If you say that Galdor of Nebulon sat down to breakfast, and do not describe any of the elements of that breakfast, the reader who eats Froot Loops every morning will on some level understand Galdor to be doing the same.
We don’t need to be experts on the Bible to prove that the “prophecies” of Left Behind are ridiculous. That ridiculousness presents itself on every page of these books. “These things will happen,” LaHaye says. “These things are prophesied and therefore they must happen.” And without ever consulting the text from which these supposed prophecies are derived we know that this is false — that such things cannot be and will not be because people are not like this.
Human nature will not allow it.
Human nature is the one thing we require from any story for it to ring true. We can accommodate fantastical elements like Nicolae’s supernatural mind mojo powers. That’s unlike the world as we know it, but we’re willing to stretch that far. What we cannot tolerate, though, is the notion — the requirement — that people will cease behaving like people. And that is the premise and prerequisite for most of what happens in these books.
It’s not just that we occasionally see a few people behaving strangely or inexplicably, but that everyone behaves inexplicably. In these books, the whole world is out of character.
I don’t just mean the sort of out-of-character behavior that arises from sloppy writing, where people talk funny or seem to have inappropriate emotional responses. There’s plenty of that here, too, but what I’m talking about here is the way in which alien, inhuman behavior is made the necessary driver of this story. The plot depends upon people not acting like people. It depends upon them acting in a way that people have never acted and, being people, will never and would never and can never act. If people in this story behaved like actual people, then this story would not happen.
That makes this a bad story — an unbelievable story that does not ring true.
Human nature will not allow it.
Human nature is the one thing we require from any story for it to ring true. We can accommodate fantastical elements like Nicolae’s supernatural mind mojo powers. That’s unlike the world as we know it, but we’re willing to stretch that far. What we cannot tolerate, though, is the notion — the requirement — that people will cease behaving like people. And that is the premise and prerequisite for most of what happens in these books.
It’s not just that we occasionally see a few people behaving strangely or inexplicably, but that everyone behaves inexplicably. In these books, the whole world is out of character.
I don’t just mean the sort of out-of-character behavior that arises from sloppy writing, where people talk funny or seem to have inappropriate emotional responses. There’s plenty of that here, too, but what I’m talking about here is the way in which alien, inhuman behavior is made the necessary driver of this story. The plot depends upon people not acting like people. It depends upon them acting in a way that people have never acted and, being people, will never and would never and can never act. If people in this story behaved like actual people, then this story would not happen.
That makes this a bad story — an unbelievable story that does not ring true.
— Fred Clark on Left Behind, Slacktivist
The world of Girl Genius magically aligns itself with our world's history just enough so that at any given historical era, someone from our world would recognize the names and roles of the principle figures, yet be different enough to remain interesting and weird.
—Troper DeMarquis in the Girl Genius TVTropes Forums thread
