In my last two posts I discussed the importance of belief, and how setting audience expectations are crucial to maintaining it. But setting expectations requires planning ahead. For episodic stories in particular, it’s impossible to plan for everything:
- An actor on a show could suddenly quit, leaving no time to foreshadow the conflict that kills their character.
- Strange patterns could emerge in the story over time, leaving the storyteller to notice what’s wrong only after it’s too late, e.g., redshirts.
- Something previously established could become problematic later, making a retcon worth the break in consistency.
You may not be able to repair your broken story so it’s as good as new, but a little duct tape can do wonders. Here’s some tips to help your patch job:
Hang a Lampshade on It
The first rule is to acknowledge the break in believability. Instead of hoping no one will notice, deliberately call attention to it. One of the best ways to do this is to make a character comment on it.
Lampshading does two important things:
- It gets your audience to cut you a little slack. If you’ve ever approached a teacher before class and apologized straight up for not doing your homework, you know how effective this is.
- It makes the incident more believable. What’s more realistic to you: a blizzard in Arizona that’s treated like a normal occurrence, or a blizzard in Arizona where everyone is talking nonstop about the crazy weather?
For light and comedic stories, hanging a lampshade could be all you need. Make fun of yourself a little, then pat yourself on the back and go home.
For more serious stories, it’s important to include an audience surrogate in the scene. This is a character who reacts to the unbelievable element in the same way the audience does. The surrogate gives your audience a moment to deal with the unbelief in a way that is sanctioned by the story. Then, when your character moves past the break from reality and onto the good stuff, your audience can move on as well. This won’t spare you from further repairs, but it will minimize the damage.
Lampshade Hanging in Action
In an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dracula takes residence in a castle in Sunnydale. But Sunnydale’s just a small town in California, and it’s never been established that there was a castle anywhere nearby.
The character Riley remarks on this: “I’ve lived in Sunnydale a couple of years now, and you know what I’ve never noticed? … A big, honking castle.”
When Invader Zim was cancelled, the crew was only able to finish one of two episodes they were working on. They chose their Christmas special, but there was a problem – the episode they left out introduced a new sidekick, Minimoose, who was then in the special. To handle the unexpected appearance of a new character, Zim jokingly remarks that Minimoose has been with him throughout the entire show.
Make It a Mystery
While you’re lampshading, avoid making up an elaborate explanation. It’s easy to find something to criticize in last-minute justifications. Instead, make the answer as vague and mysterious as possible. A wise character can tell your audience surrogate that the secret of the unbelievable item was lost with the city of Atlantis, or requires an understanding that only the gods have.
You can also use mystery as a cover when you are GMing. When a player points out an inconsistency you’ve created, just say, “Yes, you’re right…that’s interesting.” This will lead your player to conclude there’s some deep, hidden meaning behind your mistake.
At the very least, making your problem into a mystery will buy you time to come up with a solid explanation. If the unbelievable element isn’t important to the main storyline, the mystery alone could have you covered.
On the other hand, if you make your mystery too interesting, or it’s important to the plot or primary characters, your audience may not feel your story is resolved until they know the answer.
Mystery in Action
If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ve probably noticed that the Klingon race changes dramatically between The Original Series and The Next Generation. Star Trek writers were able to ignore this until an episode of Deep Space 9, when crew members go back in time and witness the famous episode, The Trouble With Tribbles, from The Original Series. One of the crew that travels back is a Klingon, Worf, which allows the other characters to ask him about it:
Worf: They are Klingons… and it is a long story.
O’Brien: What happened? Some kind of genetic engineering?
Bashir: A viral mutation?
Worf: We do not discuss it with outsiders.
Then Enterprise ruined everything by providing a convoluted explanation that involved both genetic engineering and viral mutation.
Use Irrational Actors
If you’re dealing with a major fracture in a serious story, you’ll need to justify the break eventually. When you are forced to explain something that doesn’t make any sense, keep in mind that people don’t always make sense. In any good story, the world or circumstances have been influenced by imperfect characters.
In speculative fiction, those people could be very very powerful. Perhaps there’s a weather god who won’t summon the rain until everyone wears their hat upside down on the same day. Perhaps someone makes an error when programming the ship’s computer, leaving it unable to translate alien speech until life support is flipped off and on again.
Whatever the unbelievable item is, ask yourself if you can explain it via stupidity, insanity, or incompetence.
Irrationality in Action
The movie Galaxy Quest is based on the concept that aliens, watching a Star Trek like show, think it’s real and actually create the spaceship based on what they see in the episodes. Then the aliens bring in the actors to operate the ship under the assumption that they are real crewmen. In one scene, actors Gwen and Jason are racing through the ship when they encounter a corridor full of stomping columns and other mechanical menaces (watch it here).
Gwen: What is this thing? There’s no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway!
Jason: Gwen—
Gwen: No! I mean, we shouldn’t have to do this! It makes no logical sense! Why is it here?
Jason: Because it’s on the television show.
Gwen: Well, forget it! I’m not doing it! This episode was badly written!
Build on What Exists
This is Sanderson’s Third Law, and it applies anytime you are developing your world or your story. Instead of adding a novelty to explain something unbelievable, use the places, events, and rules you’ve already established. Fill in details that were left mysterious. Make everything more nuanced and complex. If you’re lucky, just by adding more depth to your world and story, you’ll figure out how they could have created your unbelievable element.
If that doesn’t work, put aside all your half-baked ideas and focus on the simple facts you’ve established in the story so far. Pretend you’ve already foreshadowed your explanation in these facts, but then you forgot your plans for the big reveal and all the clues you left about it. Read into the events at the beginning of your story to rediscover those clues, and extrapolate the ending.
You’ll know you’ve hit the jackpot when you find a explanation that naturally ties together disparate elements in the story. If it explains mystery item one and mystery item two, that will lend it a lot of credibility. Don’t force the connection by creating elaborate scenarios. Just by providing the bare essentials of mystery item one, mystery item two should make more sense.
Building in Action
The writers of the show Lost stuffed it with as many hooks as they could, without knowing the answer to the mysteries themselves. If you’ve watched through the show, you’d probably agree that they never came up with a great explanation – but the fans did. They looked at what there was already evidence for, and came up with a theory that the characters had been in limbo since the beginning of the show. It fit what was already established: the story started with a plane crash that the cast somehow survived. Strange miracles occurred immediately after, and the characters definitely had unfinished business to keep them from moving on. If the writers had made it part of the story, they might have been able to carry on with none the wiser.
Putting It Together
I’ll show you how these tips can work together by doing a sample repair job on one of my favorites animes: Sands of Destruction (also called World Destruction). The anime centers around a mysterious object known as the Destruct Code. Everyone knows it has the power to destroy the world, but no one knows where it came from or how to operate it.
The Destruct Code isn’t the problem – it’s hard to quibble with something that’s so mysterious. The problem is that the world it’s in makes no sense. The oceans are filled with sand instead of water, but somehow regular ocean creatures live in this sand, including whales and jellyfish. The main inhabitants of the world are divided between men and beast-men. Beast-men can look like any animal, or part human and part animal. But they are one race, and humans are another. If that isn’t enough, there are four continents that each exhibit one of the four seasons – permanently. The fall continent has trees that are forever losing their leaves.
Now I’m going to use my four tips to show how this could have been repaired.
First, I would lampshade by picking an intellectual character to question the way the world works. In this case, Naja, the half-human, half-beast-man. There’d be little snippets of dialogue in which he asks where sand jellyfish get their water, or how it is that trees on the fall continent still have their leaves. I wouldn’t want to give the audience an answer right away, so his knuckle-headed companion, Rhi’a, would respond with circular logic along the lines of “it’s got electrolytes.” Doing this repeatedly would buy time and build up the mystery, preparing for a big explanation at an important moment.
At the end, that important moment comes – there is a character who can actually explain the world. He would tell the cast that the world was created by a god who didn’t know what she was doing. She was just a kid, and this was her first world. As a result, the world can’t sustain itself – it’s maintaining its form by drawing in energy from outside. The god got older and moved on to other things, but she didn’t want to just get rid of the world because it had sentimental value. So she maintained the energy supply, but also created the Destruct Code. When the inhabitants of the world are done, it will turn out the lights.
Using an irrational but powerful actor like this bypasses the need to scientifically justify every little thing that’s broken. But what really makes this work is that it also explains the Destruct Code, a mystery that’s central to the story.
When you put your repairs together, use the tone of the work as your guide. Good repairs stay consistent with the rest of the story, minimizing the interruption to the audience. If it’s a campy story like Buffy, campy jokes will be the best fit. If it’s a wacky story, it can have wacky explanations. If it leans heavily on science, you’ll want something scientific. No matter how you explain it, don’t rush. Using a mysterious lampshade will let you craft your repair job carefully.
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Well, maybe it’s time to edited the story and see if i put enough “it’s got electrolytes” and then a great explanation.
Btw, in these sentences [i]”The main inhabitants of the world are divided between men and beast-men. […] But they are one race, and humans are another.”[/i] why do you think that is some unbelievable element? I saw this in some show/books that I really don’t mind
Hi Sara.
What bothers each person will be unique, but the big issue with the beast men vs humans in this story is that the beast men as a group have an enormous variety. They can be anything from someone who looks human but has cat ears and a tail to someone who looks like an alligator standing upright. Humans have more in common with some beastmen than beastmen have with each other. This is an issue for a couple reasons:
1) It’s incredibly human-centric. One race is human, the other race is everyone else lumped together. Being human is a matter of purity, if you have even a little beast you aren’t human anymore. This would actually make sense as a cultural distinction if humans were considered superior and they were racist against beastmen, but in this setting beastmen are the privileged race, and humans are considered lowly.
2) It feels arbitrary. I discuss this more in my post on rational magic systems, but when you make up categories for your spec fic world, you don’t want them to feel “made up,” you want them to feel like they naturally occurred.
I hope that clears it up.
Exactly right Chris!
Sara, think of an extremely similar world where we don’t have Beast-Men and Humans, instead we have had Beast-Men and Catfolks.
In that world, Catfolks would be 100% cat people. BeastMen would be everything else, including 100% dog people, half-elephants half-cats, 99% cat mixed with 1% of anything else, or even … 100% human looking people would also be “east M’en”,. After all, humans are only a variant of money/primates lines, right ? Just a hairless ape!
So we can easily how dumb that kind of artificial separation is. The ONLY way the split can work is if the split is maintained artificially for some reason (racism, magic, whatever), which MUST be addressed in the show.
My favorite Lampshade: E1s2 of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
“I feel like we’re been sitting on this bench for mounths.”
“We’ve been waiting for so long, that Sunny starts to look less like a baby and more like a toodle.”
I agree that’s a great lampshade!
Another fun one is in H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. He reused his creature design from an earlier sci-fi short story for the martians. The narrator, upon first seeing the martians, thinks to himself “weirdly, they looked just like the creatures in a sci-fi short story about the far future of mankind that I read earlier”, before going on to describe what they actually looked like.
I wish there had just been a whole bunch of Klingon subgroups with no explanation. TOS ones, TNG ones, the weird Discovery kind.
In fact when a bunch of Klingon lords meet in Discovery by hologram conference call there should have been every type of Klingon ever seen before. Even the really narrow ridge guys only seen in the first movie.
I’m going to start off by saying this article is quite good. The list of methods of fixing story elements that don’t seem to make sense are useful, and the examples illustrate them well – except I feel there are special issues with the last one, the one about Sands of Destruction. I don’t wish to be boastful, and I feel uncertain about this, but I feel illustrating the problem might help clarify repairing even more.
So, the three unbelievable story elements of Sands of Destruction you chose to identify in this article are: 1. aquatic creatures can live in sand instead of water 2. humans are treated as distinct from beast-men despite some beast-men being more different from each other than they are from a human 3. on the “fall season” continent, trees always lose their leaves but still have them. The basic issue with 1 and 3 is that they seem to be fundamental parts of this fantasy world, so I think many people would actually be fine with them, just as they’re fine with other fantasy worlds where magic is an important part of the geography. Another way of seeing this is: how do they compare to the other examples given earlier? (I am going to admit that I have not watched any of these shows, including Sands of Destruction. Hopefully I’m not making too many errors).
Audiences generally don’t expect castles or important new characters to suddenly appear out of nowhere. (I suppose if in the Buffy example, there had been previously established magic to hide big objects/locations, that could have worked as a more immediate explanation, for savvy viewers at least. This also illustrates how expectations could be changed if a certain magic is shown as a big part of the world). Nor do they expect an established species with a certain appearance to suddenly change appearance (unless they’re shapeshifters or similar, but Klingons are never shown to be such). Tying into this is how the lampshades suggested for Sands of Destruction have issues of their own – and may even seem more unrealistic than the original elements themselves for some viewers! (This does admittedly depend on how much scientific knowledge is present in that world in-universe, which I admit I don’t know. But general fantasy worlds tend to not have anyone in them who knows much about the scientific method).
1. Are there any bodies of water in which creatures such as whales and jellyfish live as well (you said oceans had sand instead of water, so I thought there weren’t)? If not, why would anyone find it odd that such creatures lived in sand instead of water? That’s an expectation we have in our own world by seeing where those creatures live, which shouldn’t apply to a fantasy world where those creatures have always lived in sand. People of that world might find such creatures living in and breathing water unbelievable. Even if there are such bodies, how would it seem any more strange that some creatures can live in water or sand than that some creatures can live in both water and air in the real world? The only way, IMO, it would seem odd is if science in general (such as biology and mechanics) had advanced enough that scientists could tell that the sand jellyfish and whales don’t conform to the laws of mechanics that would prohibit them swimming through sand (there are actually some real-life creatures that can do that, but I think they require special adaptations to physically allow it), and that the sand jellyfish should have dried up and died. Okay, it would seem strange if jellyfish were losing water much slower than other similar things do in other contexts, so maybe that in particular could have been noticed a bit sooner?
(And if science had advanced to that point, scientists wouldn’t just throw up their hands and declare that the world doesn’t make sense. They would try to study how exactly these things work, like scientists in the real world do whenever they notice a seeming anomaly that doesn’t conform with known laws. For instance, if you artificially created a large body of sand far away from an ocean with similar sand, could sand whales and jellyfish transported there still survive and move? Does the specific type of sand have any effect? What do we see when we dissect them? When we observe them close-up, perhaps even with video or special sensors if those are developed?)
3. Yeah, it’s going to be a bit similar for this one. Let’s assume that it is known that both sunlight and leaves are necessary for plants to grow in other contexts. However, I believe farming should have shown that water and soil are also necessary for plants. Why couldn’t people believe that these specific trees only need those and don’t need light? Admittedly, your question seems to be more about how leaves can stay on a continent where they constantly fall. By necessity, the leaves (or maybe even trees with many leaves themselves?) must reappear at some point, even if it’s a sudden magical appearance or teleportation. People would probably watch for when the leaves regrow/reappear. If they don’t do that when anyone is looking, there would be theories about it (do gazes have power? are fall trees sentient and embarrassed to change when someone’s looking at them? :) ) If technology had gotten to the point where such devices exist, videos and other sensors would be used to check if they can detect the leaves regrow/reappear when no human or beast-man is around. There would probably also be attempts to transplant trees/seedlings to different continents to see if it’s the location or the kind of tree that matters for their growth. The bigger issue is arguably how four continents can each have a different sort of climate (and yes, scientists would try to study that too if they existed there).
2. This is… a bit of a different issue, less about actual physical phenomena then, as you point out, arbitrary classifications. Therefore, the best solution might be to make it seem less arbitrary. Could the interbreeding of humans and beast-men, as you implied with Naja’s heritage, do this? If a human paired with a beast-man always produced children with partially human features, but two beast-men together didn’t necessarily have children with so many shared features, that would suggest that humans are separate from beast-men – or that they’re a special type of beast-man with unusual heredity rules. But it’s not impossible that many people decided on the former in this world. There are other possible features, perhaps, and two separate ideas I thought of. One is that humans are dominant and have enforced a bigoted “purity” standard on the beastmen, as Chris Winkle described in her comment. This could work, but may require more changes if in the original show, beastmen were dominant. As the people at Mythcreants have pointed out, prejudice is all too often done badly. Another is that there is no distinction between humans and beastmen (presumably, a different word would be used for both). This removes the prejudice element (mind you, I believe such things can sometimes be well-done in-story, and I’m not sure how it is in the original anime), but I also don’t know how much it played a role in the original story.
With all this said, I think your proposed idea of an inexperienced deity creating the world and the Destruct Code is actually pretty cool! (The Sands of Destruction wiki apparently says it’s canon that the Destruct Code was created by a deity, but for a somewhat different reason – to reset the world before it is entirely flooded by sand). I also agree that it helps not have to explain all the scientific issues. I know all my discussion about scientists might therefore seem pointless, but my point was that it generally doesn’t make sense for people to find things they’ve grown up with nonsensical, at least when compared to a world they have no means of knowing about. And even if there were scientists who noticed there were some things that seemed to clash, not all of them would just ask someone else these questions, but would try to find out themselves, even if they don’t succeed. So basically, the Sands of Destruction example works well to illustrate the “irrational actors” and “building” tools, but not really to illustrate “lampshading” – and therefore loses the part of the “mystery” that lampshading would enhance. I suspect a better example to show all four types might have actually involved a world that’s more similar to our own (such as urban fantasy set on Earth), which allows characters newly introduced to weird phenomena to have our reality as a reference point.
The problems I see with those elements can’t really be explained awy like that. Let’s have a look at them.
1. Aquatic creatures living in sand. First of all, yes, animals can live in sand – a lot do in the different deserts of our planet, too. But moving in sand and moving in water is different. An animal built for moving in water, like a whale or a jellyfish, will have a hard time moving in sand. Dune’s sandworms are believable, because worms move in earth or sand. “The Future is Wild”s land-living octopuses make sense to a degree as even today octopuses can move short ways across land without having breathing problems, they could evolve from that. On a world with sand instead of water, the animals living in the sand wouldn’t look like jellyfish or whales, they’d be more alien (and more interesting).
2. If you put humans in one category and all ‘beast-men’ into another, you make humans something special. They’re better and more important or you would also make sure to introduce all different types of beast-men. Why not have a few less and tell about the humans (ape-people), the cat-people, the wolf-people, the shark-people, and the vulture-people?
3. Yes, in a fantasy world, seasons don’t have to work like they do here. Yet, the time of the year when the leaves fall is a specific one and usually not that long (depends on how many different types of trees we’re talking about, of course). It would be one thing if trees did have their cycle of growing, using, and throwing off the leaves independently, but a tree won’t go through the energy it needs to grow a leaf, just to throw it off again. Having one season only is always weird to a degree, but there are areas of earth where seasons are not that distinguished or look far different from elsewhere. It’s the specific type of season that makes it weird. Constant summer is the easiest one to work with, since you can easily have an agriculture in that. Constant winter works well if you want wastes of sort, but no sand – it’s just a constant waste of snow. Constant spring and constant fall seem the strangest, because both are more transient seasons than summer and winter. They lead from summer to winter and vice versa. And even in fall, the time at which the trees lose their leaves is just a rather short one, it’s not all there is to fall. That would be like equating spring in Japan only with the cherry blossom bloom.
I mean, I know there are scientific issues with the world. I said as much in my post – real-life physical laws would prevent jellyfish and whales from swimming through sand, and trees wouldn’t be able to have their leaves falling all the time. (Your point that leaves don’t fall all the time in autumn is a new one, but I’ll just add that to the list of scientific inaccuracies). My point was specifically that the lampshading might not make sense because the in-universe characters wouldn’t have this real-world frame of reference.
(I agree with you on the beastman thing. While it’s not quite a scientific issue, it’s still a problem with the original setting. I specifically noted that to fix the issue, either humans could consider themselves superior to beastmen and they imposed that arbitrary category, or humans could be just part of the beast-man category. My suggestion for a non-arbitrary difference was merely in case it required the fewest changes to the story. But I personally think just treating humans the same as the rest of the beast-men, as you suggested, would otherwise be the best option).
Basically, if the scientific mindset hadn’t really developed, people would just accept the sand creatures and eternal seasons as part of their world, as they didn’t know the scientific issues. They could certainly have questions about them, but there would be loads of questions about everything else: “Why is the sky blue?” “Why do we need air to breathe?” “What is fire?” and all the questions humans have pretty much always had in the real world (and which led to the development of science), and there wouldn’t be an in-universe reason to separate those different types of questions.
But what if they did have scientific knowledge? That would allow them to realize that the sand jellyfish and whales, and the fall trees, aren’t obeying the same physical laws that other things seem to do. However, we’ve had plenty of times in the real world when we’ve seen things that don’t conform with the current understanding. The strange experimental results that ultimately led to the development of relativity and quantum theory are prime examples. In that case, scientists don’t just give up and say science is useless – they try to find a new framework to incorporate these anomalies. Yes, they may not succeed, but they will try.
So, again, my point was certainly not that the example was completely useless. For the watchers in the real world, those elements don’t make sense and require explanations, which the proposed changes do provide. My main issue is with how the characters in the story would react. The characters in the story do not have that real-world framework. It is, in fact, unbelievable if they declared the things about their own world in the way that the “lampshading” example stated.
That was why I suggested that an Earth setting with fantastical elements would work better (such as urban fantasy). On modern-day Earth, we do in fact have a scientific framework in which magic has been shown not to exist. If magic suddenly appeared and some things started to behave contrary to established science, statements by characters that these specific elements don’t make sense do, in fact, make sense in this context. Ultimately, it’s less about the science itself and more about the worldviews that characters would have based on their environments and that shape their reactions.
It’s not about people realizing that sand whales and trees with ever-falling leaves are not scientific correct. It’s the other way around: they should not exist in the first place, because even a fantasy world has some kind of internal logic to it. It’s not about people in that world questioning the sand whales. In fantasy, you can always paste ‘magic’ across such questions if nothing else works. Magic, too, follows rules, but they can be completely different. A tree with magical properties could shed leaves all year round and nobody would bat an eye about it.
For someone from such a world, these animals simply exist. They must be in accordance to the natural laws (or magic ones or others), otherwise they wouldn’t exist. We do not look at something that has existed for millions of years and say ‘that’s unnatural.’ For every scientist on that world, whales swim in sand and trees lose their leaves all year. That is not the point. The point is that it’s horrid world-building.
Instead of simply taking water animals from earth and putting them in sand, for instance, the author could have looked at sand-dwelling animals or made up something completely new to populate the sand oceans. Simply using whales and saying ‘they live in sand now’ is just a bad way of building up the world. I can say ‘ruffins live in sand and breach the surface every hour to take a breath’ in my world. But if I then describe the ‘ruffins’ as regular sperm whales, for instance, people will get annoyed and not find my world believable.
Those are good points, actually. I’m not saying the sand jellyfish or whales, or ever-falling leaves, were the best ideas. But I thought that in this specific scenario, we were working on the constraint that these elements were already present and could not be removed. After all, what Chris described in the example was not removing these elements, but eventually using a deity to explain them. And the whole point of the original article seemed to be about what to do if you run into an unbelievable element that you can’t just remove for whatever reason. Perhaps in this case, they actually could be, but I’m trying to go by the article’s original purpose.
So yeah, this is a fantasy world, and we basically are going to have to use (potentially divine) magic for these elements if we have to keep them. I think I see you have a point about the sand jellyfish and whales – that it’s just lazy worldbuilding to have water animals in sand instead of developing animals actually adapted for it. The issue is that while I’m not 100% sure, I suspect it’s possible that there is no scientifically plausible way to have large sand-swimming animals. (Sorry, sandworms!) There are animals that can “swim” through sand, but IIRC, they are all quite small – for instance, the sandfish (which is actually a lizard) is less than a foot long. I haven’t been able to find much information on size limits, but well, sand is really different from water. It’s abrasive, hard to breathe in, and so on, so it suggests to me that there is a size limit.
So, if there is no scientifically plausible way at all to have large sand swimmers, then we have to resort to magic – and if we are resorting to that, putting jellyfish and whales in sand is not actually much more of a plausibility issue than putting any other large creature in. I agree there’s still the issue of it not being very creative. Fantasy often uses creatures based on real-world ones, but even with magic, there’s no reason it has to be that way. It’s fantasy, so why not turn your creativity to the max and think of something truly bizarre? Or perhaps work out how magic might affect speculative evolution?
But yeah, while this is genuinely interesting, I think we’ve moved a bit off the original topic (unless I’m misunderstanding what the original point of this article was, which is possible). Lampshading was a tactic Chris mentioned in the original article, and I was suggesting that it is harder to use it specifically as a tool for maintaining the suspension of disbelief in a full-on fantasy world than in a setting closer to real life. (This also reduces, but certainly does not eliminate, the effectiveness of mystery, but irrationality and building are as or even more useful).