Who Cares about Clothes in a Snowstorm?

My first thoughts when walking into up a mountain slope in Skyrim where something along the lines of “All that wind and snow, it surely must be cold up here.” Pretty immersive to be sure. Nils, on the other hand, wondered why people weren’t wearing appropriate clothes for the cold, having his immersion broken in the process. He’s right, of course, but my ignorance of the weather-appropriateness of people’s clothing made me enjoy the game more. I see the same thing happening a lot with movies and books – the tendency to over-analyze the fun out of a piece of fiction.

I don’t know how often I’ve heard people complaining about movies not being logical or people in movies ignoring better solutions for a problem. Me, I prefer to simply enjoy the action/dialogue/pictures/soundtrack/world/whatever of the movie without going to deep into the analysis of it all. This is me willingly suspending my disbelief and I think it is absolutely required to enjoy pretty much any work of fiction.

I highly doubt that someone like Nils purposefully spoils his gaming experience by looking for details that do not fit. Maybe the (lack of) weather-appropriate clothing worn by the dwellers of Skyrim jumps out to him as much as the (lack of) clothing of the messenger early in the game jumped out to me. Now, that messenger wore nothing but a loincloth and seemed quite comfortable in the snow – a rather obvious feature. Probably there are many people who simply look at the world in much more detail than I do, or analyze things more deeply. Maybe that means that those people are more intelligent than I am, I don’t know.

What I do know is that a certain amount of ignorance makes many things much more enjoyable. Take the upcoming Doctor Who movie that got announced recently. When I read the news, my first thought was literally “awesome”. I like movies and I love Doctor Who, therefore the prospect of a Doctor Who movie is exciting to me. Most vocal fans of the series on the internet reacted quite differently though. Apparently the movie is not only going to be awful, but it will also destroy the whole series through its awfulness.

Sure, the movie might be quite bad. I’ll probably still enjoy it because I don’t really care whether the continuity is followed and things are done exactly to canon. That’s like caring whether an actress in a movie has the same hair color as described in the underlying book. Whatever. Still, I can see how Hollywood could turn Doctor Who into quite an awful piece, but I can’t see how that would even remotely touch upon the rest of the series.

Once again, I can simply ignore such a movie if it is bad. I can even ignore continuity breaks between a movie and a TV series just as I can ignore the contradiction between snow and sleeveless shirts.