That's an interesting story about your hearing, Lynn. It clearly illustrates how our own experiences and beliefs color what we are willing to believe in and what we find hard to accept.
I don't worry about implausibility a lot when it comes to Lois and Clark. I have been a Superman fan since 1969, and I knew right from the start that it was impossible that a man could fly. It was just so delightful to pretend that he could!
For me implausibility becomes a problem when I'm asked to believe in it for real, or when I'm asked to suspend my disbelief about something that I not only find implausible but also don't like in the first place. I can pretend that Clark Kent can hide his identity behind a pair of glasses, even though it forces me to pretend that everybody in the fictional world of Superman suffers from prosopagnosia. (Imagine that a colleague of yours comes to work one morning sporting a pair of glasses for the first time ever, and you stare at this bespectacled person and say: "Who are you?".)
I do find this concept just a tiny bit over the top, but I can accept it as a part of the fantastic and totally implausible story about Superman. But I remember reading a sci-fi book by Robert Heinlein, where the whole point of the book was to prove that a person who was out of his luck could suddenly get the biggest break in his life by being offered the chance to impersonate the most important leader in the world
and then get away with it. Heinlein described the training and preparations of the sudden stand-in and his fantastic ensuing success (which was so complete that this other guy eventually took over the identity of the deceased leader. And
no one ever noticed!) I couldn't accept it at all, because Heinlein took the concept too seriously and at the same time the whole thing was just totally impossible. Imagine that somebody would pick a person off the street and tell him to be Obama, and after a few months of training this nobody pulls it off. He travels around, makes speeches, is seen on TV almost daily etc,
and nobody notices that he isn't actually Obama! (I wonder, by the way, why the suggestion that an ordinary person could impersonate a real person in real life and get away with it irks me so. Maybe it is because I'm not very good at recognizing people myself, so maybe the suggestion that I myself could be
so utterly taken in by an impostor is something I find vaguely threatening and not very funny at all.)
I don't want to be told
why an impossible concept is possible. I want to be asked to pretend that it is possible and leave it at that. But I much prefer "fairy-tale-y" flights of fancy (like the Superman fantasy) over complete improbabilities that take place in a world which is too much like the real world, like the suggestion that somebody could impersonate Obama and fool absolutely everyone.
One thing I hate when it comes to Clark's identity-game is when other people see through Clark's disguise, but Lois remains stubbornly ignorant. The underlying assumption is that Lois is more stupid than other people, and that is a suggestion that I don't like at all. The common explanation, that Lois was so "blinded by love" that she couldn't see through Clark's disguise, isn't good enough for me and doesn't make Lois less stupid, at least not in my opinion.
So when it comes to implausibilities, I want to be asked to
pretend that something is possible rather than to be told I should
believe that it is. Also, very importantly to me, I'm only willing to "suspend my disbelief" when it comes to ideas that I like. Because I have this hangup about the death of women, I am utterly unwilling to believe that Lois's body could be destroyed while her soul could be transported into another body and live on there. To me, this idea smacks too much of a suggestion that it is not much of a problem when young women die, because their souls live on anyway, either in heaven or in another body on the Earth. I realize, of course, that the writers of LnC stories where Lois's soul is transported into another body most certainly aren't trying to tell me that it is okay when young women die, but even so that is what their fics mean to me. It certainly doesn't help that as a non-religious person, I don't believe that one's soul is separable from one's body, or that there exists any sort of afterlife. And when it comes to this conviction of mine I'm not willing to suspend my disbelief, precisely because the idea of an afterlife has been linked in my mind to the idea that women's living bodies are expendable.
Ann
