RE: On the Suspension of Disbelief
I'm leaving my comment as a reply here because I very much resonate with @michaias points! (and also loved the Ayn Rand references haha! which btw can be said of many of her works. Although there's something to rescue from the way the characters behave, they act truly sociopathic from time to time. But I guess she never really cared for socially accepted behavior anyway, did she?)
I hadn't ever hear of the terms new criticism or Suspension of Disbelief but now that I do I find it that they are really something I align with. My point of view from some time ago is something like anything is believable as long as you go beyond the shapes it takes. Like seeing those shadows on the cave's wall and then closing your eyes and thinking beyond those dark contours...
For example, my dad was always upset that I watched so many animation shows ('cartoons') and played so many videogames. And I understand how people can get lost in the shapes and colors, the bright explosions and cycles of starts and finishes, just to pass time... But there was a point where I started thinking a little beyond. Seeing the works through and gazing upon the people that made them, the times and places from where they came, the processes involved; and could grasp a bit more of the very much human ghost that all works of creativity carry along.
It happened with one of my favourite shows, Adventure Time, which has been highly criticized for its retconning and other inconsistencies. The first seasons weren't even thought as part of a story, but only loose whacky adventures. But then it evolved into something more, and the creators could see its potential to tell whatever stories they wanted to tell. And I could see the show evolving, and I thought it was beautiful... So where I saw a Work with inconsistencies (in many other occasions too), I started seeing now that Work and Inconsistency could not be separated, but instead that the Inconsistency is a intrinsic and fundamental part of the Work. Because it says a lot about the process of those who create such works.
(I think that's partly how @michaias feels about Kojima's storytelling, right?)
Anyways, just wanted to share a bit of my experience with Suspension of Disbelief :D Thanks to this post, my awareness on how I approach Works and my own way of thinking, deepens. I love reading this kind of material: the kind that makes you realize and think about stuff going on in your own head. Words for one's thoughts. It truly makes me feel connected to others and that's something I really value! Thanks a lot, @theironfelix!
UwU ~ Thanks for the compliments and thanks for philosophizing!~
On the Ayn Rand bit, I guess it was more taking these characteristics of Capitalist society that seemed to be churned out more often and trying to say they are the only good... which in a relativistic sense (hypocritical to her philosophy when she called herself an "objectivist"... and which she developed thanks to the education provided by a still Socialist USSR btw...) could make sense... but she's more reifying/deifying these qualities when Capitalist just tends to benefit from those people more often then not.
Suspension of Disbelief I did heard of since childhood; new crits since early highschool but a long time for me to despise this long-held idea of suspending disbelief (especially in its contemporary form unlike past forms).
c:
Dialectical outlook of a work right here, and also one of my favorite TV shows as well. (When I meant externals, they are meant, in a dialectical sense, bearing lil' influence or heavily translated into something else when incorporated into something... after all: the bullet shot at a block of cheese didn't totally do the job nor does it go unscathed. The bullet applies force on the cheese, the cheese has to accommodate for this force by accelerating somewhere in proportion to its mass. The bullet on its part then receives, thanks to Newton's Third Law of Physics, a reaction force back due to it applying force to begin with, which causes massive de-acceleration / acceleration in the other direction.)
{Hue!~)