It's interesting you bring up the Batman example, because when I saw it, the three of us had totally different reactions to that exact skip: I thought it was funny but dumb (did he flap his arms real hard?); one friend wasn't bothered; and the other friend hated it and declared it a glaring flaw.
What this says to me is that readers and viewers evaluate the fundamental logics of fantasy media very differently. For some people, a journey across the world is an obstacle in the way of the story, and they're very pleased that Batman can Bat-wave his hands and skip to the good parts. Some people think that a jump like that is a flaw in the internal logic, but not a big one (I'm in this camp, since I think it's possible for the viewer to fill in what happened). And some people want you to do the math. What that math is, of course, depends on how much that math has been valued in other places in the book.
A good example of doing the math, I think, is The Matrix (which I am now about to spoil, for all two of you who have never seen it). The math I'm interested in here is the fact that in the first movie, getting out of the matrix is always hard. It never gets easier to escape, even when the narrative might like to jump back to the real world. That means that every time someone needs to leave the matrix, they show the math. It's part of what makes the first movie so tense and real (and it falls a little by the wayside in later movies... but I digress).
TL;DR: I think what matters is less whether you show the math, but whether you've already established that Batman can do his Bat-math and make it go away or not.
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yati
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Date: 2012-07-31 08:37 pm (UTC)What this says to me is that readers and viewers evaluate the fundamental logics of fantasy media very differently. For some people, a journey across the world is an obstacle in the way of the story, and they're very pleased that Batman can Bat-wave his hands and skip to the good parts. Some people think that a jump like that is a flaw in the internal logic, but not a big one (I'm in this camp, since I think it's possible for the viewer to fill in what happened). And some people want you to do the math. What that math is, of course, depends on how much that math has been valued in other places in the book.
A good example of doing the math, I think, is The Matrix (which I am now about to spoil, for all two of you who have never seen it). The math I'm interested in here is the fact that in the first movie, getting out of the matrix is always hard. It never gets easier to escape, even when the narrative might like to jump back to the real world. That means that every time someone needs to leave the matrix, they show the math. It's part of what makes the first movie so tense and real (and it falls a little by the wayside in later movies... but I digress).
TL;DR: I think what matters is less whether you show the math, but whether you've already established that Batman can do his Bat-math and make it go away or not.