Every week there’s a new monster (MOTW) where all the evidence for outsiders disappears, or there’s the mythology where the government is covering it up.
I’m a huge skeptic in almost everything, but if I saw what she saw, I would clearly believe. That’s plenty of evidence for me, and I’m an actual scientist (well PhD engineer. I definitely did real science in school though)
The shit’s clearly real in their universe.
(Sorry, just been watching the first season of the x-files for the past few weeks)
The thing is, what we’ve dubbed “realistic” is things that are consistent with previous observation, and our best models of reality. We’ve so far never once, let alone frequently, seen incontrovertible proof of life from Extra Terrestrial origin, we never see real life vampires and when people die they tend to stay dead and eventually rot rather than becoming ghosts. Because of that, we consider phenomena that mostly follows this trend to be “realistic” or rather just, real.
Sometimes there’s things that were simply not observed or not accounted for in our models before, but we’ll experience them in a way that is frequent enough or resistant enough to being explained through existing models, that we have to update our understanding of reality. After that future experiences with phenomena that are explainable through the lens of our experiences and latest models of reality become the new “realistic”. From that, we can’t really live in an “unrealistic” universe because realistic is just whatever is “real” and when we find something provably new, it becomes the new “real”. If vampires started popping up all over the place or even just one was discovered and provably had different biology from human beings that enabled the ability to live eternally or suck blood through specially adapted teeth, then ultimately that would just become normal. Until they do though, it’s in general best to reckon using our collective experience and understanding of reality which mostly precludes vampires or premonitions as possibilities.
Fair enough. I meant that there’s two "realistic"s out there. There’s what’s scientifically proven, and there’s what pop-culture has led us to believe; they overlap but the latter is significantly less required to tell the truth.
How childlike are teenagers? More than you think thanks to Dawson Casting. Why do Aluminum Christmas Trees exist in the Peanuts universe? Because that was an actual ugly fad back in the 1960s. Why do cars always explode when they crash in movies? Because it looks cool and reminds people that the Ford Pinto was a death trap and so could their Tesla be.
Pop-Culture is art, not science, but most of us (myself included) take it for granted that what is and isn’t fictional is easy to spot because real people sit on chairs but only action movie heroes can survive jumping out a plate glass window to escape an explosion. Sadly, fake news exists because fiction has never been 100% clear on what is fake in movies and books, and since 2016 neither is reality for some odd reason (Life imitates art, go figure).
If every Aluminum Christmas Tree was just a wry commentary on the commercialization of a Christian holiday, World War One would never have happened. If the poles for traffic lights weren’t designed to shear off and fall to the ground if a car drives into them, there would be a lot more road fatalities, yet people deride Grand Theft Auto, American Truck Simulator, Crossout and other games with drivable vehicles and destructible environments for unrealistic traffic lights that you can push over by driving into.
Science, as accurate as it is due to only trusting the verified and being willing to de-verify whatever turns out to be misinformed, is not the default coding language of our brain; We are usually very emotionally-motivated, so people believe in everything from a flat earth conspiracy to “science is my one true god because my parents abused me and were constantly going on about Jesus and sinners to cover up that they were bad people, therefore all religions must be evil” to “capitalism is inherently good because I saw my neighbours dragged into the night to never be heard from again by the Soviet secret police” (for the record, I hate both systems but monarchy and anarchy don’t appeal to me one bit either so… eh).
So yeah, tl;dr, take it from a fiction writer that people will often believe anything that speaks to them, and therefore our definitions of “realistic” were quite different.
I really did mean “realistic-looking, but not reality” as much as you meant “scientific consensus”, and I get why that’s easy to confuse… sometimes I just forget when posting on social media that most people don’t have a good memory or the desire to memorize things from fiction as disparate as Aboriginee mythology, Hypnopspace Outlaw, the Backrooms, Paprika and Inception, all well enough to remember every single one of them (and many others) involves dream magic/super-tech of some sort. My apologies for forgetting you probably don’t write fiction for a living.
That was really all quite interesting this was not where I thought you were going with your comment that I replied to at all. I think actually the down votes might speak to a similar confusion.