My best guess is that her “reasoning” isn’t really reasoning, but irrational prejudice, or that she’s resisting the shows you’re pushing on her as a form of contrariness or asserting her independence.
However, if there is any logic to her point of view, it may be that she can relate to the shows she likes. There are characters she can identify with, and they inhabit a world she can imagine living in or would like to live in. The shows that “aren’t real” are set in worlds that are too far removed from the world of her own imagination, worlds that “work” differently from the way she thinks the world really works or she’d like it to work.
Personally, I’ve been unable to really get into Buffy for much the same reason: it “isn’t real” to me. To take just one example, the character of Cordelia is such an over-the-top caricature (at least in the Season 1 & 2 shows I’ve seen) that she helps to kill my belief in the characters as real people.
This, developmentally speaking, is exactly what is going on.
In other words, she’s going through a phase. Be aware, of course, that some phases set people’s tastes like a bundt pan sets a cake, but this is about her setting the boundaries of who she is deciding she wants to be. Just be supportive and assure her that her choices are valid and you’re happy to introduce her to good new stuff if she ever decides to look over the fence she’s building around her tastes.
I think you’re onto something here. They’re “not realistic,” because they can’t be comfortably fit into a fantasy timeline that starts with us and leads to that fictional universe.
It reminds me a little of Helene Hanff, the author of 84, Charing Cross Road, the story in letters of an American writer who yearned to visit England. She was a great reader, but she didn’t like fiction: “I never cared to read about things that never happened to people who never existed.”
When she eventually got to England and visited with other literary people, everyone was shocked that she never read Dickens, Thackeray, Austen or Bronte. She just didn’t care for the genre - she only liked nonfiction.
I’m like your niece, except I wouldn’t watch any of the shows she does like. I totally love fiction but fictional stories set in real times and real places, with real people. I enjoy Lost but not Heroes - although I wouldn’t be into Lost if it hadn’t started with 5 seasons of real people in real situations (as right now they’re heavy in to time travel). I can’t get into Harry Potter or LOTR at all.
Of course, I didn’t really come to this conclusion about myself until I was a bit older than your niece. I think she’s just starting to form some solid opinions on what she thinks right now, and is not in the market for anything new that contradicts her opinions.
I got a grandaughter a bit like that. Kids, ehh? Watchugonnado?
For me I love almost all things fake and supernatural and sci fi, but they have to really be made up. Like Medium, based on the life of a real person, I can’t stand to watch it at all because it is supposedly “real”, a totally fake made up show I could probably watch, but not this one.
I think the key here is that she is not saying she doesn’t like them, but that she will not try them. As others have said, she probably got into ST, SW, and BTVS when she was younger. Today, she may be like my wife. She has created a self image that doesn’t allow these things. She isn’t judging the material, because she hasn’t seen it. She is deciding that she no longer likes that kind of thing because it isn’t the ty[e of thing she thinks she should like.
My wife cracks me up because we alternate picking movies on Netflix and most of the movies she puts on the list, she doesn’t actually enjoy, she just thinks she should enjoy. Her movies tend to be boring or depressing to me, and to her. She doesn’t enjoy all of the movies I pick, but I think she enjoys them more. I keep telling her that watching movies should not feel like doing your homework.
I hate explaining to people why I don’t watch or like some TV show. Sure, maybe it’s similar in some way to something I like, but maybe I just don’t feel like investing another hour on the couch every week. The fans of some shows often seem almost insulted that you don’t like what they consider to be the Best Show Ever, and I wouldn’t lose any sleep over making up some shit just to get them off my back.
I am also ill equipped to explain some of my tastes. Many times, I hate a show/movie and have never watched it. I am just instinctively turned off by it. This can be said of most series (Lost, CSI, 24, Prison Break, The shield, Heroes, etc). On the other hand, I LOVE Law & Order. Not Law & Order SVU however.
I love Star Wars but hate Star Trek. I love Lord of the Rings but hate Potter with a passion. I love Carlitos Way, but I can’t even bring myself to watch Scarface. Never seen any of the Godfather movies because I am just turned off by the concept.
It is true that is has a lot to do with the age you were when you were introduced to these things. Even though LOTR came to the screen when I was an adult, I read the books as a child. Star Trek just always seemed dopey to me, and Star Wars came first into my life and thus, won my heart over in the space fiction genre.
Other stuff I hate because of the fans/hype. Other stuff is just silly. Other stuff is poorly produced. And when it comes to series, I think I like series that dont have a requirement to watch every damn week to stay on top of it. Example “Lost” - if you miss an episode, you are screwed. Law & Order on the other hand, each episode is a self contained story.
Well, it typically shuts up nosy-ass people who grill you about WHY WON’T YOU WATCH THIS while being a lot more polite than “Chinese-speaking cowboys in space chasing/protecting a spooky assassin chick sounds really stooopit.” I mean, if you try to describe the show to someone who’s never seen it in such a way that they’re not going to constantly be asking wtf someone is speaking Mandarin while wielding a sixgun in front of a spaceship, it sounds pretty damn silly and not particularly engaging. It’s unrealistic in a totally different way than encountering ninety-bajillion humanoid alien races who all speak English and shoot at each other with lasers is unrealistic. If someone had described the show in any sort of detail to me, I wouldn’t have watched the few episodes I did. (And yes, I did find the show rather ridiculous and not particularly engaging, although I generally love fantasy and sci fi. It really kind of screamed “someone who was trying way too hard tried to cobble together the most incongruous elements he could think of.”)
It might just be unreal in a way that she doesn’t like–I mean, why would all those elements of the old West be revived a few hundred years in the future?-- or it may just be that she’s trying to make you shut up and leave her alone about her viewing habits. Being badgered about how you really ought to watch this because you’ll just luuuuuurrrrrvvvvveeee it, even though it sounds utterly unappealing to you SUCKS, and it’s rude.
I don’t think the OP has given any reason to suspect that he has been badgering his niece in an obnoxious way.
A logical answer, or a simple statement of opinion like “eh, I just don’t like it” shuts people up a lot faster than a completely off-the-wall illogical answer like “I like Star Trek because it’s realistic and I don’t like Galactica because someone told me it’s not realistic.”
The question is, really, what does the OP’s niece mean by “real”? Perhaps another suggestion is that Galactica doesn’t answer every question in a pseudo-scientific fashion. Many things are left open to interpretation.
My best theory for what might really be her issue, as well as the issue many people have with sci-fi and fantasy, is not so much an inability to accept things that aren’t “real”, as it is a difficulty personally relating to that material.
There is probably something about the characters and/or situations in Buffy that she feels she can relate to, so it interests her, and therefore she’s perfectly willing to accept the existence of vampires (which is obviously not real) because something about the story rings true to her life and experience. If you could find that type of connection in those other shows (which I haven’t watched, personally) maybe you could pique her interest after all.
I’ve never heard a Mariah Carey song (at least that I’m aware of); yet I’m certain it wouldn’t be my kind of music. I think you can get a general sense of what something is like from the prevailing culture/what you overhear at the water cooler/etc. and make a somewhat valid judgment as to whether it’s for you or not.
She probably doesn’t want to experience new shows because she’s afraid she would betray her old loves. She probably realizes her current tastes in scifi/fantasy are crap, but she associates them with fun times in her life and doesn’t want to risk displacing those guilty pleasures.
It could be she doesn’t want to go through the work of immersing herself in something new. I’m that way about popular shows like Lost, *24 *and Heroes. I don’t want to see them because I’m afraid I’d have no idea what’s going on, and I’d have to do some major backtracking.