Not believable as in realistic. Believable within the context of the story. If it turns out that Coulson was resurrected because Fury wished it hard enough and their is a magical fairy who grants the wishes of those who just believe hard enough it won't matter if the movie had a giant green monster beating up aliens, it would be a disaster.
Part of telling a good story is the world building you do and your ability to maintain internal logical. If the solution seems to come from nowhere and doesn't flow naturally from what information we're given before hand then it doesn't come off as believable. The above wishing based scenario works in something like Peter Pan because it flows naturally from the world created in the novel. When I ask for believability what I'm really asking for is good writing.
yes, this is exactly what I mean by believability too. Or really believability is the wrong word for it in a lot of ways.
I see it more as there having to be a fulfillment based on what the situation that has been set up.
For example, a lot of talk when Coulson was announced for this show, was..."Of course he's not dead, he never died, and Fury lied. This is exactly what Fury would do. duh..."
and I never really bought that Whedon would use this as a way to do it. Even tho it does exactly fit Fury's character in an honest way, and is also most 'believable', it does nothing. It's no fun basically, it's cheap and it would feel like a rip off.
Ideally, you gotta come up with something that introduces more possibilities and somehow pushes things dramatically to a new open place that you can then use to go off in different directions.
The problem with a lot of theories that go thru my head are that they lead to dead ends or just have a finite payoff and then after that, what? And it's actually a credit to Whedon's reputation that we are willing to assume that he's got something good as a way thru with this. With a generic hand leading the direction of things, I'd be more non-interested becuz I'd assume it could go any direction and I'd just be more likely to sit back and see what happened instead of puzzling at it.
So the level of believability expected is definitely influenced by that too.
I think a thing that this sort of touches on is when I see complaints about, for example, in TDKR about how Batman got back to Gotham from Bane's desert prison.
Overall, I didn't like TDKR as a whole movie, but I think it was unfairly savaged about stuff like this.
Anyways, in that situation, we got Batman being thrown into a prison and there's set up for him a puzzle in order to get out. The conditions of this puzzle are defined in the movie, he has to overcome a certain thing, and then he gets out. What's not part of the conditions of this puzzle is the fact that the prison is way out in the middle of nowhere and how is he gonna get home?
To some extent, we realize this, but it's not what is driving the thing he needs to realize to escape the prison. It's in no way set up as a primary condition.
If he had been dropped off in this prison and some amount of attention was drawn to exactly how diabolical this trap was becuz it was on top of being an archetypical type of prison that past figures had escaped from, it was also so far away from Gotham, and how messed up is that?
Then it would be a cheap move to suddenly have him overcome this the next time we saw him.
But as it was, just getting out of the prison solves the puzzle, and it would actually be annoying to waste time with the details of how he got home.
This was actually a proper way to make a story work best.
But I'm bringing this up becuz it's this difference between what we in real life see as a problem and what characters in a story are bound to. I guess there's different physics involved you can say. and believability has more to do with our expectations being fulfilled within what has already been established than with looking at anything rationally.
Cuz you'll see people a lot of times going "Well, why wouldn't this happen? that's what seems most likely?" but that's just not story logic. and we're talking about a story and trying to figure out the best way to tell it is.
let the speculation continue
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