Obsessive Rationalization of Unrealistic Genres

I am constantly amazed and disappointed by people’s perpetual insistence on willful ignorance and disregard of logic. It is common to tout that people are able to “distinguish reality from fiction”, but I am finding that hard to believe. This ailment is especially prevalent in fans or supporters of a particular lore; enjoyment of a genre appears to be a debilitating disease that leaves its victims completely incapable of making concessions to critics.

Let’s examine two examples. First, zombie lore. The genre is wide and diverse, but is generally accepted to be a gross fabrication and completely improbable, right? Nope. There is a fixation on coming up with more and more “realistic” explanations of how a zombie apocalypse could “actually” come to be. This is true both in media — we see the introduction of terms like “infected” to make the scenarios seem more authentic — and in the fan culture surrounding it. Look at any article on the Internet pointing out the most obvious reasons that a zombie apocalypse would never arise, and you will see a flood of comments defending the feasibility of such a scenario. Do they think that pointing out the unrealism of the genre is somehow offensive? That explicitly distinguishing reality from fiction (in a genre that is constantly trying to move the latter towards the former) somehow invalidates the fiction? It boggles my mind that people feel the need to defend the feasibility of a clearly fictional and improbable scenario.

But this feeling of wonder is only compounded whenever I accidentally wander near Star Wars or Star Trek fans. Both these franchises are clearly future fantasy (where technology serves only to further the plot, as opposed to hard science fiction, where there is a clear bi-directional interplay between the two). Yet many fan sites are created to help flush out the technological lore and attempt to apply rational, scientific explanations to the events in the media that are clearly only in service to the plot. If you point this out to a fan, they will become indignant and start explaining their way around any obstacle you toss at them. Never mind that the whole thing is fictional and doesn’t actually need to be scientifically accurate in order to be entertaining (and in fact was never intended to be scientifically accurate). This madness continues to the degree that later productions in the franchise may even try to explain some of the happening with science, but 9 times out a 10 this only bungles things up further.

Anyways, I wish die-hard fans would accept that they are fans of a fictional entertainment franchise that not only isn’t realistic or feasible, but in fact doesn’t need to be in order to be entertaining. Being unrealistic does not invalidate zombies or Star Trek or Star Wars in any way. So get over the fact that none of those franchises make any damn sense.