The classic essay
"The Strange Attractor" by Terry Rossio has kind of been the starting point for a lot of discussion on this topic starting around two decades ago, so maybe give that a read.
Speaking more broadly, people want a blend of the strange and the familiar. Make a story too familiar, and people will be bored by its predictability. Make a story too strange, and people will find it difficult to understand or connect with. Portal fantasies like the Chronicles of Narnia blend the strange and familiar by taking a familiar character (children from 20th century England) and transporting them to a fantasy land that is unfamiliar (Narnia). Fish-out-of-water stories like Crocodile Dundee do the opposite, by taking a strange character (Dundee from the Australian outback) and planting them in a familiar setting (New York City). Some superhero movies do this too: there's a reason that Superman spends his time defending Metropolis instead of exploring distant planets: it gives us a blend of strange character (Superman and the villains he fights) in a familiar setting (Metropolis is a facsimile of New York City). There's a reason that so many movies are explicitly set in major cities like New York or Los Angeles that will be familiar to most audiences.
Sometimes, genre works can appeal to the "familiar" by embracing genre conventions. When Tolkein first created the elves and dwarves and orcs of Middle Earth, they felt new and strange. Now, when a game like Dragon Age has elves or a game like Warcraft has orcs, this is actually an appeal to the familiar. So while a lot of secondary-world fantasies seem like they are nothing like our world, I'd say that most modern fantasies set in Tolkeinesque worlds are around a 50/50 blend of strange and familiar, just based on how they appeal to genre conventions. Some fantasy settings get away from the faux-Medieval Europe setting, though.
Ultimately, it depends on what your audience wants. People who pick up a regency romance novel are probably looking for something that is 95% familiar, with the 5% "strange" part coming from seeing new characters that are in some way distinct from the Jane Austen novels they've already read. Genres like teen paranormal romance and urban fantasy are probably more like a 75/25 blend: familiar settings (high schools) and character archetypes (teenage stock characters), but with a bit of a unique "edge" to them (Edward from Twilight in a lot of ways behaves like an "ordinary" person even though he's a vampire). Most "trope-ish" speculative works like Tolkein-esque fantasy or heroic or space opera are probably like a 50/50 blend, and on the weirder end of the spectrum you have more unusual sci-fi stories and unusual fantasy settings (I'm thinking like Zeno Clash levels of strange) that are like 25/75 familiar/strange. And then you have niche genres like
"weird" that are more like 90% strange and only 10% familiar.
To be clear, none of the above percentages are intended to be in any way scientific, but I find them to be a useful mental framework when thinking about how "strange" a story should be based on its genre and target audience.
So, long answer short, it depends on the type of story I'm writing.
nekobara wrote:as writers, do you tend to make your writing as realistic as possible in an attempt to make your readers feel as if your story world were reality?
Within speculative fiction genres like fantasy and sci-fi, you tend to have a spectrum between "hard" (realistic and restrained) vs "soft" (malleable and undefined).
For example, The Martian is very "hard" science fiction. It's about an astronaut on Mars, which is a frontier that humanity has yet to explore, but it's based on "real" science. The author Andy Weir actually did the math to figure out what the dates of the flight from Earth to Mars would be, how much fuel it would take. Real science is the basis for much of the conflict in The Martian: the main character is trying to figure out how to do things like create a chemical reaction to produce water with the materials he has on hand, how to grow enough food to survive with a makeshift potato farm, and so on. It feels like a "real story" and it's very hard science fiction.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Star Wars. Star Wars is "sci-fi," but the rules of the setting are pretty much made up. Jedi are basically wizards who get to carry around cool laser swords. How does "The Force" work? I dunno, it just does. It kind of lets characters do almost anything if they're powerful enough, from lifting up heavy objects with their mind, to shooting lightning out of their hands. Star Wars is not a story about science; it's a story about a struggle between good and evil, and the conflict is not based on things like chemical reactions or the number of calories in a potato, but things like being tempted by power and triumphing over your foes by mastering your own emotions. It's soft sci-fi.
You can observe the same thing in fantasy, where you have some "soft fantasy" works like The Lord of the Rings, where most of the magic is very mysterious and it isn't even entirely clear exactly what Gandalf's powers are, and then there's hard fantasy like Brandon Sanderson where the rules of the magic are made explicit to the reader and almost treated like an invented form of science.
Brandon Sanderson wrote an essay about this (it's actually the first part in a series) and I'd recommend giving that a read. For a manga/anime example, I'd put Death Note in the category of "hard fantasy," as Death Note has very specific rules that govern how its magic works. Also, in a weird way, I'd also put some sports anime in the category of "hard fantasy," like Kureko no Basket, for example. The characters in Kureko no Basket have abilities that are basically superhuman: one character can make a shot from anywhere on the court as long as he has enough time to prepare the shot; another has the ability to perfectly imitate another basketball player's move after seeing it. These abilities might as well be magic, but they're hard magic in the sense that the series very clearly explains what powers (and weaknesses) each of the players has beforehand, and then consistently sticks to those rules throughout each arc.
There's a large category of shounen action manga/anime that mostly pretends to be hard fantasy, but they actually behave much more like soft magic systems. They usually do this by technically having rules, but they generally make up the rules as they go, so the anime still has the feel of "anything can happen" even though it's constantly trying to explain why its magic is rational. This leads to situations where heroes are constantly getting surprised by new forms of magic that "monster of the week" villains spring on them, and the anime then tries to explain the "rules" of this new magic so that it can maintain the fiction that it's a hard magic system. I personally dislike this approach a lot, but at the same time it also seems to be very popular, and what I'd conclude based on this is that most people like hard magic in the nominal sense (they like to be told that their are rules, these serve as the basis for their own speculation about the universe of the series) while also maintaining the sense of awe and wonder and the unknown that basically comes from giving the writer a "blank check" to do whatever they want as long as they cobble together some sort of perfunctory explanation for it.
Or putting it even more broadly, it seems like a lot of manga/anime for more mature audiences tend to be hard magic, while a lot of manga/anime for younger audiences (think elementary school kid-friendly stuff, like Shounen Jump fair) often tends to be soft magic masquerading as hard magic. Ergo, if you're making a visual novel and trying to hit the enfranchised weeaboo market, maybe it's a good idea to try and make your story seem like hard magic (even if it really isn't). That's almost not even being disingenuous, since pretending to be hard fantasy when you're not seems to be a hallmark of shounen anime. (Okay, maybe I'm being a little bit facetious here.)
nekobara wrote:Or do you like to go all out, shoot for the stars, and be as ridiculous, outrageous, and over-the-top as possible to make your reader laugh out loud while having a little fun yourself?
Even comedy has to have rules. That's the basis of "character humor": a character has an established pattern of behavior, and when the character behaves in a way consistent with that established pattern of behavior, we recognize it and laugh. Even if you are trying to make your reader laugh out loud, simply being "as ridiculous, outrageous, and over-the-top as possible" is usually not the way to do it. For example, take the classic Monty Python sketch
"dead parrot." On its face, it seems absurd. A customer comes in with a dead parrot, and the seller insists that no, the parrot isn't dead; it's merely "resting." The customer then responds by yelling loudly at the parrot to try and wake it from its slumber. Outrageous!
However, if you look at the flow of this sketch, you'll see that on a certain level, it's logical. For example, when the shop owner insists that the parrot is alive and its total lack of movement can be attributed to the fact that it is "tired," it's
sort of logical, because a sleeping bird would be immobile. And when the customer then responds by screaming at the parrot to try and wake it, that's
sort of logical, because that's exactly the kind of thing you'd do to try and rest a sleeping bird. But if the customer instead responded by saying, "Alright, if the bird is really resting, then I'll set it on fire," that would be completely illogical, and actually be
less funny while being more absurd. By the same token, if in the middle of the sketch, the customer became frustrated and took out a gun and shot the store owner, that would also be less funny because it would be logically disconnected from the argument being made. So while the sketch is "ridiculous" and "outrageous," it does this in a very restrained manner.
Even when Monty Python resorts to complete non-sequitur,
it still does its non-sequiturs in a consistent manner: every time the
Spanish Inquisition comes out, they are wearing the same attire, they make the same type of abrupt entrance, and they deliver the same classic line: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" Well, yes, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but when they do show up, ironically somehow everyone in the audience knows exactly what line they're going to hear next. At a certain point, the joke is that everybody
does expect the Spanish Inquisition, and the punchline hits when they don't show immediately show up.
