Here’s another question for you guys: When do you find a work of fiction’s (book, game, etc) premise so ridiculous that it prevents you from picking it up?
For me, as a science fiction/fantasy/anime/video game geek, an open-minded attitude towards far-fetched concepts comes with the territory. I mean, I’m currently playing a game about demon-fighting schoolchildren who summon their guardian spirits by pantomiming suicide! Even by JRPG standards, that has to take the cake for bizarreness. But on this blog, I’ve also mentioned a TV series about people who cross the galaxy by walking through wormholes, a time-travel-steampunk American Civil War game, and an anime about a biplane-flying pig, none of which cause me any problems.
Yet one concept never fails to make me howl with disbelief: a foreign power invading the continental United States (most famously, Red Dawn). Aliens with the technology to fly dozens of light-years are landing on the White House lawn instead of lobbing giant rocks from orbit? No worries! Giant two-legged robot lizards are tearing up California? Pass the popcorn! But the moment the first jackboot touches down on American soil, having apparently teleported past a US Navy and Air Force that are the most powerful in human history, is the moment I say, “Not interested.”
The underlying principle here is similar to the Uncanny Valley. Just as we are repelled by robots and animated characters who look like humans, but aren’t quite right, so I roll my eyes at settings that are obviously meant to be the real world, but aren’t quite right. In other words, I have a much higher threshold for suspending disbelief in real-world settings, and these scenarios (as with any other that suggests the author failed to grasp the basics of a real-world issue, whether it’s politics or a financial crisis) fall egregiously foul of that. And that is why it will be a very long time before I ever look at THQ’s Homefront, not to say Red Dawn itself.