Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-24732895-20140910035928/@comment-6383956-20140918121521

Walt has his hands in front of him when he hits the steel meth machine and his ass hits the concrete first -- his head never so much as touches the ground. Literally just watched it again.

At what point in Lord of the Rings did anyone fly without an eagle or a fell-beast? I'm gonna give you a hint: never. That never happened.

The Good Wife doesn't waste time at all -- and yet, they still throw in a line like "Let's see if we can expedite this" or "We should be able to get this in court by tomorrow" or something which lets us know that this works faster for them. (And, no, Alicia has never been in court in the same clothes as she was wearing when they picked the jury -- on the rare occasion they even show jury selection. Unless you can give me a specific example, but considering your track record with examples in this thread thus far... I'm gonna guess you made this one up too.)

You want the academic sources? It's called fiction theory. What we're discussing, specifically, is called the principle of minimal departure (or sometimes the principle of mutual belief and occasionally the reality principle although there's some argument that the reality principle is a different principle which doesn't apply to fantasy or sci-fi) -- and it is the way fictional worlds are viewed and analyzed across the board because it is the way audiences (except, apparently, you) interpret fictional worlds. It's the same principle we use to judge the morality of character's actions (something discussed pretty extensively in these forums).

"This principle states that whenever we interpret a message about an alternative world, we reconstrue this world as being the closest possible to the actual world. This means that we will project upon the world created by the text everything we know about the real world, and we will make only those adjustments that are imposed by the text." (http://users.frii.com/mlryan/abstracts3.htm and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304422X80900303)

"The statement 'deer have four legs' will be true of this fictional world, but the statement 'deer have a single horn, and it is made out of pearl' will be false, unless specified by the text." (http://users.frii.com/mlryan/pws.htm)

"We are entitled to assume that fictional characters, like real people, have blood in their veins, that they are mortal, and so on-unless the story contains explicit indications to the contrary. On reading a story we note what it says explicitly about characters and events, and-insofar as the Reality Principle applies-ask what would be the case in the real world if all this were true." (http://hettingern.people.cofc.edu/Aesthetics_Fall_2010/Walton_Morals_in_Fiction_%26_Fictional_Morality.pdf)

The only exception to this principle is when the author believes things about the world to be true which we now know are false. For instance, when reading a story written back when everyone thought the Earth was flat, you can't really assume the fictional world being talked about is round. Stories written back when bloodletting was considered a cure for disease are going to assume that we too believe bloodletting is a cure, etc.

Jeff Davis, though? He is alive now. In the present. These exceptions don't apply to him.

I gotta get to work, but trust me, there's more light reading if you need it.