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.
This is a book I’ve been writing, a world born from childhood sketches, half‑finished comics, and daydreams about heroes, dragons, and divine beings. From the margins of old notebooks to the corners of my imagination, these stories have followed me since I was a kid. Over the years, they grew roots, intertwined, and began to form something larger, a universe where every fragment, every forgotten drawing, every whispered idea could finally coexist.
That universe is called the Ambilux, a vast system divided into seven worlds: Una, Citria, Tabith, Orificium, Katheon, Katherick, and Smaragd. At its center burns the Two‑Faced Star, the eternal balance between Lunaria and Solaria. Each realm carries its own history, its own purpose, its own scars, and together they form the living tapestry of the Ambilux.
This is the world I’m building, and I want to share it with you piece by piece. Think of it as wandering through the libraries of Citria, where ancient tomes whisper forgotten truths; or stumbling upon a dust‑covered manuscript in a bustling market on Una; or uncovering a sealed record deep within the archives of Katheon. Every post will be a fragment, a recovered page, a glimpse into the mythic machinery behind the Ambilux.
So, if you love worlds that feel ancient yet alive, if you’ve ever wanted to read stories that feel like they were found, not written, welcome.
You’re standing at the threshold of the Ambilux.
And every story I share from here is another light flickering in its endless expanse.
I have already rambled at length in the vc about this, but I thought I'd begin to note down some thoughts.
Basically! Began with going lmao what if Sharkie reversed with the players,
And has now evolved into a complex au where the hockeys and their friends and families are all merfolk and Sharkie is a human employee at the SAP Center - an organisation that works with rescue, rehabilitation, release and observation of mers in the bay area.
The mers are quite more inhuman in both looks and behaviour than your average mermaid portrayal, they're animals - aquatic mammals, the somewhat resemblance to humans being a case of convergent evolution. Some aspects vibe wise I'm drawing from particularly dolphins and capuchin monkeys (plus some inter-group interaction ideas from chimpanzees), plus just the vibes of toxic male hockey culture
BECAUSE ITS ALL ABOUT THE HOCKEY CULTURE!!! 😃😁😃
there is so much cute asides and stuff but it all boils down to the hockey annual life cycle - not just the negatives but the good, the bad, the neutral of hockey culture
OH! and Stella is human too <3 she's a SAP employee too
As a vice-admiral’s son, Dragon was subject to a good bit of ribbing from his peers when he joined the marines, this Urpi knew. It was in the nature of the young to be playful and foolish, this was universal. But this? This was neither.
Dragon had been hazed, to put it plainly. Peer-pressured into a few too many drinks, the primary feathers of his wings crudely clipped while he was too intoxicated to protest, and his person unceremoniously dumped on their doorstep for his parents to find.
She was furious.
To the Shandia, wing-clipping was considered a vile act. Something not to be done even to your very worst enemy. When her people were still widespread across the blue seas, a Shandian- or any Sky Islander for that matter- with clipped wings was often also the bearer of a World Noble’s four clawed brand. To willingly recreate that humiliation was nothing short of a war crime.
His feathers would molt out and grow back in whole with time, but the intangible damage was still done. Her son had been shamed, plain and simple. Worse still, he blamed himself for it.
So I FINALLY digitised my notes for the day-by-day symtoms of an average heat in my verse, here it is! It's pretty straightforward, I'd say. God, Im a nerd.
Sorry it's so teeny tiny, the program didn't allow it to be bigger. hope it's legible if not. eh. the darkness of the red obv indicates the severity.
How many of your toy characters have playable gimmicks, and what are they? I know Victor has the AUX port but do the other boys have similar functionalities?
Hard Cal (calculator) and Victor (mp3 player) are one of the few with an electronic gimmick in particular that is always accessible in some way, but since they're all merch mimics, many have more object-based forms that have basic functionality. Jack can actually become a comic book (or a VHS tape) featuring a random issue from the story he came from. Zachary is the most adept shapeshifter, but ironically doesn't care for becoming anything more than vases and art pieces; objects to be looked at, not touched or interacted with much. Beyond the Fellas, Umbra is Not A Boy but can become a book of any story, and can tell a wider variety of stories than Jack due to being a walking library with a great memory.
As for girls, Hex can become a knife.
Most of them have more forms than just that, but those are the respective favorites for each character. Starry and Slick are special, as they seldom change shape, and instead just have a metric shitton of accessories they can summon from nowhere (cars, clothing, jewelry etc. for Starry, skateboards, ramps, and grind-rails for Slick).
As always, feel free to scroll down and check the Merch Mimic section of the oc-masterlist if me listing any of these guys got you curious.
