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001 - In Defense of Fantasy

The Prancing Pony Podcast

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What Is a Willing Suspension of Disbelief?

i want to start by talking about what secondary belief is a reaction to. And i won't spend too much time on this, but there's a phrase that many people learn in english class called willing suspension of disbelief. Tolkin rejects this notion and says that we are not suspending disbelief. He actually says, the moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken. The magic, or rather, art, has failed. We are engaging in secondary belief. It it's an active decision to believe in a secondary world which your mind can enter. Those are the professor's words, e, and inside that world, what you read is true to the laws of that world - internal consistency. Ye

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