idk who needs to hear this but the way people flatten Danse drives me up the fucking wall. I mean, it drives me up the wall that most characters in fandom get flattened and treated, but the fact that Danse has hyper-visibility is another layer.
Every time fandom does the whole “i’m an abomination” thing but refuses to actually deal with any of the bodily horror, masculinity issues, or purity-culture brainworms the Brotherhood baked into him?? Like hello?? That’s literally the point of his arc. It’s not just identity angst! The man is having a full-body existential crisis and y’all keep treating it like he just needs a warm bath and some validation and sole survivor pussy (or bussy) or what have you.
And the Brotherhood stuff…oh my god.
People love the “they were my family and now they hate me ” angle but completely skip over the fact that Danse spent decades POTENTIALLY enforcing their ideology. He wasn’t an innocent bystander. He believed in it. He lived it. He helped uphold it. And that’s actually interesting! That’s human! That’s where the story is! Whether or not he's a replacement.
But no, every time you bring this up someone shows up like “he didn’t mean it!! he was just sad!! he was programmed to do it!!” Be serious. For one second be serious.
Danse’s arc only works if he has to confront the fact that the things he believed in hurt people. If he has to unlearn it. If he still slips sometimes. If he’s uncomfortable. If he’s wrong. And he did believe them, that is not in question and you cannot walk that back.
But the uwu--good vibes only crowd does not want him to struggle with any of that because then he’s not a Perfect Sad Boy anymore, he’s a complicated person with messy beliefs and internalized shit he needs to dismantle.
And apparently that’s too much for them. Like usual. *sighs and exits stage left*.
I had to explain suspension of disbelief to someone recently. Not in an academic context. Not as part of some obscure narratology deep-dive where you'd expect to haul out the terminology. As a concept. As in, I had to explain that it was a real thing, with a name, that fiction has depended on since fiction existed. I then had to sit with the fact that I'd had to do that at all, which was its own particular flavor of psychic damage.
That conversation is what finally made me write this, because it confirmed something I've been stewing over for a while: we are losing basic craft vocabulary. Not in some slow, graceful erosion — in a landslide, and the way we talk about fiction is getting measurably worse because of it. People are not engaging with stories anymore. They are performing autopsies on them, and they are somehow still getting the cause of death wrong.
If you've been around my blog for any length of time, you already know I talk about this constantly. Critical thinking, media literacy, art history, the works. I am not positioning myself as the authority on fiction. What I am is someone who has spent a long time studying, consuming, and making art across mediums, centuries, and several increasingly unhinged academic papers, and I have gotten tired enough of watching foundational concepts vanish from the conversation that I'm going to start putting them back. Field notes. That's all this is.
So. Suspension of disbelief.
The term comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817, though the tradition of thinking about belief in fiction — what scholars call 'belief talk' — goes back to Aristotle and has never really stopped evolving.
The idea is not complicated: if a writer puts enough human truth into a story — real emotion, real stakes, real psychological texture — the reader will voluntarily set aside their skepticism about the implausible parts. That word is doing all the heavy lifting. Voluntarily. The reader chooses to believe. The writer earns that choice. It is not a trick and it is not a con. It is a contract. The story says meet me halfway, and the audience says fine, but make it worth the walk.
Suspension of disbelief is not "this must be realistic." It is "this feels coherent enough that I am willing to emotionally buy in."
Nobody promised anyone a logistics simulation.
Now — and this matters — the contract does not look identical across mediums. Film has the advantage of image and sound working simultaneously; a score, a camera angle, a performance can accomplish in seconds what prose needs entire paragraphs to construct. Games have agency, which is functionally a cheat code for immersion, because the player is far too occupied with the immediate business of not dying to conduct a thorough audit of the supply chain. Prose, meanwhile, has what I'd argue is the most powerful tool of the three: interiority. Direct, unmediated access to psychology. To the full contradictory mess of a person thinking, wanting, rationalizing, and lying to themselves in real time. That kind of intimacy is an enormous deposit into the trust account, and it is why character-driven fiction can survive structural imperfections that would be fatal in any other medium.
The principle, however, is the same everywhere: the story makes promises, and the audience agrees to believe for as long as those promises hold.
Here is what people miss when they flatten this into a binary of "it broke" or "it didn't." It is not a switch. It is a bank account. Genre sets your opening balance. Every choice the creator makes either deposits or withdraws. And the currency is not realism.
It's trust.
Take Fallout. Two-hundred-year-old Salisbury Steak sits on a shelf in pristine condition. Fancy Lads Snack Cakes have survived nuclear holocaust with their packaging intact. Blamco Mac and Cheese waits patiently in a kitchen cabinet as though the apocalypse were a minor inconvenience it chose not to acknowledge. Nobody — and I cannot stress this enough — is running a functioning agricultural system in the Commonwealth. If you approach this setting as a logistics problem, the entire world collapses before the player has finished leaving Vault 111.
But Fallout is not asking you to believe in its food distribution network. It is asking you to buy into the aesthetic: a retrofuturist satire of American consumer culture so grotesquely resilient that even nuclear annihilation could not kill the branding. The preserved food is not a plot hole. It is the thesis. The tone is internally consistent, the satire is coherent, and frankly, the Blamco Mac and Cheese is performing more thematic labor than most prestige dramas manage across an entire season. You do not need the agriculture to make sense. The world has already told you what it is. If you weren't listening, that is not the story's failure.
Now consider Jurassic Park. The raptors are too large. The dilophosaurus did not, in fact, possess the charming neck frill, nor was it in the habit of spitting venom with what can only be described as theatrical conviction. The entire premise of the T-Rex's motion-based vision is scientifically dubious at best. People have been cataloguing these inaccuracies for thirty years, and I need those people to understand that they have entirely missed the point.
Not because accuracy is irrelevant. Because immersion is the operative standard here, and Spielberg met it. The trembling water in the glass. The pacing. The sound design. The escalating, sickening sense that hubris has purchased itself a very expensive catastrophe. You are not conducting a paleontological compliance review while watching that film. You are thinking about whether those children are going to survive. The internal logic is airtight: a rich man mistook control for mastery, the systems failed, and nature reasserted itself. The dinosaurs do not need to be correct. The story needs to be coherent. It is.
Then there is Stephen King, and I say this as someone who has been personally and repeatedly victimized by the man's body of work for the better part of her adult life: he gets dragged for his endings, and he frequently deserves it. IT. The Stand. Under the Dome. The catalogue of grievances is extensive and not entirely unjustified.
And yet people read a thousand pages of Stephen King and then immediately pick up the next one as though they have learned nothing at all.
Because his character work deposits so much into that bank account that by the time the ending wobbles, it barely matters. That is prose doing what only prose can do — you have been living inside these characters' heads for eight hundred pages. You know how they think. You know what they fear. You know the specific small humiliations and private losses that made them who they are. By the time the cosmic clown situation devolves or the dome turns out to be what it turns out to be, you were already in. Emotional investment subsidized structural imperfection, and you will do it again next book, because you are a fool who apparently enjoys this. As am I. We are not here to discuss my personal failings.
That is suspension of disbelief working exactly as intended.
The mechanism is not accuracy. It is investment.
And here is where I want to extend some grace, because I understand why people have started engaging with fiction like hostile witnesses at a deposition. I do it too. I catch myself doing it more than I'd like to admit. We live in a culture where credulity has genuine consequences — where "I believed something that turned out to be false" is not a harmless embarrassment but a material danger. The reflex to fact-check, to interrogate, to distrust the frame — that is a survival skill in 2026. Of course it bleeds into fiction. Of course people bring the same adversarial posture to a novel that they bring to a headline. The muscle is the same. They cannot turn it off.
But fiction is not journalism, and reading fiction well is its own skill. It requires the ability to modulate your expectations across genres — to understand that a retrofuturist satire, a gothic romance, a courtroom procedural, and a film about a billionaire's dinosaur park are not making the same contract with you. They do not succeed or fail by the same criteria. I spent years studying art history, and one of the first things the discipline teaches you is to read a work within the terms it is actually setting. A medieval painting does not fail because the perspective is "wrong." The artist was not attempting to simulate three-dimensional space for the eventual approval of someone on the internet. They were mapping spiritual hierarchy. The contract was theological, not literal. A Baroque altarpiece is not bad because the anatomy is exaggerated — the exaggeration is devotional. It is the point.
You learn, if you are paying attention, to ask what a work is doing on its own terms. Not whether it would survive cross-examination by the most determined pedant in the room.
Which brings me to the irony I find most exhausting. The same people who insist on total procedural fidelity in fiction — who will derail an entire discussion to point out that a speculative world's legal system does not perfectly mirror real-world municipal code — are often producing the least coherent critique in the conversation. "That's not how it works" is not analysis. It is an observation dressed up as insight. It tells you nothing about whether the story succeeds on its own terms, whether the tone holds, whether the characters earn their arcs, whether the thematic architecture is sound. It is the critical equivalent of checking someone's bibliography without reading the paper.
A story does not break because it departs from reality. It breaks when it departs from itself.
Fiction is not asking for submission. It is asking for trust.
gather round children, I am going to tell you the story of when I worked at one of the most 'progressive' LGBTQIA+ organizations in the united states as a front line crisis worker, and said organization frequently misgendered me, was constantly ableist, straight up committed tax fraud, money laundering, and forced me out after I requested accommodations all while I was a union organizer. So if I am quiet around pride, it's because I think most peoples idea of praxis is entirely white washed and fucked and I'm not saying you can't enjoy pride, but as a disabled person who is high risk, I have never felt safe truly safe in the 'community' by being both disabled and incapable of transitioning in a way they find meaningful, and by being LOUDLY bisexual. anyway, that's the tldr version, because if I see one more 'ur not queer enough if ur married to a man' or some version thereof. i will in fact, commit arson in game.
why of course im buying a mentats themed organizer even though all my other pill organizers never work for me because i am goblin incarnate cannot remember anything swiss cheese brain, but it's ORANGE MENTATS, so every time i see it I will think of the blorbos <3
okay Fallout fic writers & readers (even if ur not, feel free to add ur two cents), organizational polling hour. here's my setup: my pre-war stuff lives in a fairly structured AO3 series (book one, book two, linear-ish). but my post-war stuff is way less linear — i've got a verse name for it but no strict "books," it jumps around the timeline, and my current move is to now just drop an author's note at the top saying when each piece is set. imo cramming it all into one giant multichapter fic reads as cluttered as hell. but for non-linear, multi-arc, multi-timeline work — how do YOU prefer to structure or read it? 👇
How do you structure your work/fics?
One long multichapter fic (everything as chapters)
AO3 series, ordered chronologically in-universe
AO3 series, posting order + a/n noting when it's set
Separate series per arc/timeline, all cross-linked
My copy of a second edition printing of The Silmarillion
Frankenstein's monster rubber duck
My cursed goat head/ Baphomet plush
Medical-grade weed kazoo
Gengar crocs
Valentine Detective Agency LED stand
Xbox Wireless Controller – Pulse Cipher Special Edition (it's RED!)
One of 5 iPad/pencil grips that look like butt plugs
Crayola crayon USB-C drive
TWSBI Eco fountain pen (in teal)
Voting ended onMay 27
I was tagged by @hpysprkl, @tunnelsnke and @some27-url lol ur all angels, thank you for including me. I'm tagging @ohgeesoap, @loser-sons, @ghoulghostly and whoever else want's to play.
every few years somebody rediscovers that Deacon lies, notices there is no romance button, and announces they have uncovered the sinister truth of the character. Grandpa is tired because Grandpa has watched the same fandom wheel roll back into town wearing a new pfp for a decade and I blissfully wish someone would end my suffering.
