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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/15891
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Realism has several components. Different ones dominate in different genres/settings _and_ among individual readers.

- (Real) setting accuracy: If you're describing a real place or a time in history, people who know something about that will respond based on how closely you match what they know. If there isn't a lot of noise and traffic on your mid-day NYC streets (and there isn't a plot element that explains that), for example, people aren't going to buy that.

- Setting plausibility: This is the case you've identified. Basic errors of credibility -- e.g. routine snowstorms in terran tropical climes -- will be noticed by everybody and bother some. Others will be less obvious to some -- e.g. giant creatures that disregard the square-cube law -- but will be _just as disruptive_ as the basic ones _to the people who know_. This also applies to consequences of plot points; people with medical knowledge may know that your pandemic isn't credible, scientists may know that your meteor strike wouldn't produce the effect you describe, and so on. You need to decide how important this is to your audience.

- Behavior plausibility: Unless you do a lot of stage-setting to the contrary, people will generally expect your characters to act like people. Your readers have expectations about how "Joe Average Person" would behave in a given situation; that expectation may be reasonable or unreasonable, or uninformed because your characters _are_ different, but this is what they'll be looking for. Seemingly-rational characters behaving irrationally, experts who don't seem to know the basics of their fields, and so on disturb some readers.

- "Magic" plausibility: People are generally willing to go along with a fantastical setting if they think it's internally consistent. The sorcery in your story can be completely unrealistic (from our perspective) but realistic _within your story_. You do that by exposing the important rules of your world (ideally through illustration, not long exposition) and then _staying consistent with that_.

Original score: 6