Realism vs. Fun

I've done many random little posts recently. I'll put some actual effort into this one. It's been sitting on my list for ages.

When reading a book or watching a movie, it's nice for there to be some level of realism. I'm not talking about magic and talking animals and sci-fi. I mean rules that the world follows, logical science, magic that has some guidelines, ex.
There are exceptions were total insanity and lack of rules is fun. But only if the creator is incredibly skilled to pull it off.
But readers will take stories with a grain of salt. If there's a few little things that don't make 100% sense, people will accept that. Those little innacuracies might be part of the deeper meaning of the piece. For example, one author said that he didn't have all of his medical information in the book completely accurate. But he did that because it helped the symbolism and such.
There's plenty of reasons why a story might not be compeltely realistic.
The whole point of fiction is that it isn't real. And just because something happens in real life doesn't mean it should happen in your book. If it doesn't add to your story, it doesn't belong there. "It happened in real life" is not an excuse to add something to your book.

If there are little things that are innacurate, peopel will notice. People always notice stuff. Heheh. That may be okay, under some circumstances.
But don't set up unbreakable rules, and then break them. And don't ignore really important points and think that the reader doesn't notice. (It's different if a character forgtets something important, and then is punished for it or comes back to it.)
There are plenty of bad books that just don't pay attention to what they're doing.
For example, I just read the last Maximum Ride book. I liked the first part of the series. But when it got to the Max, Angel, Fang, and Nevermore books, it lost the cohesiveness that it needed. The books were already pretty crazy, so that was a bad thing. They kept ignoring stuff. I swear, Total was nonexistent for 3/4 of the book. They once mentioned that they left him behind. But what about the rest? He just shows up when he's convenient?
And then when the fake Ari showed up, they magically forgot how Ari was their friend the last time they met.
That's not getting into that Dylan guy...I don't understand his purpose, except to have some "perfect guy" to mess with Max and Fang.
Sigh.

But then there's the opposite end of things. If you focus too much on making things super realistic, then a lot of the fun of a story can be lost.
A while ago Ellen, Nicole and I were teasing the movie Atlantis. Now, we love that movie. It's an awesome movie. Though there are a few things that don't hold up really strong when you think about them a lot. But it makes up for it in a lot of ways, like awesoem characters.
Same with Rise of the Guardians. There's a few things that don't make sense with thought, but it's a fun movie and it makes me happy.

In Avatar: The Last Airbender there is some of this too. Like how the Gaang are able to make friends so easily with peopel they just met. But again, it's awesome and makese up for that in many ways.
Unfortunately in Legend of Korra, they lost a lot of their fun. Part of that seems like they spent too much time working on their city and making everything as realistic as they could. (That's not the only reason, but it's part of it).

And the author Tamora Pierce has done a similar thing. I loved her earlier books. But her more recent books have been too realistic. They spend so much time on details and general stuff. There isn't as much action and fun.

Sigh.
Realistic is good. But don't let it take everything over. Especially if you have a good thing to begin with.