In Raya and the Last Dragon, Raya meets an invader from another story.
One of the most important choices you can make about your story is the level of realism* you’d like. A story with a more realistic feel tells audiences that characters have to meet a higher standard when solving problems. A story with low realism signals that the story will be campy or whimsical. When a story violates these expectations, it will feel jarring or contrived.
While realism is most associated with grittiness, that only applies when the story is dark. Stories can also be light and realistic-feeling. They just need to offer relatable, real-world experiences and high accuracy while keeping a positive tone.
Stories with higher realism are often lauded for it. But realism is not inherently better, nor is it a good choice for every story. Let’s look at five common tropes that work much better when realism is low.
1. Walking Off Deadly Wounds
One of the most common signals of realism is how the story deals with injury. Does hitting someone on the head mean you’ve pushed their “Off” button, or will it give them a serious concussion? Can characters shake off bullet and stab wounds, or does getting shot in the abdomen mean a slow and painful death?
Hawkeye was remarkable among Marvel shows in that it showed the heroes slowly recovering from their wounds. That’s higher realism than most Marvel works, in which heroes are electrocuted or tossed fifty feet in the air without needing significant rest or recovery – even if they don’t have superpowers. This is generally fine because it’s consistent with the realism of these works. It becomes a problem when early scenes show that wounds are as deadly as they are in real life and then later a hero shakes off a bullet or stab wound.
Unfortunately, storytellers have a perverse incentive to mess this one up. To make the story more exciting, we want the situation to be as dire as possible while still leaving room for the hero to turn it around. For this reason, heroes may sustain injuries that are too dire for how realistic the story feels or, at least, too dire for the hero to keep fighting like nothing happened.
When a character walks off wounds that should be deadly, it doesn’t just break believability. It also makes the character’s recovery feel cheaper, and any similar injuries after that will mean less. If we keep escalating this trend, soon we’ll need characters to sew their heads back on in the middle of a fight.
2. Air Catches
Some stunts look real cool, but are terribly unrealistic. A good example is the air catch. This happens any time someone starts falling to their death and another character grabs them before they hit the ground. In some cases, this is a scientific impossibility, because the catch requires the rescuer to fall faster than the damsel. Other times, it’s just implausible that another hero could swing in fast enough and with exactly the right trajectory to catch their comrade in midair.
Take Space Sweepers, a movie that initially feels high in realism because of its detailed examination of classism. Team Good is trying to get ahead in a rigged economic system that leaves them trapped in debt and at the mercy of a giant corporation. Then they decide to defy the corporation in hopes of a big jackpot.
At first, it’s easy to ignore how the protagonists escape getting shot when they’re fired upon in a large and crowded room. That’s a regular feature of films that works in pretty realistic scenarios. But when one protagonist falls several floors and another protagonist manages to swing in at the last second on a rope, their plot shields become obvious.
Cue a dozen more wild stunts on the part of the heroes, and the movie doesn’t deliver what it promised: a story where poor underdogs have to outmaneuver an opponent they aren’t powerful enough to confront directly. The setup provided highly realistic problems, but then followed it with less realistic solutions.
Other examples of implausible story physics include:
- Wings that are not large enough for flight.
- Strong characters who somehow have infinite body mass to keep them on the ground.
- Explosions that toss characters aside without burning or breaking them.
Let’s not forget what happens in classic cartoons like Looney Tunes. If you ever doubt that realism matters, just imagine a character in your favorite live-action show walking off a cliff onto thin air, realizing they aren’t on the ground anymore, and finally falling. Then they get up again, of course.
3. Humanish Aliens
A staple of live-action space opera is having sapient aliens that look very much like humans. In most cases, they can even interbreed with us. This convention is partially because of the constraints of film. In live action, creating aliens that aren’t played by human actors requires expensive special effects that could still look fake. Actors can wear bulky costumes, but it hinders their performance. Given that, simply using humanish aliens was the best choice for franchises like Star Trek, Babylon Five, Stargate, and, to a lesser extent, Star Wars.
But humanish aliens are still exceedingly low in realism. This is likely why Andor, a gritty Star Wars TV show, sticks to human characters, with only a few aliens in the background. Depicting the aliens risks making the show’s highly realistic struggle against an oppressive empire look hokey.
When popular hard-scifi stories include aliens, those aliens are always vastly different from humans. In The Expanse, humans investigate a protomolecule that was engineered by an extinct alien civilization. While that civilization is largely mysterious, they existed as a hive mind that used bioluminescence for communication. In Project Hail Mary, humans are threatened by alien microbes they name the Astrophage, which are dimming the sun.
Given that narrated works don’t have the production constraints of film, writers are expected to be a little more creative with their aliens. If sexy babes with green skin come to visit Earth, the story will feel campy. If that’s what you want, then great, go to town. Otherwise, you may need to either give them an Earth origin or provide a robust explanation for why they look so much like humans.
4. Fairy-Tale Kingdoms
In fantasy, typical medieval-Europe-inspired worlds usually fall on a spectrum between feeling more historical to feeling more like a fairy tale. History-inspired settings are much more specific about how the world works, especially political boundaries and politics. They also incorporate details about the food, tools, or clothes that people actually had during the Renaissance or in medieval times.
In lower-realism fairy-tale settings, royalty pops out from under every mushroom. A princess may be introduced without any mention of what kingdom she’s from. When many kingdoms are named, their exact borders are rarely important, nor are their political relationships sketched out in detail. A monarch may give half the kingdom to some guy who rescued their daughter from a dragon.
While fairy-tale settings usually have peasants, they’re the kind of peasants that show up in cottagecore slideshows, not serfs who live on the edge of starvation. And everyone has modern luxuries like their own room and access to sweets every day.
Mixing and matching the traits of historical and fairy-tale settings doesn’t create good results. For instance, in They Mostly Come Out at Night, author Benedict Patrick paints a gritty picture of a struggling village where families live in one-room cottages. Because of this, it’s strange that sacks of grain are sitting out where rodents can get them and a character turns up her nose at berries for being too sweet. If Patrick aimed for low realism, those things wouldn’t matter.
Similarly, a fairy-tale setting should generally stay that way. If it goes into historical detail about diseases ravaging the population or the intricate politics between monarchs, that will create clashing aesthetics.
5. Child Action Heroes
In the real world, children being sent into danger is a clear sign that something is terribly wrong with society. Loving parents want to protect their kids, and adults do a much better job taking care of tough problems. But children naturally want to see heroes like them in their stories, and adults still love a good coming-of-age tale. Satisfying this demand is a lot easier when realism is low.
In cartoons like Amphibia, the Plantar family fights dangerous creatures together, and no one thinks anything of it. In stories that are a little higher in realism but still aren’t particularly realistic, the irresponsibility of sending kids into danger can be ignored as long as the storyteller doesn’t call too much attention to it. A child superhero can be asked to save the day by an adult government, or a parent can be blissfully unaware of the adventures their kid is going on all the time.
As realism goes up, these conceits become harder to swallow. It’s still possible to make a child hero believable, but you have to work harder. The child will likely be on the older side, their tasks may not be as difficult and dangerous, and adults must be thoroughly out of the way.
In Stranger Things season 1, the child heroes mostly work on hiding Eleven, the only person with powers in the show. Eleven fights the Upside Down with psychic powers because no one else can. Then there’s Will, who is pulled into the Upside Down involuntarily. He spends his time hiding from monsters while trying to communicate with his mother, so she can rescue him.
Raya and the Last Dragon created a huge realism clash when it suddenly introduced a small child that could perform advanced martial arts and outmaneuver the adults. While that conceit exists in films like The Boss Baby, it’s not something you can just throw seamlessly into another film.
It’s not impossible to change the level of realism during your story, but you’ll need a way to set the right expectations. If your character falls asleep and enters a surrealist dream world, the audience won’t expect events to be as realistic. The trick is not to surprise them by breaking the rules you’ve set for the narrative.
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In cartoons like Amphibia, the Plantar family fights dangerous creatures together, and no one thinks anything of it.
To be fair, Amphibia is a terrifying deathworld and it’s a wonder anybody survives childhood.
Which is why my niece and I, when we watched the show, were steadily more convinced as each episode went on that there was something seriously off about Sasha and Marcy’s families. Why else would those two have gone through such extreme lengths, at various points, to stay in the deathworld!?
I think that for Marcy « Walks in the middle of snakes » Wu, it can be wrote off as her wanting to live her fantasy and being impervious to why it is a terrible idea TM. I mean she also thought that trapping her friends away from their families and friends could be excused because of all the good things that came from this adventure…
For Sasha however. She did have an attitude of someone who has trouble at home, she was acting up in school and out of school, was obsessed with control over the one part of her life where her parents weren’t, had big emotional issues, and the end of season 1 gave off major suicidal vibes from her, soooo…
Yeah, Sasha needs a hug and therapy.
I mean she also thought that trapping her friends away from their families and friends could be excused because of all the good things that came from this adventure
Side note, everybody needs to lighten up about the original trappening.
Okay, would it have been better if Marcy had said “Hey, FYI, this music box is magical and will take us to another world”? Sure! It would’ve been better if they hadn’t all stolen the thing in the first place, but obviously destiny was writing the script here, so their actual choices were a bit limited.
And even if she had said it, so what? These kids are in middle school, which makes them young enough to make some really poor choices, but also old enough to understand that music boxes aren’t magic. If she’d warned them in advance, what would have happened, really? They would’ve gone “Oh, no, don’t wanna risk it”? Yeah, right. No, they would’ve all laughed and then opened the box anyway.
For that matter, Marcy may have wanted to believe that the box was magic and the string of coincidences was destiny, but until she actually ended up in Amphibia she probably didn’t. Not really. She was only pretending.
Of course, she ought to have told them when she met up with them, and certainly should not have tried tricking them into staying with her, but at that point she’d been heavily manipulated for some time, so… yeah.
I don’t see enough people talking about the fact that Sasha tried to literally commit suicide at the end of the S1 finale. That caught me so far out of left field when it happened.
1. Could a work have some high-realism aspects and some low realism ones, if they were clearly established from the beginning and each aspect stayed consistently on the same level of realism? For example, a fantasy story with both political intrigue and action, where the action would be consistently heroic and low-realism and the intrigue consistently detailed and high-realism?
2. Are some “serious” topics always high-realism? Politics and classism, physical or mental recovery from injury or trauma, the hardships of poverty… Is it possible to cover them in a low-realism way without cheapening them?
1. There’s some wiggle room, the question is if it’s enough for what you’re doing. If you keep the tone consistent you’ll do better, plus fantasy politics probably won’t feel as high realism as real world politics. If you’re using really rigorous historical accuracy in your setting and then the fights are not at all accurate that could still create some clashing I think.
2. The big question here is what exactly does “serious” mean? That comes with a lot of connotations. But let’s take one of your examples. Classism, for instance, is obviously a serious topic. Can a cartoon cover classism in a cartoonish way that nonetheless does the issue justice? Yes, I think it can. It may feel more simplistic, but it can get to the heart the matter while exaggerating some aspects or not including lots of detail. Cartoons often cover topics this way.
It’s also worth noting that dark stories are not necessarily high in realism. A lot of highly stylized creepy and gothic stuff would fall into that category.
I think Doom Patrol on HBO manages this pretty well. Fights and physical dangers are consistently low in realism, while psychological issues, trauma and relationships are much higher.
Avatar the Last Airbender is a great example of this.
The Superhero genre is FULL of low realism tropes, even putting aside the superpowers and the Walking Off Deadly Wounds
While some masks cover the entire face, many leave the lower half uncovered, and a few are tiny domino masks that practically disappear when the hero squints. And some heroes don’t even wear masks. Yet even their closest friends don’t recognize them
The heroes are basically masked vigilantes, yet the law enforcement agencies accept them and even work w/ them, despite not knowing their names or identities. In fact, in some cases the law is modified to accommodate them. And typically the police have no superpowered people of their own and have to rely on these vigilantes
Many superteams have no apparent means of support. They elide over who pays the bills
Superheroes only use their powers to fight crime. They don’t take jobs in transportation, construction, demolitions, security, etc… And tech-based superheroes never sell their tech for public use
Superheroes always encounter crimes in progress, can’t fly across town w/o interrupting a mugging, banks get robbed every week…
Prisons are easier to escape than mandatory work meetings, and rarely hold people as long
And many more
Now, some stories pay lip-service to explain some of this, w/ varying degrees of success. And plenty of stories nowadays “deconstruct” these tropes, deliberately apply a higher level of realism. But the bog-standard super-verse is VERY low realism
This is a good reminder that realism and scientific accuracy aren’t necessarily the same thing; buses and bullets may be as fast and dangerous as in the real world, the superheroes just get to ignore the consequences to some degree. In other words, they are rather large exceptions to what may be an otherwise realistic setting….
“In Amphibia, even the little tadpole fights in battle. »
Not only does the little tadpole fights in battle, she’s the most skilled and bloodthirsty of them all.
In at least one of my unwritten tales, the wings, though probably large enough, aren’t used for flapping, but to generate a repulsive field that keeps the characters aloft and to glide and steer. That kind of gets around whether they’re big enough to actually carry the person. It is, of course, a fairly fantastic setting.
To be fair, even in the real world it’s hard to say, what is or isn’t a fatal wound. People have survived headshots, dropping into concrete from great heights and similar things you think would be deadly.
Granted, they’d all required lots of recovery, but still.
Also, as a side-note, I never would have guessed Yarnsworld of all things is a Fairy-Tale Kingdom. I mean, it doesn’t at first glance appear to have any fable elements, even on a fractured level. I actually had to check from the reddit to discover that it’s folklore inspired.
Non humanoid aliens are not more realistic than humanoid ones.
We have never meet aliens, thus we have 0 data to make predictions.
It could be that humanoid shape is very effective for sapient species, just like many acquatic animals evolve in a fish like shape or a worm like shape.
Humanoid aliens look goofy only because of cheap costumes of effects, you can make them look realistic but it’s expensive.
It’s much easier to not actually show any aliens.
It depends on where a species evolves. It’s probably that an alien species who evolved in a similar environment like humans is humanoid – they will differ depending on what kind of creature they evolved from. If it evolves in a different kind of world, breathing a different gas, perhaps living in water or being able to fly, it will look severely different. I actually have to give Star Wars a bit of respect about that, sneaking in non-humanoid species here and there.
I’d have to agree that we have 0 data on what aliens look like so the whole human looking alien thing being unrealistic is sorta silly. On top of that, within star trek they actually explain it quite well in an episode or two of TNG, where as star wars has many alien species that are essentially exactly like humans but are multiple different species and it’s not explained at all.
At least in star trek there’s an explanation that an ancient species of aliens deliberately seeded a ton of worlds with the building blocks of life after finding they were the first intelligent species to evolve to that level and the galaxy was a rather lonely place for them. Personally I find it extremely intriguing since panspermia is a prevalent theory and this is essentially played upon with the explanation in star trek. The whole concept actually makes one think if you allow yourself to, even with aliens are we more alike than different and what would the first interstellar species do if they found they were essentially alone?
It’s true that we’ve never met aliens.
It’s also true that crabs have evolved multiple times on Earth, but hominids have evolved exactly once, and everything roughly approximating our body shape is fairly closely related to us – monkeys and apes.
So, extrapolating from available data, I for one welcome our new crabby overlords.
Crab people, crab people!
But crabs are not intelligent, humans are.
Certain body structures being so common yet failing to produce intelligence for hundreds of millions of years probably means those structures are not suited for intelligence.
Hominids evolved in humans in a very short timespan.
That could mean something.
Or it could be just a random chance, but that would still leave us with 0 data.
Hominids are quite a bit older than humans per se. Humans have a long line of not-quite-human ancestors (it’s hard to say where exactly to make the cut and new hominids are still being found).
Crabs might or might not be intelligent. We can’t measure intelligence in a species we can’t communicate with. Many animals are much more intelligent than we have given them credit for in the past (mostly because of our ‘humans are no animals’ hubris). We are the only species on the planet who has achieved a high level of detachment from nature through our own means, yet other animals use tools, other animals keep pets or livestock of a sort, other animals have a highly-complicated pack structure, other animals build their own living space. We are not as unique as we’ve thought for a long time. We do not know whether crabs are intelligent. We only know crabs don’t show intelligence in the way we do.
I meant intelligence in the sense “can develop a spacefaring civilization” which is the thing that matters for space opera.
It’s true that there are very intelligent species that can’t do that (cetaceans for example).
Every possible candidate other than hominids has serious roadblocks that can’t be removed without changing the species at a fundamental level.
A spacefaring species must be:
-terrestrial
-social
-long lived
-able to manipulate tools
-able to acces mineral resources.
Maybe it’s possible to exclude one of these, but I doubt that such a species would be a very common occurence.
What would keep intelligent crabs from building spaceships? They have something to grab with and can manipulate things, which is the first step to building tools which is the first step to building very much everything.
Those spaceships would probably look severely different from what we usually imagine, but assuming that only humanoid species can get into space is giving us humans more credit than we deserve.
Reading this discussion makes me want to make a space-faring crab species just because I can.
Also, King Robert, I see your ‘terrestrial species’ and raise my various non-terrestrial species that were the first in their universe to explore it [namely, the star people, who are literal living manifestations of stars–like dryads, but stars instead of trees; the cosmic merfolk that are also kind of squid-like; and the cosmic dragon folk]. The latter two did make home planets as ‘stopping points’, but that came much later.
“…and everything roughly approximating our body shape is fairly closely related to us – monkeys and apes.”
Bipedal omnivorous organisms with hands used to grasp things arose in both the Dinosauria and in Mammalia. Dinosaurs included tails and longer necks, but we’d still recognize them as roughly equivalent to humans. Dinosaurs also had bipedal herbivores with grasping hands. Predators are a bit more complex–they tended to lose their arms.
Several lizards are also capable of bipedal stances. The ones that run on water, for example, run in a bipedal fashion. It wouldn’t take much to evolve a fully-bipedal gate (we aren’t anywhere near the end of evolution).
Non-monkey mammals also can develop bipedalism. Sloths, for example, are roughly bipedal, and could evolve to fully-bipedal fairly easily. A bunch of critters that eat insects evolve to use their hands to manipulate objects (it’s one line of reasoning folks use to argue that Therozinosaurus was an insectovor, though I don’t buy it).
Really it appears that forelimbs are highly adaptable to whatever the organism needs. Assuming a four-limb bauplan (and that’s the real issue with hominid-like aliens), one should expect a tool-using species would develop grasping limbs.
Heads evolved due to motion, as far as we can tell. Any intelligent thing that evolved from something that swam or walked will need a head.
Upright gates are an issue of balance. I imagine you can play with that without breaking biology too much.
A four-limbed organism with a head, no tail, an upright stance, and forelimbs used to manipulate tools would be effectively human-like aliens, or close enough that we can treat them as such for the purpose of TV and movies.
And remember, you’re only discussing individual organisms. If the intelligent thing was a parasite of some sort (and there are ample examples of parasites that take over organisms), it gets MUCH more complicated.
Biology is a bunch of exceptions with just enough holes to hold it together. Give me a critter you want to make, I can probably find existing biological examples of each trait. The only question is whether they can be combined.
Gene Roddenberry can the conclusive reason why live action science fiction movies and television use humanoid aliens. Actors need to, well, act, and too much make and costuming makes that really difficult. So you have to design the aliens to look not human but close enough to them to allow actors to do their job.
Star Trek at least tried to explain why most aliens are humanoids with the TNG episode The Chase. Which I think is a very underrated and not often talked about episode. But even in TOS, you still had the silicon based lifeform the Horta from The Devil In The Dark, and then there’s the Sheliak’s from TNG’s Ensigns of Command.
I can accept human aliens as part of a higher realism setting in live action TV/movies, but not in animated works or written works. Even live action benefits from including puppets, like Farscape did – LOVE Pilot! Or think of Yoda.
But I agree that in written works, aliens that are just humans with blue skin or whatever are ridiculous. Even if we accept the hypothesis that bipedal two-handed beings are most likely to develop spaceflight (which I’m not convinced of, I can easily see spacefaring kraken), there are so many ways that could end up looking that are much different from humans. Look at the different species in the same family that exist even on earth! And those have the same evolutionary ancestors and evolved on the same planet. Or, for maybe a better comparison, how different animals still look that have convergent evolution. But those live in the same environments with the same ecological niche (like ichtyosaurs, dolphins and sharks), not on a different planet with a different sun, with a different atmosphere, different oceans, different climate and different ecosystem and different evolutionary pressures.
So, if the aliens evolved independently of humans on another planet, they will look much more different than a human actor with some face paint and a “forehead”. If you do want human aliens, make them descendants of humans or something like that. But even then, if they just had some human DNA introduced into their genepool billions of years ago, evolution on another planet would have shaped them from there. A billion factors shaped our own evolution and they won’t be the same for aliens so expecting them to look similar to us doesn’t fit higher realism settings. At least not in written works where we can easily describe them as, well, alien, without having to worry about budget.
The fairy tales one is complicated. It depends on perspective.
From the perspective of a king in the late Middle Ages, yeah, fairy tales are unrealistic. Kings and high-ranking lords need to understand political boundaries and whatnot, and giving up half a kingdom probably is really stupid (but not always–it’d be a REALLY good way to dispose of that pesky duke that keeps trying to rebel, or all that swampland that you can’t do anything with).
But from the perspective of a peasant? Remember, we’re talking about people who’ve probably not traveled more than 20-30 miles from where they were born for generations (though pilgrimages were more common than people think), were largely illiterate (tax records were kept in notched sticks for centuries), and who probably couldn’t tell an earl from a king because they’d never seen either. The political boundaries and economic realities they were living in were as fantastic to them as fairy tales are to us. A king could easily say they gave someone half the kingdom when in fact they gave him a manor and a handful of serfs a few hundred miles away, and no one would be the wiser. For that matter, the king could simply kill the guy and claim he gave him fabulous wealth and who would know? Royalty popping up everywhere would be common too–they likely were fairly familiar with the local lord, and fostering was really common, so it’s not unreasonable that they’d have worked alongside someone of fairly high rank (even major nobility often helped with the harvest, there are ample historic examples of even minor kings doing so). When Young Uther, who helped with the harvest and was so good with the horses, suddenly ends up being the son of a duke from another kingdom, it would appear that royalty was popping up out of nowhere. Magical cures would also be common–they didn’t know how medicine worked, and people do get better from even deadly illnesses on their own, and certain plants do have medicinal properties.
I’m not saying that the setting would BE realistic, mind you. I’m saying it would SEEM realistic, because it would agree with what people accepted as real. From their perspective, it’s how the world works.
In the end, I suppose it depends on what story you’re telling. Are you telling a political thriller, or is politics merely part of the setting to the real story? If the latter, fairy tale elements would help realistically portray the views of the people at the time.
(As an aside, racial diversity in such a setting is also easily explained. Merchants traveled a lot further than people think–Norse warriors fought as mercenaries for the Byzantine empire and Rome and China exchanged diplomats–and North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East were always part of Europe’s world. While peasants didn’t travel very much there was a great deal of trade and people of all skin colors wandering around. Not in huge numbers, but they weren’t unknown either. Any study of Catholic saints can’t help but notice that a fair number were black or Middle Eastern.)