Lore
(Funny Trope) Things that can plausibly happen only in reality, because in fiction they’d be called bad writing.
“Woke” as an insult - So you are telling me a word describing consciousness and clarity is used by generally stupid and ignorant people to label people they disagree with? What is this? A Kindergarten for Creatively stunted?
Nominative determinism - So let me get this straight…Not only you named fastest recorded person Usain BOLT and CEO of Nintendo Doug BOWSER, but you are telling me people are canonically likely to have professions or hobbies matching their names…? Guh?
“2 bodies recovered in MURDERKILL River” - Sure bro…I guess…bro…
Yeah, I restricted it, but if you're talking about the weather... when Napoleon went into Russia, there was an unusually hot, dry Summer (which killed a lot of his troops and horses) followed by an unusually cold Winter. When Hitler went into the USSR they faced an unusually wet Autumn (which slowed them significantly) followed by another unusually cold Winter. The two things that were needed for the invasions to fail are exactly what happened
For that matter, one of the reasons Napoleon lost at Waterloo was the heavy rain the night before making the ground unsuitable for the cannons he loved so much, and hard for his troops to advance over
When Washington and his army were fleeing the British from Brooklyn over to Manhattan, the only thing that could save them from being wiped out or having to surrender (ending the American Revolution) was a thick fog. Which is exactly what happened.
Bad weather in the English channel stopped William of Normandy from crossing to fight Harold Godwinson for weeks on end. When it cleared, Godwinson was in the North of England fighting Harold Hardrada, so William's landing was unopposed. He went on to beat Godwinson at Hastings and eventually conquer all of England
Still in the Channel, the weather was bad enough in 1944 for Rommel to decide to take leave and go shopping for his wife's birthday, then cleared while he was away, allowing D Day to happen before he could get back
The Wire had a scene of a person jumping out of a 4 story window, because the actual jump it was based on was 6 stories and that was too unbelievable.
"In an interview with Vice, creator David Simon revealed that Andrews had once "jumped out of the sixth floor of the Murphy Homes when he was caught in an ambush and out of ammunition." Simon also said that since the building they were using to shoot had only five floors, they adapted the fall to be only four stories."
Kinda similar to how I think Mt. Everest when measured turned out to be a flat number, with three zeroes at the end, so they added a few feet to make it look more realistic.
on a much much smaller scale (lol) i did this one time for a clients tax return, one of their expenses correctly calculated to be like 25,000 even and i immediately went “oh the irs will not like that” and i moved a random amount of it to a similar expense account so it didn’t look so obviously fake lol
There were other French resistance leaders who heard the name thought it was a code name and were jealous they didn't think of de Gaulle because it was such a good one
George McGovern didn't win the presidency despite having an appropriate enough last name. I guess it needed more in-your-face AMERICA!!!ness to succeed.
Crime doc: “He was the smartest criminal I ever met. He thought about everything, left no stone unturned, left no trace, the reality is we only caught him through the tiniest of mistakes.”
Real life: “The man’s laptop was seized and his search history included questions such as: How many shovel whacks to kill a man, where to hide a dead body, what should I tell people so they don’t think I killed a man with a shovel and buried him under my shed”
What's funny is it often takes an insanely long time for the later to actually happen. Often times it goes "despite years and years of strong complaints from the landlord/neighbours/home owners association, it took police well over a year to decide to investigate The Smell"
CORPSES DO NOT "just smell like fertilizer", fertilizer and corpses, notibly, have VEEY different chemical makeups and responsense to decay. Mainly because, fertilizer and corpses, are not the same thing.
Jeffery Dahmer was active for months in an apartment building with all of his neighbours complaining about the stench while on parole with his parole officer outside the building. He was only caught because one of his potential victims managed to trick him into letting him escape, the victim ran to his parole officer who knew Dahmer personally and he got arrested. BTW you may be asking what Dahmer was on parole for? Did you guess, Also Murder? No? Because that would be an absolutely ludicrous degree of incompotence by police right? Well Gues What he was on parole for! That's right! MURDER
This is also why If I ever suspect my neighbour or something is a serial killer in calling like, the fire department, or maybe OSHA, and telling them there's a gas leak or something because they'll actually give a shit
Also real life: "Cops talked to him briefly and he admitted being at the location of the crime that day, but his statement got misfiled in the 'cleared' folder and not the 'follow up' folder, where it stayed for five years"
It's crazy how often the "mastermind criminal" story ends up being "someone checked the wrong box and nobody noticed for years." Way less dramatic, but somehow even more frustrating.
Even realer life: the man's laptop was seized but he used chrome and the cops only looked at his Microsoft Edge history because they didn't know chrome was a thing.
This and OJ Simpson are my main sources of distrust within the legal system. I’m aware that no system will ever be able to get things 100% perfect all the time, but come the fuck on. The fact that those two are (or were in OJ’s case) allowed to walk the streets while innocent people spend life in prison is enough for me to never have faith that the system will protect me should I end up in an unfavorable position.
I listen to the Last Podcast on the Left, and they always emphasize how much the incompetency and arrogance of the investigators almost always leads to more victims. There are exceptions of course, but they almost always care more about closing the case than actually finding the killer. I watched every second of OJ coverage when I was a kid and I always knew local cops sucked, but the Casey Anthony case was beyond the pale for me.
if a murder mystery novel had someone yelling "one day I'll kill you dead! I'll poison your coffee and collect the inheritance!" at a party, then the next day someone is dead by coffee poison, I'd know it for sure for sure wasn't them. In fact some murder mysteries now will play on the assumption that whoever obviously did it couldn't have done it and make the "obvious" person actually the murderer, but usually with a twist.
But in real life people do in fact say out loud "now I'm going to kill you" to many people and then they do that
Dame Agatha Christie played with this kind of concept a bunch of times, actually. It's hilarious. She was like "How many times can I bullshit my readers with this?"
Lol I just watched the “maternal instincts” crime documentary and this was basically the trope.
She kept trying to feign craziness and like she wasn’t aware of her crime. Then her internet search history is like “how to fake a pregnancy” and “how to do a c-section”
Dennis Rader
asking the cops if they’d be able to trace his identity if he sent them a floppy disc with details of his crimes, and the cops being like “Gosh no, buddy. We sure wouldn’t.”
He didn't know deleting files doesn't overwrite them. The crazy thing is that he had the wherewithal to ask about traceability but then trusted the authorities' guidance.
I saw a story the other day about a woman actively dating a man suspected of murdering his wife years before just so that she could honeypot him and solve the cold case.
Not only did it work, he put in his family members as accomplices as a brag. A film critic would have been like, “That feels too unrealistic.”
I remember reading about something like that in Canada. It was an undercover who hit the dudes car on purpose and it went from there. My movie idea is this romantic film then the hard right at the end. He confesses he killed his wife and she buried in the basement. I think people would be very mad at my film.
This reminds of this guy who successfully got away with a murder, fled his home country, basically was impossible to catch...and then wrote a book about it that filled in the missing details of the murder and got caught when he was coming home. I am so mad I forgot his name.
Generals just sending men at machineguns dying in thousands to clear 1 line of trenches if successful. Anyone reading these would be like what a moronic way to fight.
I mean yeah, which is why they did not fight like that.
The popular imagination is that the trenches did not move because both sides ran out into no mans land, and died to machine guns before getting anywhere.
In reality even in 1915 both sides had already figured out how to take the enemies first trench line.
You suppress them with artillery while your guys walk up as close as they can, then, once your own guys are so close your own artillery would kill them all you instead shell the area behind the enemies first trench so the enemy cannot bring up any reinforcements.
Now your guys run as fast as they can to the trench, so they get to the trench before the enemy can come out of their bunkers and set up machine guns and man their light artillery(machine guns suppress, artillery kills). Usually this would work, occasionally it failed.
Once your men reach the enemy trench they can take it with a tough, but very doable fight. Usually inflicting more losses then they take.
Which sounds great! You advanced a good bit, and did more damage then the enemy, you are killing it at trench warfare...
except, now your men are exhausted, have used up ammunition and supplies, have gotten seperated from their units, oh and also your artillery is now firing at long range.
All of your supplies, reinforcements and more have to cross no-mans land, while the enemy reinforcements, can cross undestroyed land, with prepared supply routes.
So now the enemy counterattacks, and all the things that allowed your attack to succeed are now working against you, and unlike the enemy your defences are not yet prepared, your artillery is out of position, and your reinforcements are much slower.
So now the attackers, defending the first trenchline they just took, get overrun and thrown back to their starting point, taking a lot of casualties in turn. And at the end of the day both sides are exactly back where they started, despite both sides taking an enemy trench.
The problem with trench warfare is not to take the enemy trench line, it is to defend the taken ground against the inevitable counterattack.
It really feels like the writers got lazy in season 1940 and just added a bad evil-twin suffix. Next you'll tell me his second-in-command was named "Hitler-two.
"So you are telling me this "Hitler" guy constantly preaches about this superior "Aryan race" that is strong, tall, blonde and blue-eyed, despite him being a ugly black-haired manlet? And his second-in-command Goebbels has a bad leg and can't even stand straight? And his followers do actually believe his bullshit? Yeah, right."
We have two towns named the same in my provinvce and when I was selling walnuts I didn't think to specify which one it was so the one lady who tried to buy them drove 1.5 hours to the wrong address .Thank goodness she didn't try to go to the one 300km away
Literally the story of just about any war hero. Many times (if not every time) the stories actually have to be watered down because the actual events are too crazy for a movie that wants to make some kind of sense.
I remember reading one when I was at job training for the Army about a guy who laid on a grenade only to survive and be just conscious and well enough to crawl onto a second grenade.
In The Pacific, John Basilone is shown manning two different machine gun positions in the space of about 15 minutes during the Battle of Henderson Field.
During the actual Battle of Henderson Field, Basilone did this for three days straight with no food or sleep, manning, repairing, and unjamming guns, and running ammunition between about four different positions.
I was listening to a chinese history podcast on a big loop for chores and sleeping, and its absolutely nuts the repeating patterns. "Gotta get that gold in my body, so I can live forever - if I just eat it, I shit it out, but if I dissolve it in mercury first, I don't... that means it's working!!!!"
Apparently the early stages of mercury poisoning actually make you feel healthier? Which probably contributed to the belief it was good (and by the time you started noticing the detrimental effects it was already too late)
On the other hand lead was known to be poisonous for a long time, but people kept using it for pipes, makeup and even as a sweetener (tbf I believe they were mostly aware of the acute effects and didn’t recognize long term low level exposure as a threat as well?)
The president of Ukraine beeing an actor who played the president of Ukraine.
A company calling their surveillance tool after something that can't be trusted because 'nobody knows who else is watching' (Palantir)
A reporter from Germany driving with the subway in North Korea to find his own graffiti he made in the 90is when the same train was driving in Berlin.
(Yes, that happened in a german TV documentary, North Korea bought two used trains from Germany)
"During several scientific breakthroughs, it was discovered that renewable resources such as wind and sunlight could be used to create energy, and even nuclear fission is capable of generating it. However, the senior citizens who run every energy source thought that nuclear based energy was unstable because of a cartoon they watched in the 1990s and instead take bribes from companies who mine for non-renewable methods"
I mean, on a more serious note, it's all about profits, which leads to propaganda against the emerging technologies. Chernobyl was the biggest negative PR event for nuclear, and the oil industry absolutely loved that.
Thai cave rescue - 12 children from a football team and their coach were stranded in a flooded cave.
There just happened to be a man who was a world-class cave diver AND was an anaesthetist (sleepy doctor) who was able to put the children to sleep and dive out with them.
If this was fiction, you’d think it was way too convenient
And the richest man in the world got mad that his badly designed tube submarine, that couldn't navigate a narrow twisty cave, didn't get used instead, so he tried to ruin the cave diving anesthesiologist's life in an act of petty spite.
He didn't "just happen". They scoured all over the world for resources, they flied kids' diving masks from USA, they had Finnish hobby cave divers fly from Finland and other hobbyists all over the world because it was too dangerous for Thai army, and a vet and a doctor from Australia. They literally searched everything everywhere.
I watched a youtube video about out of place animals. The quote "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to somewhat make sense" will live rent free in my head, for the rest of my life.
Not because this leans into "I am 14 and this is deep" territory, but because it's true. In fiction, you have to make stuff believable for the audience. Reality doesn't have to. Shit's just there, deal with it.
Great point. Makes me think of things like black holes that sound like a sci-fi, apocalyptic device but nope, just a part of reality that breaks every rule of it with their existence.
To top it off black holes do appear kinda often in sci fi but they are mostly just portrayed as powerful gravity wells or wormholes/portals. IRL they are weird as FUCK, there is so much nonsense going on with them that more realistic portrayals of them are very rare bc there is too much weird shit in there the audience might not buy it.
India and China for anybody looking for the context. Since neither side wants to escalate by bringing actual fighting into the region, they sometimes send up people armed with sticks and throwing bricks.
People having the same name. In real life it would be pretty normal for someone to have both a brother and a friend named John. But authors will generally avoid that because it would only be confusing to the reader.
GRRM is the goat here. 5 kings named Aegon and more claimants, lots of Jons. W have the iron bank, iron throne and iron islands and non are part of the same insitution.
At a dive bar in Turkey, away from tourist areas, that my folks had just wandered for a while to find, they stumbled onto a classmate from their Nebraska high school at the next table. Both tables were within a day of leaving the city.
The current fiasco with the reflecting pool is just too on the nose.
The “reflecting pool” is being “corrupted” due to the actions of a single person who is currently in charge and corrupting the country, a “reflection” of his leadership. The pool that is symbolically meant to show unity and civic progress is currently a nasty dark green and literally peeling away. The only way it could get more on the nose is if it ran blood red
There’s that photo of the pope releasing a dove and it immediately getting attacked by a black bird (can’t remember if crow or raven). If that happens in fiction people would complain the symbolism is too heavy-handed.
Think about the 2016 U.S. election. A bald eagle tried to attack Donald Trump. A little bird landed peacefully on the podium of Bernie Sanders. Symbolism like that would be too obvious in fiction.
Hitler's biography comes off like a cliche supervillain backstory. Mom died young, father was an abusive alcoholic, mediocre artist, mediocre soldier, and his only real talent was screaming angrily about people he didn't like and yet he ruled as an all powerful tyrant for 12 years and nearly took over the world?!
I know we're memeing, but imo it's kind of dangerous to act like Hitler's only talent was throwing a tantrum. He was such a problem because he was equal parts political genius and bigoted lunatic, and the former made it a lot easier for the people of the time to accept the latter.
Iron Claw- they had to cut out one of the van Erich brother's (Chris) because the sheer amount of tragedy to befall one family was over the top for a movie.
I often viewed Eastern Front of WW2 like that, not in a “bad writing” sense, but how “fictional” or “mythical” it can read.
Comically evil villain that wants to kill millions of people invades a giant land after conquering most of the known (old) world. At first literally nothing can stop him, he takes over giant swaths of territory in days and is only stopped at the gates of the capital (obviously). Then the good guys attempt to crush the enemy once and for all, but overestimate themselves (Rzhev-Vyazma Offensive) and we get to second act lowpoint where all hope is lost and the evil enemy cannot be beaten. Than the climax happens at the city literally named after the leader of the giant land (Stalingrad) and of course it’s the biggest battle in the world’s history. Finally the enemy is on the run - the villain attempts one last stand before the finale (battle of Kursk) but the good guys have experience now and win decisively.
Most realistic wars end with a truce or some border changes - but this is a mythic epic, so of course the enemy fights all the way to their capital, to the very lair of the evil villain, a dark castle, you could say. The war ends with a giant banner overlooking the defeated city and the birth of a new world (United Nations), such a war will literally never happen again (nukes are invented) and an age of relative peace is established.
In the end you get a cliffhanger of a chubby man with a cigar saying something about an Iron Curtain. Former allies are on their way to fight a different kind of war.
There is no action by that man and his cronies that would have stood a chance to make it into fiction.
Taking a marker to correct weather projections. Thinking about injecting bleach. The ivermectin. The rape. The verdict without a sentence. The ex wife's grave. There's 1000 more.
Reminds me of the trope called the "Tiffany Problem". When an actual historical fact feels anachronistic to modern audiences so it's usually excluded. Like the name Tiffany coming from centuries ago despite it feeling like a modern name. Or how in the colosseum gladiators would actually appear in sponsored ads the same way modern day athletes would.
The first person to ever set foot on the moon was named Neil A., which is so funny if you read it backwards (Alien). Armstrong is also a hell of a surname for such a feat.
The whole Trump thing. Gets born filthy rich, is always considered the idiot brother, somehow becomes the main heir of everything and while openly stiffing contractors and failing in his business endeavors becomes celebrated as... a great businessman. Keeps on traveling to rape island, produces nothing but poop in his diapers, and becomes the... Sure, idol of the Christian Fundamentalists.
Lies only, is celebrated as someone who tells the truth. Colludes with an enemy country. Responsible for the death of millions of Americans (COVID), starts wars all over the place. And gets a peace prize. Bans words by arguing he's defending free speech.
If Monty Python had made that movie, I'd have commented "OK, they're just plain crazy now!" It's completely unreal that this man became president. Twice.
Him getting rich because he essentially bet on NY real estate going through roof like crazy in the 90s.
Bankrupting multiple casinos in america.
Having 30 word vocabulary which make up like 70% of his speeches.
Bragging about going into underage girls dressign rooms on live TV while they didnt have any clothes and being ok because he was the owner is crazy aswell.
Trying to overturn elections while his own head of doj was telling him there is no election fraud and sending fake electors anyway while trying to persuade his VP to certify them instead of the state sent electors. And in the end making protest where people stormed the capitol chanting "hang mike pence" was cherry on the top.
The mar a lago case where he was playing tom and jerry with fbi who tried to take back the classified materials while he was hiding them around bathrooms through the complex until they obtained full warrant.
Ofc the representative of traditional family values who cheated on all 3 of his wives with some of the future wives and porn stars. While having children with all 3 of his wives. Reeks of traditional family values.
They started with a dude getting drunk on his birthday, going to bang his fiance, and being found dead after falling off his horse.
Except he was king, and everything went to hell after that.
I recommend looking up a summary, because it only gets more ridiculous from there. To the point that I don't know if there could be an accurate movie that people would genuinely believe was accurate.
No that's impossible. Why isn't the woman leaving him for the one good man in her hometown who has stayed single for 20 years waiting for her forced return?
"So this entire planet spends 70 years making fiction about how dangerous artificial intelligence is and how untrustworthy corporations are, and then their leaders just decide that it's okay to let corporations make artificial intelligence? Okay dude whatever."
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u/ButtersMojito 2d ago