@Silver said:
@HelloRaptor It's interesting that you bring up suspension of disbelief. This touches on something I really think about a bit when it comes to stories, and it is that in my opinion anyway the suspension of disbelief is most easily done when the setting and characters are structured in a way so as to be plausible. Given that it is one of the storyteller's jobs to help the experiencer (a word I use just to cover movie-watchers, TV-watchers, book-readers, etc) suspend that disbelief, I think the more skillful a storyteller is at embracing the plausible the better.
Unless you're telling a story in the form of a fable, which might be something like Flatland or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or similar. In which case go hog wild.
I think the word you're looking for is "audience". Heh.
Also, by and large--and this is likely covered in the wikipedia article, I just haven't bothered to read it--suspension of disbelief is less about "what is plausible in the minds of the audience" and more "what is plausible within the structure, theme, and dynamic of the world within which the story is happening". If you can accept a core premise, your suspension of disbelief towards that story will be guided by that premise and your acceptance of it.
A few examples:
Example #1: Superman is an alien who looks exactly like us but gains god-like powers due to how his body processes solar radiation from a young sun in its "yellow" phase, because his race is so old their sun has entered its "red" phase. Okay. I can accept that. Aliens with the technology to encrypt DNA within the blood of one of their own (especially if when presented to us, they are done so as a species that now exclusive relies on artificial genetic manipulation to procreate and have a caste-based system right out of fucking Brave New World) do not seem far-fetched within this world. I can suspend my disbelief for that, because I've suspended it for other things that are more ludicrous (the concept that this eponymous alien can fucking fly because "lulz, powers from the sun").
Example #2: A show whose cast of characters are a number of geniuses at a fictional scientific research institute, who join forces with an FBI agent to solve crimes that require their specific and particularly expensive forensic abilities. Okay, I can accept that things go a little faster for them--maybe this world is slightly more advanced (because they cite real world sources all the time so they can't be too far ahead) and they've got federal grants and money to operate their equipment. It would never fly in the real world, but it's not that big of a stretch. But then one of the psychopaths they hunt inscribes bones with certain patterns that when scanned into a computer as images proceed to fucking hack the computer and give it viruses. It's at this point that my brain goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, WHAT? And that is a break in suspension of disbelief, because for fucking five seasons, nothing that fucking ludicrous happened--and then they dropped it on a dime and it was fucking stupid.
Naturally, some people have different thresholds and their areas of interest might color what they can accept. Maybe @Misadventure just has an interest in genetics and flails because "it can't work that way!!!1111!1oneeleven" and that's fine for her, (but then she should probably be flailing at a flying man because solar radiation lulz). And some people care so very little about the physics of computer technology, that they ooed and ahed at Pilant hacking people via bone incriptions and then kept right on watching (and more power to them, even if they are dumb >.< god that was so fucking dumb).
Example #3: In the DC Animated Feature Justice League: Doom, Hal Jordan is actually speaking while flying at the speed of light to f--you know what, fuck it, at that point I was like "this is a shit movie, did the writers even? DID THEY EVEN?" And you can break suspension of disbelief in just about anything if you're enough of an asshole and your audience has half a fucking brain, seriously, what the fuck, writers? That was a shit movie.
Sources: Superman, Man of Steel, fucking Bones. Fuck Bones. And fuck Justice League: Doom.