I keep thinking this is the stand I should take, and I keep watching the next episode. Maybe I’ll start illegally downloading it. That’ll show 'em. (just kidding, just kidding…)
Ghost Whisperer is same for me. Fun show, hot chick, and James Van Praagh is a weenie.
Good for her. I used to work in a bookstore, and I used to bite my tongue every time someone asked "Why do you keep ‘the Celestine Prophecy’ in fiction?
Another problem with the reality vs fantasy element I have with these shows is that people seem to be won over way too easily. By the end of every episode, whoever was involved that week fully believes that Allison is a psychic, that she has visions of murders and that this is somehow good.
I find myself drawing distinctions like this all the time.
me: There’s no way he could jump that far! No human’s legs are that strong! some bemused friend: And the fact that he’s jumping on to the back of a dragon …?
I didn’t watch the first season of X-Files because I didn’t like how it was ridiculing skepticism. After watching a few episodes in season 2, I realised I was being an idiot.
I love Fantasy and SF, and consume a rather large amount of it where I can. I find there are very few people who actually believe events portrayed in fictional works, and those that do are beyond help.
His Dark Materials…oh yes.
All I demand from wild fiction is some sort of internal consistency. The worlds of Tolkien and Pratchet are ludicrous, but they make sense in their own right.
Me? I’m waiting for my X-wing fighter. I wanna cause problems.
Medium is a good example. I liked the show at least in the beginning. I thought the relationship between the husband and wife was very well done. I enjoy this type of show usually. I just couldn’t get past the fact that it is supposed to be a real person. If the real Allison Dubois was as effective as she is on the show James Randi would have bowed down and gladly turned over the check. She isn’t. I can’t watch the show. I am unable to suspend my belief.
In fairness, Scooby Doo was the only really consistent skeptical cartoon show out there, and it’s entirely appropriate for skeptics who enjoyed the show to object when that premise was violated.
Some people are still able to enjoy the show. There’s no reason for you to throw a tantrum about it.
Actually, I always thought the reason why the “monster” or “ghost” in the original Scooby Doo series always turned out to be a guy dressed up was because they didn’t want to scare little kids by inadvertently suggesting such things could be real.
I’m not as skeptic as others - I think it’s remotely possible that bigfoot exists, there’s life on other planets that doesn’t visit earth, and residual ghost sightings might be explained by electrical/magnetic forces someday - but I think I really disappointed my dad one day when I mentioned that I don’t think most elements of the supernatural are plausable. He supposed that because I love movies and shows based on these things, I must believe they exist. You don’t need to believe in magic, alien abductions, demons, vampires and sentient ghosts to enjoy stories about them.
On the other hand, I dislike “non-fiction” investigative shows about the same things. Like Ghost Hunters. None of that is real and they never find anything, so why do people watch week after week? Specials about UFO sightings induce tears of boredom, too. I tend to think of things like Haunted History on the history channel to be acceptable tongue-in-cheek fiction, though; they don’t expect us to believe the ghost stories, do they?
Maybe, but I think the easiest solution to such a concern would have been simply to present the ghosts and monsters as obviously harmless, like Casper the Friendly Ghost or the Groovie Goolies. But then there would have been no mystery: “It turns out that those strange appearances of a zombie space alien at the abandoned air base were actually caused by a zombie space alien haunting the air base.” It’d be a bit like Sherlock Holmes discovering that Sir Charles Baskerville was actually killed by a spectral hound as the result of an ancient family curse.
Granted, you could just as easily design a Saturday morning show around such a premise, but it would have to proceed along completely different lines, more akin to Ghostbusters– there’d be little opportunity presented for genuine detection. Though the paranormal element was always the plot hook, Scooby-Doo was ultimately a mystery/detective format. They investigated, they found clues, they solved the case and foiled the crime.
For that matter, later series such as The Scooby and Scrappy Doo Hour and The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, which were produced in the arguably much more child-protective 1980s, had no problem presenting supernatural monsters as real. I don’t think many people would argue that such incarnations were superior to the original.
Doyle was remarkanbly good about keeping Holmes grounded in reality, evebn after he started believing in the supernatural. “The Advrenture of the Sussex Vampire” is a late Holmes story, but Holmes explicitly condemns ideas about ghosts (especially blood-drinking ones) in that story.
Professor Challenger wasn’t so lucky. After “The Lost World”, Doyle put him in “The Poison Belt”, which wasn’t so bad, but “When the World Screamed” is embarassing.
At least he created a different scientist for The Maracot Deep, rather than putting Challenger in it. The book is Doyle at his supernatural-believing worst, and is damned near unreadable. Don’t visit it more than once, and for no more than twenty minutes.
Exactly. Once you’ve established your premise, you have to be faithful to it. In a mystery story, it is cheating to invoke the supernatural or “impossible” in the solution to the mystery, unless you’ve established at the beginning that it’s that kind of story.
I haven’t ever watched the show myself, but enough people have mentioned Medium that I am reminded that SF writer Orson Scott Card has come out as a fan of the show even though he has a problem with its premise:
I don’t believe in ghosts, goblins, spooks, or fairies but I still enjoy movies with fantastic or supernatural elements to them. I really like zombie movies for example but I certainly don’t believe there’s even a remote chance of the dead rising and devouring my flesh. I’ve seen all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the first 4 seasons of the X-Files, and I happily watch My Name is Earl almost every week.
What about the Iliad? It’s certainly my favorite poem and it features a man named Diomedes who charges the Trojans while great gouts of flame were leaping out of his head. Hell, you try to remove all the supernatural stuff from the Iliad and you usually end up with a turd of a story.
I don’t call myself a skeptic, though I don’t believe in ghosts, psychics, etc. I am a Christian, and I do believe in God.
I enjoy reading romantic fiction with a supernatural or psychic twist. And sometimes fiction which isn’t romantic. I don’t like reading fiction (romantic or otherwise) where someone’s belief in Christianity is a major part of the plot–too often it is handled badly, being formulaic and sometimes heavy-handed, with the need for some kind of epiphany relating to Christianity or God occurring in the last 50 pages of the book. I do read some, anyway.
For example, I just read Jayne Anne Krentz’s latest Sizzle and Burn. I like it because of the tone. (And because I like Krentz–regardless of what name she’s using). The tone strikes the right balance of realism–Psychics are real, but most people don’t know about them. I love the conversation late in the book where one of the characters says that they prefer to let the bad guys tell the police about the whole two secret societies competing bit.
I also like Jim Butcher, although I’ll admit to having had the thought that just because wizards are real, doesn’t mean that Fairies, Vampires, and Werewolves all have to be real as well. (He’s not the only one I’ve had that thought about).
I don’t like Dan Brown, because I can’t tell where the line between truth and fiction really lies. Well, and he’s got other writing style flaws I don’t like.
In general, I prefer Cozy mysteries to gory ones, and I think that type of preference for not taking the out of the ordinary too seriously crosses over to my preferences in “Fantastic” Fiction.
Another skeptic who enjoys fantasy here. As long as it’s fiction, why not enjoy it ? As long as the fantasy elements are kept logically consistant and the writing is good, I just think of it as an alternate world where the physical laws are different.
Actually, at least back when I watched it, it often ridiculed both sides. Mulder got led down the wrong path quite often, either by his own fantasies or someone playing to them. Of course, the reality always turned out to be something funky or paranoic, but that was part of the fun of the show.
Fantasy actually increases my skepticism. In fantasy worlds demons vampires or whatever are objectivly, undeniably real; as real as cats or doctors. Psychic powers clearly work and are as non-controversial as your ability to do math. If these things existed in the real world they should be as obvious and non-controversial as they are in fantasy. Since they aren’t, it’s pretty clear they don’t.
“Fantastic” elements in fiction are often a type of literary conceit, a metaphoric context to examine some theme or issue. This is often done in a way that the reader or viewer can accept in the context of the story, even though it is clear that neither the consumer nor the writers have any belief in the issue. For instance, in the show “Dead Like Me”, the main characters are all “Grim Reapers”, undead people whose job it is to go around collecting souls before people die. The Reapers are presented with certain supernatural abilities (taking souls, rapid healing) but no real rationale is given for their existence. Indeed, it is something of a running joke that despite their paranormal capabilities Reapers are hardly omnicient or morally superior to the living, instead receiving the bare minimum of information (first initial, last name, time and location of death on a Post-It) to rendez-vous with a reap, and otherwise having to earn a living (legally or otherwise) and muddle through the afterlife with no more clue as to what is going on or why than when they are alive. This framing device creates both an outside viewpoint to the still living, and creates many opportunies for literal gallows humor that contrasts with the more serious drama. (There is also a central irony in “Millie” working at Happy Time as one of the corporate living dead, a role from which she cannot escape and eventually accepts, just as she does her job as a Reaper.)
Someone else mentioned Asimov and the Laws of Robotics, and in general these conceits underlie pretty much all science/speculative fiction and fantasy. The same could be said for historical fiction. With rare exceptions you aren’t expected to buy into such devices except within the story. When a writer does try to force his constructed reality as literal truth–say The DiVinci Code or the books of the Biblical Old Testament–the result is usually an unpalatable mess that isn’t consistent either as fiction or reportage.