What breaks the enchantment?

[the phantom]

Davem is right about many readers who break the enchantment themselves when it isn't necessary.

A lot of people, not just when they read but in the real world as well, walk around with a lot of chips on their shoulder, and they seem to want people to knock them off. They are always ready to be shocked or insulted by something that doesn't chime with them. They love to be offended, and will go over a book, a movie, or a conversation with a fine toothed comb and try to find things that make them mad.

These people obviously are going to have an impossible time being entirely enchanted with Tolkien's books like Davem. The Eowyn thing that people have mentioned, the issue of some people or species (elves) being better than others- there are some people that are just never going to get past things like that if they don't entirely agree with them. These people either don't want to (or are incapable of) doing what I call "glossing over".

When I am watching a movie, I always try as hard as I can to be sucked in and be enchanted. Whenever a character expresses some opinion that I think is stupid, I don't think about it. I bat it aside. I sort of ignore it. As long as the enchantment-breaker is something minor (in other words, as long as it is not the primary focus or theme of the movie/book), I do not allow it to break my enchantment.

Speaking for myself, I can't think of anything which 'broke the spell' - the effect was rather the opposite - I even carried some of the enchantment out of the secondary world with me, which changed the way I experienced the primary world.....

Me too.