The Prominence of VFX

I discovered the book Digital Storytelling by Shilo McClean, which scarily seems to answer a lot of my questions about VFX and narrative.
She classes VFX in 8 categories - Invisible, Seamless, Documentary, Exaggerated, Fantastical, Surreal, New Tradionalist and HyperReal!

Mostly I have been stuck talking like a critic - in terms of prominence and spectacle but this beek has really opened up the language for me!  McClean has anylised of 500 films to come up with these categories and I am forever grateful.

Going with these I was able to look at things a different way and think about why it is that spectacular effects can draw such negative criticism.

If there is a scale of prominence upon which each of these effects can sit, or rather a scale of awareness or activity, with regards to plot then the plot becomes the deciding factor in what is or is not acceptable to an audience.  This ties right back to Stephen Prince's idea of Perceptual Reality because an audience can be asked to believe almost anything so long as the correct conventions have been set up before hand.  The plot weaves a line through this scale, running the gamut of VFX in the process.  Should any effect appear to have more weight than the plot will be inevitably right right of course and it may be hard to recover an audience from such a thing.  The planet example above is the perfect metaphor - the more "mass" the effect has the greater the gravitational "pull" it has on the plot.