Suspension of Disbelief

The crux of any story in any non-modern, real world setting, is suspension of disbelief.  If there is anything at all that isn't exactly how it is in real life, then at some point the viewer/reader/gamer needs to accept that that is the way that works in your world and things will continue to operate within the bounds set unless given some explanation to cause an exception.  If these bounds are ever broken with no explanation, then the viewer/reader/gamer's suspension of disbelief will be broken, the illusion will be shattered, and your content will be seen as the ridiculous nonsense that it is (or maybe I'm just really harsh about my SoD being broken...).

One example of where my SoD has been broken recently is the new J.J. Abrams show, The Revolution.  The premise is that for some reason unknown to everyone, all power has gone out in the world and no one can generate more.  That's pretty fantastical and unrealistic, so it gives the show fairly large bounds within which they can set up the world 15 years later.  I'm fine with not knowing why there's no power, I accept that as a fact, so it would make sense that the ability to manufacture much of what we have today would be difficult or impossible.  My suspension of disbelief is broken when some of the militia has working civil war-era musket ball style guns.  They would have had to manufacture those guns somehow, which begs the question what happened to all the other guns in the world?  Did they stop working?  Are modern bullets really THAT hard to make without electricity?  You still have fire, metal, and gunpowder...do I just not know how bullets are made?  Even if you accept that, I guarantee there will be some technological dissonance for every person.  Some technology that can still function or be adapted with modern knowledge.  It's not like humanity got stupider, just we have no access to electricity.  So in 15 years no one was able to adapt any of our current technology to a powerless world?

Another example is the movie Inception.  In the very beginning of the movie, Leonardo Decaprio explains the rules of the dream world to Ellen Page.  He has set in stone the bounds of the world, so I know what to expect.  Problem is that those rules are very quickly broken and tossed out.  So the world does not work at all how I was told it would, so my SoD is broken.  If they had said that they think the dream world works a certain way and it didn't, then I could have accepted that no one had dove that many layers down (which they established) so the rules changed from what was known.  However, they were very adamant that the world did work that way, so what am I supposed to think when it doesn't work the way it should?

One last example is the anime Samurai 7.  I touched on this in my review, but let me go into more detail.  Throughout the show, it was shown that the seven main Samurai could perform fairly ridiculous feats defying normal laws of physics (swords that could cut through buildings, being able to jump giant robots in a single bound, being able to catch arrows, slice bullets/missiles in half, etc.).  They were very consistent with these rules, so I gladly accepted them as how this world worked.   However, in the final two episodes, they were suddenly able to perform feats that made me wonder how the leader samurai had never won a war (as he claimed).  The engineer samurai converted one of the robot samurai's limbs into a flying ship (sure whatever, ridiculous, but I'll accept it).  The capital ship they are attacking shoots a giant laser beam at them through their own arm.  The enemy robots all blow up in this beam, but somehow this robot limb the samurai are flying can ride on top of the laser beam like a surfboard.  Ummm....what?  It's as if they project an aura of samurai-ness to whatever they touch.  Too ridiculous for me.