This is one way to use the Literary Agent Hypothesis. It is odd to think how seriously people take the minutiae of storytelling when you compare it to mythology and folklore, where exaggeration, Rule of Cool, Magical Realism, and A Wizard Did It are par for the course. No-one ever asked why the Billy Goats Gruff didn't go find a bridge without a troll under it, did they? You accepted that it's just a story.
Counterintuitively, once you accept that it's just a story, it becomes easier to pretend that maybe it really happened, because all the unrealistic bits could just be the storyteller's fault.
I'm reminded of how David Brin treats The Lord Of The Rings as a legend Written by the Winners of the defeat and exile of the heroic rebel Sauron.
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Anyone else ever do this? For non-religious stories, that is?
I know people talk about enjoying stuff "ironically", which implies there's also enjoying stuff normally. So there are different ways of appreciating a story.
And in this case, I'm talking about those stories that might be full of inaccuracies, plotholes, headscratchers, or other stuff that doesn't completely make sense. Yet you still find meaning in it. It's often useful as symbolism, or its characters are more symbolic of certain concepts or traits than they are part of a nicely fleshed-out story.
This happens most often with religious texts. Second most often is classic literature, especially old literature, as well as myths and legends. Despite lots of headscratchers or instances of values dissonance or cliches (such as deus and diabolus ex machina), people find great metaphorical/symbolic meaning in them.
I see something similar happening with Evangelion, curiously. People debate its symbolism heavily. And while I know that it contains enough plot holes to drive several trucks through, I kinda just gloss over the plot holes and just consider weird things (like the episode 1 appearance of Rei on the street) to be symbolism of some sort.
So basically, it's becomes less of a story wherein I try to immerse myself in and feel the setting, and more of a story that is told to partly to represent something else.
I know I have somewhat of a history of "analogizing" things in stories to things in real life, but Evangelion is just one of the more prominent instances. This has also happened to me to varying extents with Final Fantasy V, Chrono Trigger, Kiddy Grade, Cave Story, and Eureka Seven, among others I'm probably forgetting. (Come to think of it, I think this tends to correlate with works that I really like.)
Anyone else feel that they enjoy some stories and plot elements this way? Do we have tropes about how people enjoy stories?
edited 14th May '11 6:51:19 PM by GlennMagusHarvey