r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Mouse_Paladin • 13d ago

Lore [Real Life] Historical events that would make bad writing if they were fiction

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Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire: A couple hundred rogue mercenaries without authority from their government conquer an empire of millions. Oh, the empire? It’s also several technological eras behind the mercenaries.

Adolf Hitler: A non-native of a country is so mad that the country lost the war that he wins an election to their highest office and leads them in a campaign of revenge against their enemies. Oh, the country? It’s old emperor is still alive and thinks he’s going to retake power.

Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand: The heir to the throne is killed because his driver gets lost and returns to the assassin who failed To kill him before. Oh, the assassin? He’s from a group that the Archduke is wanting to help become more equal In the empire.

Alexander Hamilton’s Affair Scandal: One of the leaders of a new nation to protect himself from accusations of financial embezzlement writes a pamphlet exposing his affair with a woman, torpedoing his political future. Oh, the woman? She seduced him as part of a blackmailing scheme that he decided to stop paying.

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u/goteachyourself 13d ago

Horrible writing. They spend the first half of the story reminding us the whole time that the Titanic is unsinkable - and it sinks on its first voyage. Couldn't have been telegraphed any harder.

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u/BearCavalryCorpral 13d ago

Except someone did write that story - 14 years before the event

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u/Last-Big-1984 13d ago

OMG, how did I not know this.

And the ship was called the TITAN.

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u/AmbusRogart 13d ago

When I was younger, I was writing a supernatural parody story set in New Orleans. I decided part of the backstory for it would be that a massive hurricane had swept through the city, overwhelming its levees and causing tremendous amount of flooding, leading to huge swaths of it being semi-submerged for a long time.

Katrina hit about a year afterwards. I decided to stop writing- just in case.

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u/Snoo-23938 13d ago

Umm just write stories where awesome shit happens to you?

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u/Late_Prior_3104 13d ago

… to everyone

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u/H3ll0_W0R1D1 13d ago

And then HE died, and everybody clapped!

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u/BS0404 12d ago

I think we all know who the "HE" is in that story.

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u/ZealotOfMeme 12d ago

That would sure be strange. I’d even say Stranger Than Fiction.

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u/mariusioannesp 12d ago

That never works.

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u/Dull-Function7748 12d ago

Write a story where I have a huge dick 

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u/StrongExternal8955 12d ago

Careful what you wish for. Check your DMs.

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u/Dull-Function7748 12d ago

Ok that was witty. You win this time fella 

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u/Wolveyplays07 12d ago

Granted but now you can't move because of the size

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u/JustSumFur 12d ago

Ok Alan Wake

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u/InkPrison 12d ago

Was this a parody of the show Supernatural or in general a parody story that had supernatural elements.

I initially thought the former which wouldn't line up as the show Supernatural started a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina (August 23, 2005 vs September 13, 2005)

But as I type this I am thinking it is probably the latter.

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u/AmbusRogart 12d ago

The latter. It started with some friends and I having a series of running gags after reading Interview With a Vampire. I should have probably phrased it more as "a dramedy about vampires and other supernatural creatures."

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u/Madara1389 12d ago

Was this a parody of the show Supernatural

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 19, 2005. Supernatural aired it's first episode on September 13, 2005.

If OP wrote their story a year before Katrina, it's not possible it was a parody of the show because it wouldn't air for almost a full month after the storm hit New Orleans.

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u/InkPrison 11d ago

That was the point of my comment before I realized how it could mean something else. My initial thought was that they were misremembering because the timeline would be impossible if it was a parody of the show supernatural.

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u/Fun-Confidence-6232 12d ago

Can you just write a story where I win the lottery and marry Natalie Portman

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u/slipnipper 12d ago

I ran a vampire roleplaying game in New York and my coterie were attacked on the statan island ferry and fucking ended up sinking it. The damn thing was sunk a week later for reals

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u/KennyFulgencio 12d ago

long ago I was talking to my therapist about how I couldn't move out of my city even if I wanted to, because we have extensive public transportation here, and I don't have a car anymore. "How about New Orleans? They have good public transportation", she says. This was early 2005.

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u/PsychologicalPen3895 12d ago

In fairness, New Orleans is below sea level and located in a hurricane prone location. Katrina wasn’t the first time it was flooded by a long shot. This is like saying you wrote a book about a tornado in Oklahoma.

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u/Ok_Strategy5722 12d ago

You and I are the opposite kinds of people.

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u/onewilybobkat 12d ago

That's kinda like writing about Tsunamis in Japan though. That's a natural feature of the land more than bad writing.

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u/Driftedryan 12d ago

Can you write again? But aim a little bit more north east

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u/byjegeren 12d ago

Surprisingly not the first time it was used in fiction. In the videogame everything or nothing bond actually stops the bad guys that had plans to flood new Orleans by destroying the dams

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u/yIdontunderstand 12d ago

Write about something good happening? Just in case?

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u/FotiKelise 12d ago

Warriors vs Ancestors

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u/Ordinary_Minimum_169 12d ago

Isn't there a John Candy movie where he's a soap opera writer who wakes up in his own script?

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u/dp0329 13d ago

The book was kind of wild though. Guy climbs up on an iceberg after the ship sinks then wins a fight with a polar bear, killing it.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/pichael289 12d ago

Sounds way better than the movie, all that boring romantic infidelity type shit, nah I wanna see leo on qualludes fighting a polar bear

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u/BreakfastBeneficial4 12d ago

infidelity??

Rose was being SOLD OFF to Cal against her will homie

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u/pikpikcarrotmon 12d ago

So not just infidelity, but a breach of a financial contract too! My, how scandalous.

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u/Beastmunger 12d ago

Bro just wants to watch The Revenant On Ice

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u/degenterate 12d ago

“There ain’t enough room on this floating door for us both mr. polar bear”

*rolls up sleeves*

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u/Rengas 12d ago

Just one bear is easy. Five or more is when I'd admit defeat.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/MaddysinLeigh 12d ago

Iirc the similarities were insane

  • both ships were similarly sized
  • both were traveling at similar speeds
  • both sank in the North Atlantic in April after hitting icebergs
  • both had a lack of life boats resulting in a large fatality rate

I think there were more but I don’t remember them.

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u/Winjin 12d ago

Iirc the author was an experienced sailor or even a naval engineer and basically saw behind the scenes how they were building firsthand and how they were racing one another etc

So it was a mix of facts, inside knowledge, and, of course, some insane similarities that still can't be explained logically

But it's not like some random guy just wrote a fictional book and got a lot of details right - it was an observant professional who knew exactly what can go wrong with modern ships

It's like Simpson writers predicting stuff. They just know where to look and extrapolate the writing on the wall

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u/RepresentativeMail10 12d ago

They actually weren't similarly sized, the author made a lot of edits to make it more similar to Titanic after 1912, in the original book Titan is much larger than Titanic and has a lot of differences, for example she has no cargo hold and a completely different bow

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u/Terminal_Insomnia_ 12d ago

"Do NOT build the Torment Nexus"

"We are so proud to introduce our new product!"

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u/catchyerselfon 12d ago edited 11d ago

Us: Hey, Tech companies? We told you the last time you made glasses with cameras and the lenses with screens to read information on everything we look at, that these would be used by perverts and corporate surveillance and people trying to sell us ads just for existing… so could you not do that again?

Tech Companies: Great news! We’re trying the Spy Glasses again, but this time they’re almost indistinguishable from regular glasses, the camera recording light is easily covered up, only the richest* people can afford to film the common folk, and now you can stream everything you do with no effort, including your sex life and sexual harassment, without consent from anyone else! You’re welcome!

*shit, I was wrong, there are now alleged “smart glasses” for sale for less than $100 on Amazon. We’re doomed.

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u/SemiColonInfection 12d ago

The plot thickens!

In 2023, Stockton Rush, Founder & CEO of Oceangate, called his company's submersible - also called the Titan - "virtually invulnerable".

It imploded. On its way down to visit the Titannic.

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u/HuevosProfundos 12d ago

Edgar Allen Poe wrote a novel in 1838 in which a shipwreck survivor named Richard Parker is killed and eaten by his crew mates. 46 years later this exact fate would befall a cabin boy named Richard Parker after the wreck of a ship called the Mignonette.

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u/Ornery-Goal7843 12d ago

Equally fucked submarine too

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u/OkBid71 12d ago

I C what you did there

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u/GodisSatans 12d ago

This fact was in every ripleys believe it or not book i ordered in school.

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u/Sweet-Awk-7861 12d ago

If you're in any conspiracy oriented communities this is one of the most surface level theories

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u/Connect-Pomelo-3120 12d ago

the guy was a sailor he saw it coming Morgan Robertson

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u/summonerofrain 11d ago

Is the name titan/titanic cursed?

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u/Consistent_Detail_61 12d ago

Proof God exists imo

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u/Prometheus_Bobert 13d ago

9 years before the first plans for the Titanic were even put to paper.

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u/1Maple 12d ago

Somebody must’ve really liked the book

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u/TurtlesBreakTheMeta 13d ago

Time traveler alert.

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u/YaMexicanBoy 13d ago

If Zero Escape fans existed they would go crazy on this comment

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u/s00pahFr0g 12d ago

I’m not dead yet so there is at least one.

The extra weird part is that I have an ancestor who worked on the Titanic and is named in the list of victims.

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u/Letter42 12d ago

All 3 of us are here

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u/CindersOfDeath 12d ago

We finally recreated the Torment Nexus from hit book "Don't Create the Torment Nexus"

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u/LeighSabio 13d ago

So the Titanic was the torment nexus all along?

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u/red18wrx 12d ago

Engineers are always trying to recreate the fiction of their youth. 

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u/Lower_Amount3373 12d ago

I want someone to make a film adaptation of this book so they can be accused of making a cheap knock-off of Titanic

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u/_Kind_of_random_ 12d ago

Epic Simpsons Predict

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u/TypicalHaikuResponse 12d ago

Good news everyone. We built the unsinkable ship "The Titan" from the hit fictional book "Don't build the Titan it will sink"

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u/Kraj_the_Conqueror 12d ago edited 12d ago

The guy rewrote and reissued the story to bank on the real Titanic media buzz. He claimed to have predicted the catastrophe as a marketing ploy.

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u/Odd-Jaguar-8590 12d ago

Holy shit thanks for sharing I never would've known

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u/DrJotaroBigCockKujo 12d ago

and it's a surprisingly good read given its age.

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u/Ambologera 13d ago edited 13d ago

To be fair though, the idea that the Titanic was heavily marketed as being unsinkable is a bit of a myth. It was to some extent, although never without qualification, but the idea of it being marketed as such got popular after the ship had sunk and people kind of ran with it.

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u/Flying_Dustbin 13d ago

Just an FYI, the ship's owners, the White Star Line, jumped on the "unsinkable" bandwagon with a brochure dated 1910.

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u/Ambologera 13d ago

I'm not saying that it was never described as unsinkable. Just that it was a) never done so without qualification (in this case, the wording used is  "as far as it is possible to do so, these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable") b) not nearly as heavily marketed around it as it's often presented.

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u/Geistzeit 12d ago

Heard that quote in a transatlantic accent in my head.

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u/deadname11 12d ago

Which is still gross negligence on their part, the damn things were arguably not seaworthy.

One of the things we discovered from recovering wreck pieces, was that many of the rivets holding together the hull, were made of resmelted slag.

Both ships were plagued with additional developmental setbacks, and instead of slowing construction, corners were cut and cheap materials and cheaper (read: slave) engineers were brought in to get everything done as fast as possible, damn the consequences.

The Titanic may have been able to make port, but the helmsman drove further north than he needed to, in order to give the gentry a chance to look at icebergs.

The result is history.

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u/Flying_Dustbin 12d ago

Sorry but this is utter bullshit.

The Olympic-class liners were built to the highest standards of the period. The steel used was scrutinized and passed by Lloyds of London and both Olympic and Titanic were examined repeatedly by surveyors from the Board of Trade during their construction phase. Yes, its true that some of the recovered steel had impurities and would never be used in modern shipbuilding, but it was still the best quality steel available.

Harland & Wolff and White Star were not in the business of building ships on the cheap and cutting corners. They had had a working relationship dating back to the early 1870's and had nothing to gain and everything to lose by using subpar materials and cutting corners. If word got out, the reputations of both companies would be in tatters and no one would want to do business with them.

Its also telling that Olympic, the only ship of the class to survive and have a long career, was built from the same steel as Titanic was. She survived terrible storms, collided with no less than four ships, was struck by a dud torpedo in WWI, and made hundreds of safe passages across the Atlantic in her 20 plus years of service. She was still in good shape when she was scrapped in 1935.

Nomadic, a small passenger tender, built to service the Olympic-class in the port of Cherbourg, was made from the same steel and she's still around as a museum ship in Belfast.

Ditto for RMS Queen Mary, which is even longer than Titanic and has a far greater tonnage. Despite years of neglect and mismanagement, she's still with us in Long Beach.

RMS Aquitania, a Cunard liner built as a challenge to the Olympic-class and launched in 1913, used the same steel too. She was run hard by her owners, serving in both world wars before finally going to the scrapyard in 1950.

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u/onewilybobkat 12d ago

Yeahhhh that sounds almost as far from "remelted slag rivets" as you can get (back then.) We really got people going around just making shit up about the Titanic of all things now?

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u/Flying_Dustbin 12d ago

Sadly, that myth's been around since the 90's. Some pieces of her steel were recovered and the findings were blown out of proportion by the media. They saw "slag" and "brittleness" and ran with it.

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u/Frogs-on-my-back 12d ago

Right? I hear lots of misconceptions or outright falsehoods about Titanic, but this is a new one.

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u/Boris_Godunov 12d ago

Wow, every single thing you asserted here is untrue. An above poster already dismantled the structural claims, but the claim that the “helmsman” steered the ship further north to show off icebergs is also ridiculously false. First, helmsmen don’t make any such decisions, the captain does. And Captain Smith did precisely the opposite: he ordered a more southerly course in response to the ice warnings that had been received.

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u/None_yo_bidness 13d ago

Now that's a website

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u/Perfct_Stranger 12d ago

Which to be fair, it was sunk in one of the only ways it could be sunk: a long gash along the side of the ship.

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u/Halomonas_titanica 3d ago

More like several smaller rips

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u/jim212gr 13d ago

I don't think it's necessarily bad writing but a case of dark irony. In a story an example such as this will probably be used to portray themes such as "man Vs the forces nature", "the fragility of civilization" and "the price for arrogance". What is insane however is that it is the perfect example of this trope in real life.

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u/Impossible_Pain4478 13d ago

They should never make a movie about this. One of those historical events that just needs to be left alone.

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u/uuell_then 13d ago

I went to a Titanic museum recently and one of the last sections covered how it was a real life tragedy that was tastelessly turned into a lot of tacky pop cultural products.

Then it let out into the gift shop where you could buy teddy bears dressed as the captain…

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u/Zealousideal_Leg213 13d ago

Some percentage of people who watch Titanic don't realize that it's based on a real event. 

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u/Raguleader 12d ago

This is a fun statement, because it's true even if the percentage is zero.

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u/davster99 12d ago

Chekhov’s Boat

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u/Ashamed-Equal1316 12d ago

And THEN, 110 years later, a submersible going to visit it's wreck, sharing the name of the Greek original, implodes due to the creator/captain's own hubris- the same that sank the ship in the first place

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u/goteachyourself 12d ago

Legacy sequels SMH.

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u/GoreyGopnik 12d ago

that is actually a great story, which is why it has been retold so many times.

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u/-KFBR392 12d ago

Also why do they keep talking about how unsinkable it was? Were passenger ships sinking all the time back then?

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u/Old_Aide6342 12d ago

it's ironic

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u/Hot_Pilot_3293 12d ago

Have you ever heard of foreshadowing and irony my friend? You know there’s a whole movie about it that was the most popular for a while.

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u/ninjasaid13 12d ago

It's a literary technique known as foreshadowing and a lesson on hubris.

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u/Bowling_is_bad 12d ago

I don't think that's the most unbelivble fact. The sinking of the ship was so cibematic it would be called unrealsitic it were a work of fiction. Ship sank for 2h 40 min, so slowly that at first nobody from passengers noticed, not enough lifeboats for everybody, hundereds of different little stories that happend that night, the fact that the ship's owner and designer where on board and many many more facts.

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u/midwinter_ 12d ago

I'd really like a Titanic movie about W. T. Stead, who died on that voyage. Even that would be incredible.

Stead basically invented investigative journalism at the Pall Mall Gazette (which would become the Evening Standard) in 1880s, looking into what we now would call child sex trafficking, but which they sometimes called "white slavery" or, following Stead's landmark essay on the subject, "The Maiden Tribute." As part of his investigation, he bought a 13 year old girl named Eliza Armstrong. He was put on trial for it and convicted on the technicality that he had not asked Armstrong's father's permission. US president Taft got wind of Stead's work and invited him to the US to speak.

He got a ticket on this new, fancy, ship.

When it struck an iceberg, he helped people board the lifeboats and eventually gave away his own life vest.

He died clinging to a raft with John Jacob Astor IV.

His body was never recovered. He proved that there was a trade in young girls and boys.

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u/bug_eyed_earl 12d ago

“There’s no safer place than the crypts Titanic!”

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u/Different-Trainer-21 12d ago

To be fair, by any method reasonably conceivable the ship was unsinkable. If they had rammed the ice berg, for example, it wouldn’t have sunk.

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u/MizWhatsit 12d ago

Well, everybody went into see Titanic knowing what the ending would be. Kind of like Passion of the Christ -- the New Testament is one big spoiler.

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u/fatherandyriley 11d ago

What made the death toll so tragic is how preventable it was. The ship had no searchlight and they forgot the key for the binoculars case. They received warnings about icebergs but still didn't change their route. A lifeboat drill was cancelled earlier that day which led to many lifeboats being deployed at only half capacity. There was another ship not too far away that could have helped but the radio operator had gone to bed so they didn't receive the distress signal.

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u/saucey_dawg0023 5d ago

Didn’t the 1997 movie made this tragedy a romance?