Genuinely don’t know what it’s called but there’s a particular way of violating reality that doesn’t work. For example, I am willing to accept an omegaverse university AU of nearly any fandom you care to name (except, for some reason, Sherlock, because I have an inexplicable hatred for unilock). However, a lot of Star Wars university AUs specifically fail on this aspect: they make Anakin an engineering PhD student and Obi-Wan something like literature or classics, and then they make Anakin his TA or GA.
You can’t do that. Absolutely not. Anakin is unqualified for that and a university would not do it in any case. A university would literally hire a junior or senior undergraduate workstudy student to do as much of that work as possible first. They would do NOTHING other than do that and make the prof do all his own grading.
Is there a name for “I will accept [wild fantasy premise] but not [ordinary wrong thing]?” Please tell me there’s a name for this. Probably someone who studies lit will know? I’m a systems person I don’t know from lit theory just like Anakin
No idea if there’s a formal name but I think of it as “you have to play by the rules of the universe you create”. Like okay, I’ll buy that Superman can fly into outer space because those are the rules set up by the Superman universe and so the author and audience both agree that this can happen in the story. The minute Superman picks up a human woman and flies her into space with him, the author broke the compact they made with the audience and now that story is bad.
Ironically, the wikipedia article for verisimilitude cites Superman as an example
I think “it violates the rules of verisimilitude” is as good a name for it as any
It’s walruses vs. fairies. If a fairy shows up at my door, okay, fine, I don’t know how fairies work. But a walrus is not qualified to be TA for a lit class.
amhrancas 