correctly.

edited 20th Jun '12 8:40:30 AM by SalFishFin

I think what's being talked about here, to some extent, is External Consistency versus Internal Consistency. I personally view the former as largely unnecessary (and often responsible for stifling some interesting ideas), while the latter is much more important.

Verisimilitude.

I really hate that word. It describes this.

There are two things most commonly referred to as "realism" in fiction: Closeness to reality in terms of a lack of mythic or fantastical elements; and (as Matues mentioned above) general verisimilitude, which means a similarity to that which occurs in the real world in terms of detail and resonance. Realistic, historical, most romantic and some speculative fiction *

depend heavily upon the former, while most fiction in general requires the latter in some form to be believable, even if that verisimilitude is to something fictional in and of itself: A faux-myth to the structure of a real myth, for example, or a piece of postmodernist metafiction to an essay or a conventional novel. Recognition is necessary to enjoyment, even if that recognition is of something alien.

edited 21st Jun '12 8:43:54 AM by JHM

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

For me, it's not so much important that the physics is sound or that all the facts are right, as long as all the characters act the way you'd expect people in their place to act, and are not simply devices to tell a story, I'm happy.

The appearance of reality is more important than reality.

Nous restons ici.

Indeed.

How do you mean?

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

It's really not important if your story is actually realistic so long as you can make people believe it is; you would be surprised how much non-speculative fiction is actually very much unreal by lack of research or authorial fiat.

c.f. Dan Brown. Or in a darker turn, the Left Behind series.

edited 21st Jun '12 2:05:18 PM by Night

Nous restons ici.

From a story level maybe, but in the real world, I think that I take ethical issue with that...

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I don't necessarily disagree with the ethical objection myself.

Nous restons ici.

OK.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Yeah but there are a lot of people who complain about the Dan Brown books for a plethora of factual errors, mostly because he professes to be so accurate in the first place I suppose.

Isn't that what Night said?

I will say that a lot of the "that isn't realistic" talk is bull. There's having your Suspension of Disbelief broken, and then there's just nitpicking.

I believe Night said that Dan Brown created an illusion of realism and that is good enough for readers but I was merely saying that a lot of people didn't like that. So you'll still get called out for it.

I think a better word might be "believable."

For example: a government based on a children's card game isn't realistic. But written the right way, it could be believable (meaning, it makes sense within the world that the writer has created).

Or: Say you've written a story about vampires. Vampires aren't realistic, obviously, but they can be written believably if you don't break the rules you've set up for the universe. Say the rules are: vampires can't go in the sun or else they burn; they can drink any kind of blood; garlic repels them. If you follow those rules, you're writing them believably.

If you want to write an exception to the rules of the universe, you need to explain why this exception can exist in this universe, otherwise you're not writing them believably. So if you wanted to write a vampire who can go into sunlight in this universe, you'd have to explain how he can (like, you could write that he uses magic sunblock, or a special suit or something).

In short, you'd need to figure out what you can and can't do in your story's world before you can do this.

"Realistic" would mean a story that could happen in the real world.

edited 21st Jun '12 6:17:51 PM by BlackElephant

I'm an elephant. Rurr.

I don't see why both senses can't be a legitimate use of the word. But yeah if you want to distinguish them then believable is a less ambiguous substitute.

I suppose another way to put it is to distinguish between realism as a relationship between the work and reality (one of resemblance) and as a relationship between the work and the audience (in that they find it believable). Obviously there's a lot of overlap, but even without Reality Is Unrealistic, different people are going to have very different intuitions. When discussing 'realism' in the latter sense it's probably a good idea to mention which group of people you're measuring it against.

There's also the point that an audience can know perfectly well that a work is wildly out of sync with reality in all kinds of ways and still find it enjoyable, even enjoy it because it's unrealistic. I suppose that's the 'willing' part of willing suspension of disbelief.

edited 22nd Jun '12 6:26:41 AM by Kesteven

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I'm going to go for realistic meaning logical here. Just about any world, even those that seem insane (see: TESIV's Shivering Isles) are bound by rules, and rules are what distinguish raw imagination from a fictional world. What rules apply to a particular world can vary. To use your example, the Avengers movie is set, for the most part, in the real world. There are conceits we're willing to accept (the superheroes' abilities) because those are bounded by rules of their own. But outside of that, we expect that all of the rules of the real world to apply, more or less, so a master of archery holding a bow incorrectly would be unrealistic.

I think the point you bring up about characters is a somewhat different point, as it has less to do with whether something is shown in a way that violates established rules and more to do with whether it's shown fully fleshed out. Which can both reasonably be called 'realistic', it's just that applying it to depth of characterization is a different context to applying it to breaks from reality. (I'd consider the character point to be about 'real' characters while the plot/world point is more about 'realistic' worlds.)

To me, realism means "logical". As in, everything have to have a reason. If you change anything from real world physics and laws, have a reason for that change. 1) Why is this different from our Earth? How did it happen? 2) If in another place within the same works/series it works differently, why was it changed here? 3) Make characters react like human beings and have every decision made by them be what that person with that history, personality and motivations would actually do, not what you need the character to do due to where you want to take the plot.

Beyond realistic characterisation, it's mostly about one word: Why?

In my Comparative Literature course realism was defined, by my teacher, as something which takes place in a specific time, in a specific place and to specific characters.

Star Wars isn't realistic, because you could put those characters in another situation and plot and you could change the characters in the plot around, due to the archetypical nature of the story.

In Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, the time and place is very much defined and put in a larger historical context, as are the characters.

When you start talking about things like relation to reality, then you move into what realism grew into, called naturalism. Lord of the Rings isn't concerned with the finer points of hobbit life or the political workings of the return of the royal bloodline to the throne of Gondor which a naturalistic story would be.

It's poetry. The poetry of war.

Here's an interesting thing about realistic characters:

Making mistakes and not learning lessons:

Sloppy writing, or "realistic" humans?

There are people who will swear up and down the characters of Glee are VERY realistic, for example, due to how many asshole-ish things they'll do.

edited 22nd Jun '12 12:20:50 PM by MrAHR

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