: Re: How do authors maintain suspension of disbelief for exaggerated situations or characters I'm writing about a creature who's near godlike, has a twisted sense of humor, and can basically take any

@Tiffany377

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The best way to go about it would be for your characters to react like a real person would.(Well you should mostly always do that eitherway). If you want your characters to be scared then the threat must be scary. The quickest way you will lose your reader is if your characters don't respond as expected. (Mind that each character will have a different reaction). If you want them to be scared of your monster, and by extension your readers, your monster must do something scary but as you said correctly it must not break their supsension of disbelief.
One way of breaking the supsension is by breaking rules you have already established.(Characters misunderstanding rules and learning they were wrong doesn't belong in thiscase, but such cases should handled with care).Since your world doesn't have any rules or expections of thereof, since its basically earth(if I understand correctly) + a monster , you won't have that issue unless you go in winded explanations without reason.

A bit mystery about a scary monster isn't just good practise , it's
necessary. Fear stems from the unknown.

Another way of breaking it I'd say , is if it's abilities seem too tailored for the plot, too convenient.
Lastly from your explanation in my mind the monster, could very well be something out of Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. A series so ripe with absurd things that not once felt like breaking my immersion. Probably because of constitency. Everything is absurd all the time so they don't strike off as something not possible in the mind of the reader.
Lastly I'd say you are presented with a nice option here. People from my experience are more easily immersed in a comedic world, because their expectations of consistency and realism take a seat in favor of the jokes. So if you are going for an IT ,scary story you could start off light hearted and comedy like and then subvert everything and go full cosmic horror, revealing the true nature of your world.

To sum it up
Be consistent in your world
Realistic reactions from your characters
Go for a comedic approach at the start at least
And for god sake don't explain too much about the monster, or too little in that regard, find a balance that allows your protaginsts to interact in interesting ways with it while keeping an air of mystery to its true nature.

Easy right? Well no. Fun and Interesting ? Hell yeah!

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