It is incredibly difficult to try to analyze fictional characters in a way that gives us objective measurements of their abilities. There are extremely few creators who care about their audience knowing the exact strength of their characters, so it is hard to find good scenes to measure, there’s usually a lack of accurate statements about what is actually happening, and physics is usually portrayed very loosely. That last point, in particular, causes an incredible amount of issues once we start actually trying to use physics to measure what a character can do. Characters frequently perform feats that are completely impossible with our current understanding of how the universe works, meaning that we have to squint at physics in order to get any sort of numbers. And that’s not even touching on things like magic that operate on a totally different level than normal reality.
There are some obvious cases where “appealing to reality” is a bad idea. For example, if a character is shown to be going faster than light, we can’t say “actually, that’s impossible in the real world, so they must be going slower.” However, I will very frequently see someone citing “appeal to reality” as a reason why we shouldn’t be critical of a particular feat. While it is important to try and let the fiction create and operate in its own world, there are limits to how far we should apply this. I’ll be outlining those limits in this article.
When Appealing to Reality is a Fallacy
First, it’s important to understand what a fallacy is. A fallacy is “a false or mistaken idea.” Logical fallacies, specifically, happen when somebody makes an argument where the conclusion is achieved via faulty reasoning. Therefore, we can see that appealing to reality is problematic when it leads us to have a poorer understanding of the fiction that we are examining.
An example of this would be to look at a character who has the ability to fly and say that, since it’s impossible for a person to fly under their own power in reality, they don’t actually have the ability to do that in fiction. In this scenario, we’re essentially trying to determine how a character would work if they were brought to our world and subjected to our physical reality, which does a terrible job at examining the strength of the character in their own story. It becomes fallacious because we are trying to impose our own rules of existence on a fictional world that has its own rules governing how it operates.
The situations that we need to look out for are ones where we deny a character abilities that they have demonstrated because we can’t adequately model them in reality. We need to be able to recognize that fictional worlds govern themselves under totally different principles than our world operates on. Trying to overwrite those established rules with our own will only lead to a butchered understanding of the character and an inability to represent their actual capabilities.
When Appealing to Reality isn’t a Fallacy
However, just because there are some scenarios where appealing to reality is a bad idea doesn’t mean that it is always a bad idea. What is fallacious isn’t the comparison to reality itself, but the way that we use that appeal to draw conclusions. As long as we are careful to avoid any scenarios where we use real-world physics to deem something that has been clearly demonstrated impossible, we can use it to guide our analysis to make them a more accurate representation of a character.
We are ultimately using our real-world understanding of physics in order to analyze characters to the best of our abilities. While we are unable to make physics fit every scenario, we use it to explain as many feats as possible. Without physics, we would be unable to put concrete numbers on the vast majority of feats that characters have demonstrated. But physics can’t answer some questions and it gives bad answers to others.
Let’s take a common example where some explosives are detonated, resulting in a large explosion that destroys a building. We have a ton of different ways that we can measure the energy contained in this explosion. We can measure the size of the explosion, the level of destruction that it caused, the weight and contents of the explosion, the amount of light emitted, or the speed that the shockwave traveled from the explosion. All of these are valid ways to measure how much energy the explosion contained, but they will all give dramatically different results because no author is going to run physics simulations to make sure their portrayal of all parts of an explosion is accurate. So in that case, we’ve got to decide which of these methods will give us the most accurate measurement for the effects portrayed (that’s usually measuring destruction, by the way). Every other method will give us answers that might technically be correct, but they won’t be accurate.
So we can see that measuring the effects of a feat often aren’t as straightforward as most people would assume and we’re already needing to appeal to reality in order to decide which method is going to give us the most accurate portrayal. I don’t think anyone would have a problem with it in this instance. Where it is more contentious, yet just as important, is when we appeal to reality in order to decide whether physics can describe a situation in the first place. Remember that our entire method for measuring something is done by using real-world physics, so we’re already appealing to reality in order to analyze things at all. So we also have to make sure that the phenomenon being measured is one that can actually be described by our real-world model of physics, or nothing about the process will make any sense.
Let’s say that you had a mineral hardness test kit and were skilled at using it to identify the hardness of minerals. Now I handed you a vial of liquid and told you to measure how acidic it was with your kit. You obviously don’t have the right tools for the job and can’t accomplish what I’ve asked. You might be able to get some extremely rough estimates (like “it’s not acidic enough to melt the metal”) but it wouldn’t be particularly accurate or useful.
That is the exact type of scenario that appealing to reality helps to avoid. While we can measure the gravity of a black hole based on its size, we can’t measure the gravity of a black portal that mildly sucks things up with the same methods. We can get an average speed for natural lightning, but we have no idea if that applies to electricity generated by lightning magic. We’ve got a ton of formulas that can analyze the power in an explosion, but if that explosion creates puppies instead of having any destructive effects, they really aren’t applicable.
So when we are very critical of a phenomenon that needs to be measured, it’s not a fallacy because we aren’t using it to throw out the existing reality of the fictional world. We’re totally fine with fiction having its own depiction and explanation for things like black holes. We’re just trying to understand whether a depiction of that phenomenon is something that real physics can explain or one that fictional physics is responsible for creating. And in the latter case, it becomes something that we can no longer measure (or the method of measuring becomes drastically different than the real-life equivalent).
