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There are some simple facts of life that " everyone" knows about various shows.
Well, sorta.
As it turns out, people, as a whole, know a lot less than they think they do. Those who are only casual viewers of a series will often come away with their fair share of mistakes. Such fallacies are often used by Real True Fans™ as a yardstick of the difference between themselves and the unwashed masses.
All the same, these notions can be so firmly entrenched in the public zeitgeist that they can force their way into adaptations, much to the annoyance of the aforementioned Real True Fans™.
Named for a Saturday Night Live game show sketch in which the questions were selected by experts reflecting things all high school seniors should know, and the answers were selected from a survey of high school seniors (that is, they were wrong).
Subtropes are Title Confusion, I Am Not Shazam, and Beam Me Up Scotty. May result from or lead to Lost In Imitation. When left unchecked, it can lead to Cowboy Bebop At His Computer and Never Live It Down. See also Reality Is Unrealistic and Dead Unicorn Trope.
Examples:
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Anime/Manga
- Space Runaway Ideon's famous ending where it "blows up the universe" never happened. Granted it killed all of humanity (both Terrans and Buff Clan), destroyed hundreds of planets, spawned thousand of meteors that blew up the Earth, destroyed Saturn's rings, and took out much of at least this galaxy; but nothing in there states that it blows up the universe. This was largely a piece of Memetic Mutation as "Ideon blows up the universe" sounds a lot funnier.
- In the other movie, it is stated by one of the Buff Clan protagonists such. This can be dismissed as hyperbolic enthusiasm, however.
- Similarly, the main twist of Haruhi Suzumiya manages to be this and All There Is To Know About The Crying Game at the same time. Namely all the people that specifically think/say "Haruhi is God", when all the audience or any of the characters in the story know is that she's some sort of Reality Warper, and being "God" is just one theory which is stated to not be particularly likely.
- In fact it's Koizumi who makes the God claim, and we know that a lot of what he says is a lie.
- Some individuals believe that in Jimmy Kudo in Case Closed is seventeen years old at the beginning of the series. This is largely due to the Wikipedia article about Case Closed. However, Jimmy is actually sixteen at the beginnin. This troper knows this because Jimmy almost inadvertantly tells Rachel his real age in Volume 1, Chapter 2, Page 18, before remembering that his body is shrunken and correcting himself. This very topic actually has this troper involved in a canon vs. common knowledge dispute on Youtube. This troper is, of course, on the side of the canon.
- At the beginning of course he's sixteen, but in the Non Serial Movie of 1997 he was one year older— and given the Long Runner it is, This Troper thinks it's actually accurate to say Shinichi is 17, not 16.
- When people talk about how Ash Ketchum doesn't follow the rules of the game, many people point back to his battle with Brock at the beginning of Season 1, and how Ash somehow won against a Ground-type with an Electric type. What most people do not remember is that in the very first battle between Ash and Brock, Ash lost badly because of the type disadvantage. In fact, because of that loss Ash went through a process to supercharge Pikachu to even be able to damage Brock's weaker pokemon. But it gets better; some people do recall the stated reason why Pikachu won; sprinklers had activated and doused Brock's pokemon. What most people don't remember however, is why the sprinklers turned on. It was due to the fires caused from Pikachu's earlier supercharged attacks, not Pikachu's attacks themselves. Hell, the sprinklers went on while Pikachu was trapped in a Bind move by Onix! And the final nail in the coffin here? Ash did not accept his victory. He pointed out that he only defeated Onix due to the sprinklers and stated that he wanted a fair match. He then promptly leaves, without the badge.
- Am I not understanding something here, or did you just say that supercharging Pikachu and dousing Ground-types in water makes them conduct electricity? The rest, however, makes sense.
Comic Books
- As far as most folks know, Spider-Man's chief superpower is his ability to shoot webs. Unfortunately, this is not among his super powers at all. Webshooting was instead the ability of a device Peter Parker had built for himself. Spider-Man's actual super powers are his ability to cling to walls, his "spider sense", superhuman strength and agility. It's only in the movies that he gained the power to shoot webs naturally, although this did make its way to the comics, briefly.
- Speaking of Spidey, remember, it's not Spider Man, or Spiderman. It's Spider-Man! Don't forget that hyphen!
- Some mistake Wolverine's claws as his mutant power. His powers are actually regeneration and heightened senses; the claws (and a set of adamantium bones) were implanted in him because he had the regeneration powers.
- ...at least, that's what the story was until 1993, when after Magneto pulled all the adamantium from his body, it was Ret Conned that he actually has claws made of bone underneath the metal ones.
- Similar to the Spider-Man example above, the movie-verse inverts what is now almost common knowledge; that Wolverine's claws are bone coated in adamantium. It's heavily implied that in the movie continuity the claws were implanted by Jason Stryker. They even made a gentle Take That towards the comic version of events by having a background character ask "He has knives in his hands. What kind of power is that?"
- This, though, may be inverted yet again with the prequel movie centered around the character, which appears to have him with biological bone claws.
Film
- Zombie Apocalypse movies in general. Everybody 'knows' that zombies eat brains. This only happened in one series of films, Return Of The Living Dead. In every single non-parodic portrayal of a Zombie Apocalypse after that, zombies merely want your flesh, not your brain.
- For the last freaking time Darth Vader did not use the Death Star to blow up Alderaan; Grand Moff Tarkin did. Vader was present at the time, and it's not like he cared or anything, but it's pretty annoying when people can't remember which person blew up an entire planet.
- And, for the record, there are a number of different sources for the plans for the first Death Star in the Expanded Universe, all of which are mutually exclusive — unless you accept the Hand Wave that they were each part of the plans — but none of them conflict with a statement about Bothans getting them in the movies. That was the Second Death Star.
- Inigo Montoya isn't the main character of The Princess Bride. While it may have been an ensemble cast, that title would have to go to Westley. It's an understandable mistake, given that "Hello My Name Is Inigo Montoya You Killed My Father Prepare To Die" and "You Keep Using That Word" are repeated multiple times every day on internet forums.
- If someone were to create a real life Jurassic Park, they would need to alter the dinosaurs to fit the dozens of misconceptions caused by that film in order to avoid disappointing the public:
- Velociraptors were two feet tall and covered in feathers. When Michael Crichton wrote the novel in 1990, Deinonychus, the five foot tall raptor-like dinosaur, was believed to be a member of the Velociraptor genus, and this is stated in the novel. By the time the movie was released in 1993, this belief had been revoked, but Steven Spielberg kept the raptors at five feet tall.
- Some like to argue that the raptors in the films are Utahraptors, a type of raptor discovered shortly after the book came out, and are the appropriate size.
- There is also no evidence suggesting raptors hunted in packs, and while they were smart for dinosaurs, they weren't half as intelligent as primates.
- Many people refuse to believe the above facts because it shatters their belief that raptors were vicious, effective killing machines. However, real raptors would still be dangerous to humans: imagine a turkey that can leap four feet in the air with a huge eviscerating claw on each foot.
- There is no reason whatsoever to believe Tyrannosaurus rex was unable to see unmoving objects. Once again, the novel explains this by noting that many of the dinosaurs had the DNA of frogs spliced in, and that this frog species had vision based on movement. The film throws this out the window when Alan Grant claims that T. Rex as a species could not see unmoving objects. The sequel novel (but not the second film) pokes fun of this by having a character freeze in the vicinity of a T. Rex and still get eaten.
- Dilophosaurus was nearly six feet tall (in reverse of the raptor situation) and did not have a frill or the ability to spit poison. Michael Crichton admitted this was an example of creative license, although he did get the size right in the novel.
- More specifically, he stated that he outright made the poison spitting up in order to show how limited out knowledge of dinos is, because it's purely from skeletal records.
Literature
- Frankenstein, which the public has unilaterally made the name of the monster, not its creator, and the monster usually is named Frankenstein in adaptations not striving for accuracy. (This example falls squarely under I Am Not Shazam, but it's such a potent example that it merits mention here as well)
- Even better, people typically believe that Victor Frankenstein is a doctor. In the original novel he does not have a doctorate of any sort, and is merely a medical student.
- Almost everyone "knows" that the monster is a bumbling idiot who means no harm, even though he was actually very intelligent and self-aware in the novel.
- And another one—everyone "knows" the monster was brought to life with lightning, or at least electricity. Except the novel specifically avoids saying how it was done. There is a mention of Victor Frankenstein being fascinated by the effects of a lightning strike earlier, but that's it.
- And another one. everyone "knows" that the monster is pure evil from the beginning. Even many of the more faithful adaptations involves Victor narrowly escaping as it immediately assaults him. In the original, the monster tried very hard to be accepted and spent an entire winter caring secretly for a poor family. The rejection he faced everywhere he went led to his killing people.
- The tale of the Trojan Horse is usually attributed to Homer's Iliad (or at least assumed to be related therein). In fact, the Trojan Horse incident appears in neither The Iliad nor its sequel The Odyssey — it merits only a brief mention in the latter, occurring between the events of the two poems. The lesson the story teaches us, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts," which is also usually attributed to Homer, is actually a paraphrase of a quote (original quote was more like "I distrust Greeks, even when they do bring gifts") from Virgil's Aeneid, making this the mythological equivalent of Fanon. Of course, Oral Tradition doesn't really have any "true" authority, but Aeneid was written quite a while later and by a Roman.
- The Aeneid also claims the Romans were descended from the survivors of Troy, so it wasn't exactly a friendly version of events. Half of it consists of the heroes cleaning up the messes the Greeks in the Odyssey left all over the Mediterranean, and generally making a point of facing the same challenges without getting all of their own men killed in the process.
- The title of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea refers to the distance the sub travels, not the depth to which it goes. A "league" is a non-standardized measure of how far someone can walk in an hour, estimated as about 3 miles/5 kilometers. So 20,000 leagues is about 60,000 miles/100,000 kilometers which is over seven times the diameter of the Earth. Additionally, if the "under the sea" didn't refer to where they were when traveling but how far under something they were it would imply they're not underwater, but rather under the ground beneath the ocean.
- Whenever a non-Harry Potter fan hears about Harry having romance in his life, it's assumed he'll be getting together with Hermione. Because she's the only female character non-fans have actually heard of. This is made all the more hilarious by the fact that Harry/Hermione shippers are considered a bit of a joke in the fandom due their insistence prior to the end of the series that the pairing would be reciprocated despite JK Rowling telegraphing Ron/Hermione about as obviously as possible.
- The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde: Hyde was Jekyll's evil, unrestrained side, yes, but Jekyll was not his own good side. It is specifically pointed out in the book that Jekyll is both good and evil, a fact nearly every single story, parody, or adaptation based on it forgets.
- While the famous line "O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" is usually quoted right, more or less, most people are unaware of the true meaning, often believing that Juliet is asking "Where are you Romeo?" Note that "wherefore" does not mean "where", it means "why". In other words Juliet is asking why Romeo must be who he is, a member of the family with which her own family is at war.
- It isn't really a 'war', even the patriarchs of both sides are trying to get the hotheads to knock it off by the time the couple meet.
- Everyone knows that the Mark of Cain was a curse placed upon Cain by God. Except that, if you actually read the story, it isn't. God cursed Cain, then when Cain complained that on top of that, anyone he met would kill him, God blessed him with a mark of protection such that any who harmed him would suffer vengeance sevenfold. This countered Cain's objection and ensured that he would only suffer the intended curse.
Live Action TV
- The Land Of The Lost is not Earth in the distant past.
- The only thing everyone knows about Vulcans from Star Trek (apart from the pointy ears) is that they have no emotions. Actually they have very strong emotions but their culture encourages all Vulcans to suppress emotion and act on logic. Their stoic nature is cultural, not genetic.
- Not every Gilligans Island episode involved the castaways trying to escape the island, only about a third of them. Many episodes dealt with them trying to avoid being killed by tropical storms or some other threat, while a surprisingly large number were about things like having a costume party or a beauty pageant.
- In 588 episodes of Lassie, Timmy never actually fell down a well.
- Jokes about Lost often ask why "the fat guy," Hurley, never loses any weight on the island despite having a meager food supply. In actuality, the survivors of the plane crash had a variety of food to choose from, including boar and fish, and a research station full of consumer food was discovered in season 2. A Loose Change parody documentary on the fourth season DVD makes fun of this idea by asking how Hurley and the others retained their weight despite allegedly being stranded on a deserted island with little food.
- Also, the show takes place over a much shorter time than it was aired. Seasons 1-4 took place over 108 days (this is specifically mentioned as how many days they were on the island before being rescued
- At least one episode shows that Hurley has a horrible food problem; he's eating junk food from the mysterious sources (they got an airdrop once!) left and right.
- The panel show QI has debunking things considered Common Knowledge, then explaining the facts, as its central concept.
Mythology
- King Arthur pulled Excalibur, the sword in the stone, thus proving he was king of England. Except he pulled Caliburn out. Excalibur was given him by the Lady of the Lake. This itself depends on which source one accepts as canon, however.
- Similarly, in the earlier texts, the Holy Grail was not a cup, nor was it even referred to as holy. It its first appearance, Perceval, le Conte du Graal, which translates into The Story of the Grail, it appeared as a dish.
- The above troper got it slightly wrong. Caliburn and Excalibur are the same sword, just with a different Anglicized spelling. The Sword in the Stone had a different name altogether.
- For Christianity; everybody "knows" that Satan and the demons rule over hell to torment the damned. Except that The Bible plainly says that Satan and his demons will be punished right along with the damned. Hell is Satan's prison, not his kingdom. Also, Satan, along with every other demon was once a glorious angel, and they rebelled against God. In Christian mythology, nothing originated as evil.
- His kingdom is actually earth.
Professional Wrestling
- At Over The Edge 1999, no one watching on PPV saw Owen Hart fall to his death. He was being lowered during a pre-taped interview segment, which didn't cut away until he had hit bottom.
Real Life
- By now, most people know Christopher Columbus did not "discover" America — or even the existence of continents to the west by Europeans (Vikings did this; and of course there is the age-old question of whether you can discover a place already inhabited by your species). However, most still believe he proved the world was round. The truth is that virtually no educated person in Western civilization has believed in a flat Earth since the Third Century BC, and the uneducated probably didn't care. It wasn't a fear of Columbus "falling over the side" that kept various governments from funding his expedition. Rather, most were hesitant to fund him because they thought Columbus was underestimating the size of the Earth (and as it turns out, they were right, but there was a landmass part of the way there, so that was okay). This fictitious flat/round debate started with a work of historical fiction by Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, written in 1828.
- Just as an aside, the roundness of the Earth was proven by Greek philosopher/scientist Eratosthenes in 240 BC; He also also accurately measured the Earth's circumfrence to within a few feet, the tilt of the earth to within half a degree, and the distance from the Earth to the sun to within a hundred miles, all using Bronze Age scientific instruments. Some smart cookie, that Eratosthenes...
- At least, when Columbus "discovered" America, it stayed discovered.
- Consider Dante's Divine Comedy, written in the 14th century, which, despite being about Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, doesn't actually work unless the world is round. Oh, sure, Dante assumed Jerusalem was the north pole, but the planet was still round. I bet we can reference even older things than this...
- The concept of Drinking The Kool Aid, as a reference to the Jonestown Cult suicide... they actually drank poisoned Flavor Aid. Big difference.
- Also, they were forced to drink it at gun-point, and those who escaped or resisted were shot.
- The battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack never happened. The Merrimack was a union ship that had been burned and sank to prevent it being captured by the Confederates. The Confederates salvaged it, covered it in metal plating (thus making it the first ironclad ship) and rechristened it the CSS Virginia. It was unstoppable until it battled the USS Monitor, which was the first Union ironclad. The U.S. Post Office once issued a memorial stamp that said "Monitor vs. Virginia" on it, and they got thousands of letters telling them they screwed up.
- Another example here. Neither CSS Virginia nor USS Monitor were the first Ironclad. Not only were there armored warships for centuries, but both France and Britain had already launched steam warships with iron plates. The Monitor and the Virginia were simply the first to see action.
- Napoleon was short, and he has been ruthlessly parodied this way for centuries ever since. A 'Napoleon Complex' is someone who has an inferiority complex based on their short stature, and make up for it in some way (not everyone can conquer Europe though). However, Napoleon was actually average height for men back then, and the misconception sprouted from the fact he often posed for portraits with his Imperial Guard, who were all above average height, and the British were always looking for new ways to make fun of him.
- Napoleon was called Petite because of his proximity to his soldiers, IIRC.
- The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 condemned several women to be burned at the stake. They were actually hanged.
- Slaves did not actually build the Pyramids of Giza, and the workers were most likely paid craftsmen.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy II for the SNES was not based on Final Fantasy IV Easytype; it's the other way around. Although Final Fantasy IV Easytype was released first, it was a port back of the changes made in Final Fantasy II to the Japanese version, and also has a few key differences from Final Fantasy II; the most notable being that it has an entirely new version of Zeromus, while Final Fantasy II just had a downgraded version of the original Final Fantasy IV Zeromus.
- Hey, you remember how so few good games were released for the Gamecube because Nintendo "drove away developers" in a nonspecific fashion? They actually weren't all that bad. Sony was worse than them, and they had the most popular console. Ironically, Wii owners are now accusing Nintendo of being too permissive. Nintendo actually hasn't changed their quality control much at all. This one is so pervasive that you can actually automatically win an argument by asking someone to actually back up the first one. They will disappear and never come back.
- There's a similar situation with the glut of shovelware for the Wii. Some fans still blame Nintendo for a lack of "third-party support", without any examples, or an explanation of why that automatically translates to bad games.
- Ports cost almost nothing to make, because it's just moving data from one system to another, which is why any port to a more powerful system (or less powerful) is shovelware. Except none of that is true. Even if the systems are nearly identical (like Game Cube games to the Wii) they are not actually identical, and you need plenty of testing to catch any unforeseen incompatibilities. If the systems are different, and/or less powerful than what the game is being ported from, you have to rewrite the whole damn thing. That often means the only money saved is on design (since the game is already made). People bashing ports for being cheap clearly Did Not Do The Research.
- The Legend Of Zelda series has no continuity or plotline, and is simply the same game done over and over with different graphics. In reality, Zelda has a notoriously complicated and ambiguous timeline, with the general consensus being that it splits into two seperate alternate timelines at the end of Ocarina of Time. Recent Zelda games, like Twilight Princess and Spirit Tracks have included more and more references to earlier games, indicating Nintendo is aware of this misplaced criticism.
- On that same note, "Link" is not a singular character, nor is Zelda. There have been many Links (who may or may not be related) and many Zeldas (who are all part of the same royal line). Only Ganon(dorf) remains the same person from game to game. You will be Gannon Banned for claiming Link or Zelda is the same person in every game.
- In the same vein as the Zelda example, there is, in fact, a Mario canon, which is generally agreed upon to include the main console games and certain handheld games (usually ones that introduced new characters).
- Continuing the Nintendo examples, Pokemon does have a canon plotline within the games. (Fire)Red and Blue(/Leaf Green) take place during the same time period as Ruby and Sapphire; (Heart)Gold and (Soul)Silver take place during the same time period as Diamond and Pearl (several years later). Gold and Silver are perhaps most notable for including the entire Kanto region from Red and Blue with references to the earlier games galore, while Ruby and Sapphire are more subtle with their references to the fact that Gold and Silver haven't happened yet. Abundant references to Johto in Diamond and Pearl led fans to the (accurate) assumption that Gold and Silver would be remade.
Webcomics
- Something Positive's creator R.K. Milholland gets a lot of complaints grounded in this trope from readers; the most common objection is "Your comic didn't used to be mean," despite the fact that the main character sent a coat hanger to an ex-girlfriend as a baby shower present in the first strip.
- College Roomies From Hell's trio of male protagonists all acquired a mutant ability: Mike's arm was replaced with a superstrong tentacle, Dave got laser vision, and Roger...got an eye in his hand, not his were-coyote nature, even though that's often mistakenly cited: he had that already. The confusion arises because this is what Roger uses when they have to fight, alongside the others' abilities, and because the eye in the hand hasn't been mentioned in a long time.
Western Animation
- Despite what anyone tells you X Men Evolution did not move the location of the Academy to California. It just took place in a very California-like New York.
- The same seems to have happened in the movies. Apparently there is one spot in upstate New York where it never snows without mutant intervention.
- Ya know, given the fact that Storm lives there, you could say "there is one spot in upstate New York where it never snows because of mutant intervention".
- In fact the exterior shots were done in Hatley Castle, BC, Canada.
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