Originally Posted by calliarcale

I think you've hit it right on the nose there. I've long debated with myself as to whether or not this is a sign of poor writing, in and of itself. It may just be a technique. Less realistic, perhaps, but then, it's fiction -- it's not neccesarily required to be an accurate depiction of things as they are or as they could be. Stories shouldn't be written because we want to accurately depict real life. They should be written because we want to tell a story. If that means inventing aliens to suit a series of metaphors, so be it. It may be unrealistic, but if the story works, it really doesn't matter.

That said, I think writers need to exercise great caution when deviating from reality. It's too easy to simply expect the reader/viewer to simply write off the improbabilities as fiction, and that kind of laziness can make the story not work at all. I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that you can only expect the audience to swallow one major leap of faith, and everything else has to either come from the real world or have a reasonable, logical connection to the major leap of faith and/or the real world. I don't think there's really a magic number, but I do think one has to be very careful about what they are asking the audience to accept in a story.