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Martin Savidge:When we talk about da Vinci and your book, how much is true and how much is fabricated in your storyline?
Dan Brown: 99 percent of it is true. All of the architecture, the art, the secret rituals, the history, all of that is true, the Gnostic gospels. All of that is … all that is fiction, of course, is that there's a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon, and all of his action is fictionalized. But the background is all true.
— CNN Sunday Morning, interview With Dan Brown, aired May 25, 2003, 09:45AM
Some authors and writers will admit that they're producing fiction; that they take advantage of Acceptable Breaks From Reality, the Rule Of Cool, the Rule Of Funny or any of the other Rules of Whatever. Some acknowledge freely that Reality Is Unrealistic, which affects the choices they make in their works.
Others like to claim that what they produce is accurate fact, thinking that this somehow gives them more status, or will increase their sales.
What happens when a creator has been making noticeable claims — or simply strongly implying — that their work is highly researched and as correct as they can make it, only for you to quickly discover it to be a big pile of pants? When that happens, you've been Dan Browned.
Some genres and media tend to be free from Dan Browning by their very nature. Comic books, manga and anime very rarely make claims of authenticity. Advertising examples are rare, largely because of truth-in-advertising laws; companies are allowed to make all sorts of claims about their products as long as they avoid making clear statements of fact.
See also: Critical Research Failure, Encyclopedia Browned, Techno Babble
Only examples that make claims of accuracy are valid examples of this trope. Please include why you consider that a claim of accuracy was made in all examples you add.
Examples:
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Film
- 21 is supposed to be "Based on a True Story." The tagline was "The story of five students who changed the game...forever." Even aside from the ... liberties ... they took with the actual people involved, they also make blatant errors about gambling and math in a movie that is about how a bunch of MIT students beat blackjack. Errors like Mickey Rosa lecturing about the Monty Hall Problem in a Calculus class. What's wrong with that? This:
- One student gives the answer that is correct under the usual assumptions. Mickey then starts asking questions like "What if he would only give you the choice to switch if you picked the right one?" Possibilities like that completely destroy the standard solution to that problem, but the student says it doesn't matter, it's a strict math problem and is praised for it.
- In a later discussion, one of the players is talking about whether to split 8's against an Ace. This IS a strict math problem, given that the rules of casino games are pretty standard, stated up front, and often enforced by law. The character then gives an intuitive, non-mathematical explanation and gets it wrong
 .
- The character in question is close to graduating, and so should be in a fairly advanced Calculus course. They're being taught Newton's method, which is really some rather basic stuff covered back in the first month of Calculus 1.
- 300 director Zack Snyder stated that "the events are 90% accurate. It's just in the visualization that it's crazy.... I've shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it's amazing. They can't believe it's as accurate as it is." Sadly, Snyder's statement was somewhat less than 90% accurate itself. Cue several kerjillion very annoyed people in Iran and several hundred irate Classics scholars forming into phalanx. (Okay, some other people too).
- The Day After Tomorrow is doubly Dan Browned, in that the movie was widely publicized as being based on the factual book The Coming Global Superstorm, the book even gets a credit in the film and the typical tactic of playing on current real world fears was employed and at the time there were articles of the sort of Could Ice Age occur over night with quotes like It may just be a movie. But to environmentalists, there is more than a kernel of truth in the catastrophic scenarios depicted in the upcoming summer flick The Day After Tomorrow. However if you really want a solid night's entertainment call your friendly neighborhood meteorologist, and offer to treat him to a showing of The Day After Tomorrow. One group did; Here's the result..
Here's where the Double-Dan-Browning comes in: The Coming Global Superstorm, the "factual" book it was based on, was written by Art Bell (one of the hosts of Coast To Coast AM) and Whitley Strieber (who wrote Communion, an account of his own abduction by extraterrestrials).
- Being in the Air Force during the era of the Iron Eagle movies was very entertaining. From kids running around in secure areas to the Hades Bomb to a guy violating international airspace because he pulled a few too many Gs to E-5s calling captains by their last name to the brand new MiG being the venerable F-4 Phantom...truly a hoot watching those with a bunch of the guys in the barracks day room. Like MST 3 K for aviation geeks.
- Top Gun. The technical consultant, "Viper" aka Pete Pettigrew (not that one), was pretty much ignored even when it came to simple points about how technical debriefings wouldn't be done in large open hangars nor the shower room. But they paid for Tom Cruise's ass and dammit they were going to get a shot of Tom Cruise's ass.
- Mission to Mars was supposed to have a physicist as a consultant to get the details right. It seems he was ignored.
- David Mamet's Redbelt gets very little correct in its portrayal of Mixed Martial Arts. There were a number of experts consulted on the film, and this fact was made much of in promotional materials, but they were mostly old-school MMA fighters, and they have little interaction with the modern version of the sport.
- Even an old-school mixed martial artist would know that a standing arm triangle or standing rear naked choke has an incredibly low chance of success due to the excessive mobility the standing position gives an opponent. Chiwetel Ejiofor uses this mobility to escape from John Machado, a 5th degree black belt in brazilian jujitsu and technical advisor to the film, who knows damn well there's a small chance of finishing a standing RNC. Additionally, no athletic commission or fight promotion in the world would allow competitors to fight with limbs tied down.
- Director Ridley Scott made numerous public statements about his intention to make Gladiator as historically accurate as possible. To support this goal, he hired several historians to serve as advisers. However, he made so many choices that were historically inaccurate that one adviser quit in protest and another (Kathleen Coleman of Harvard University) refused to allow her name to be put in the credits. The most aggravating thing, to many historians, is that many of the inaccuracies were completely unnecessary — getting it right wouldn't have made the film any less interesting or exciting.
- The film says Rome was founded as a republic. It wasn't; it was founded as a monarchy, and remained one for nearly 150 years.
- The film says the Roman Senate was an elected body. It never was. Senator was an appointed office and was limited to members of certain families.
- Marcus Aurelius wasn't murdered.
- Rome didn't conquer Germania. By the time the movie is set, the borders between Germania and the Roman Empire were firmly established as the Rhine and Danube rivers and had been for over 150 years.
- Mel Gibson hyped The Passion Of The Christ as a totally accurate re-enactment of the New Testiment... and then proceeded to make stuff up. The androgynous devil with the ugly baby, the crow that attacked the criminal for mocking Jesus, and other bits of melodrama.
- Speaking of Mel Gibson, historians have already ripped Braveheart to Hell and back for containing many inaccuracies, even in so much as two and a half minutes of film.
- To be fair, Gibson himself admits to and comments on the many inaccuracies in the DVD commentary, explaining that the film is more inspired by legend and the art of storytelling than by history. Dude knows his tropes, and dammit if he's not going to use them.
- The most amusing one : you know that first big win against the English ? When Mel gets this "novel idea" of using spears to counter cavalry ? Yeah, that's supposed to be the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Do note the flat, rolling green plain where the battle takes place in the film.
- Mayans and Europeans in the same film anyone?
- The Blair Witch Project notoriously ran a viral ad campaign (one of the first) giving the impression that it was the footage found in a video camera, that was in turn found abandoned in the woods, not a staged film. The truth got out before too long, but it's quite easy to find people who heard it was "real" and still don't believe that it wasn't a "found tape".
- Any work that claims to be "the true story of King Arthur"—including the 2004 film King Arthur, which includes the claim in the damn tagline, falls under this trope. The film had medievalists and Arthur buffs in tears before it was ever released.
- For those who don't know, what we know of the True Story of King Arthur is... that the stories seem to be popular.
Literature
- As the trope title shows, Dan Brown is so well known for this he gets his own example page.
- Dale Brown, a writer known for several rather "creative" interpretations of military aircraft innovations also does this a lot. Particularly notable was his Sky Masters which featured a wildly inaccurate portrayal of the Philippine government and the mention of the Philippine Air Force having F-4 Phantoms, whereas in real life the PAF never had any F-4s in service. Made all the worse by having all the inaccurate facts presented alphabetically in a "fact page."
- Swedish author Liza Marklund published two novels about a woman abused, beaten and threatened by her Muslim boyfriend, subtitling them "true stories" and opening the books with a statement that only names and places had been changed, the rest was all fact. Like Dan Brown she then proceeded to make this claim in countless interviews and articles, and used the books as evidence in political debates. Then in late 2008 a woman named Monica Antonsson published a book pointing out the enormous factual errors in the book, proving that the book was almost entirely fiction. Marklund then stated that the book was never meant to be taken as true, only loosely based on truth. The Swedes had been Dan Browned. And were mad about it.
- Though in fairness, besides the first printing of the first novel - which was not labeled a novel at all, but a report on an actual case - the books have been sold in bookstores and labeled in libraries as novels, fiction. However, this was after Liza Marklund became famous for her crime fiction. The first book was also published as not written by Liza Marklund at all - she was a mere ghost writer. Then the name Marklund became possible to sell novels by...
- Similarly to the above, Go Ask Alice is presented as (and was marketed for years as) the diary of a teenage drug abuser who died of an overdose, but is now known to be a work of fiction by its "editor", Barbara Sparks.
- Tom Clancy books tend to go into painstaking detail on lots of things like fighter jet steering and military technology and Clancy had accrued a lot of "accuracy cred". One of the most egregious cases ever was in Executive Orders when he described the makeup of an Armored Cavalry Regiment in action. His descriptions of the vehicles, and unit TO&Es are insanely off-base. But he had also published a non-fiction book detailing the equipment, organization, and tactics of an Armored Cavalry Regiment two years before. This reveals a major problem with the "accuracy cred" the books get: Tom Clancy doesn't actually write them anymore and the various ghostwriters who do, do varying levels of research.
- The story goes that some of the descriptions of naval architecture and procedure were so accurate that the navy interviewed him in an attempt to find out how he got those details. The interviewers left bemused that he'd apparently just made some very accurate deductions. Of course, back then he was writing the Tom Clancy™ brand himself, and was working closely with navy buff Larry Bond of Harpoon fame.
- Philippa Gregory, in works such as The Other Boleyn Girl, in which—among numerous other mistakes—she portrays Mary Boleyn as the older sister, cutting out her promiscuous past, and portrays Anne Boleyn as an evil woman and the charges against her (such as sex with her brother) as accurate. Gregory claims that there is "doubt" in these areas and that she is merely giving her own "interpretation," while in reality few if any historians would agree with her.
- Michael Crichton's State Of Fear has been accused of such. The reference list at the back of the book incredibly shoddy work, and one of the researchers cited actually wrote a letter to Discover magazine to complain about how the conclusions from his paper were misrepresented in the book, and several groups have said the same.
- His research quality seems to have declined over time, with his later books suffering the most. Prey in particular bears little to no resemblance to reality, adhering almost entirely to popular (mis)understanding of nanotech, despite the usual list of references and thanks.
Live Action TV
- CSI: At least they've stopped trying to claim it's accurate. In fact, the technical advisor invoked the MST 3 K Mantra (not quite in so many words, though) in an interview, saying essentially that the show focuses more on the character drama than the tedious, painstaking, underfunded work that is real life forensics.
- Bones: After a few biological anthropology and forensic courses, the science portion of the show just becomes too ridiculous and outright silly. What makes this a Dan Browning rather than simply Did Not Do The Research is that Kathy Reichs, a former respected forensic anthropologist, is a producer of the show. Sadly, this has led to quite a few hopeful forensic anthropology undergrads taking the show's "facts" as, well, fact, when most of the storylines are exaggerated for drama.
- Numb3rs: The show often forgets little things like uncertainty, noise, statistical significance, common sense, and the most important problem with statistics.
- House's Dan Browning is notable because of all the obscure medical information they get right, but then make basic mistakes like shocking a flatline. Spawned an entire blog devoted to Medical Reviews of House.
Tabletop Role-playing Games
- The roleplaying game Ninjas and Superspies and later supplement Mystic China had great detail about a large number of martial arts, claiming to have come from exhaustive research. Much of this information was either wrong or changed radically to serve the goals of creating interesting plot hooks in the game world; nonetheless, to this very day the descriptions from the original game appear verbatim in discussions of real-life martial arts styles. This includes such pieces of fallacious trivia as the fact that Wing Chun, one of the more popular kung fu styles available and one of the original/core styles first studied by Bruce Lee is only taught to women.
- FATAL. FATAL claims to be "the most difficult, detailed, realistic and historically/mythically accurate role-playing game available." (Emphasis added.) That was followed by this statement from the author of the game: "The odds in FATAL are that if you attack a character with a weapon, then they are likely to die. By the way, this is an obvious attempt at realism." Because, of course, most attacks with any weapon in real life are likely to be fatal. Except that, statistically, they aren't now, and they weren't in the Middle Ages, either. Or, again, the author's own words: "I searched for information on sexually transmitted diseases in the Middle Ages. Although I did not search with vigor, the few times that I have searched, I have failed to find any information." A Google search on "sexually transmitted disease in the Middle Ages" produces 3 sites directly addressing the subject in some detail on the first page of results, including one that was a review of a book on "Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages". He certainly did "not search with vigor" if he missed those references. Let's not even go into the "mythologically accurate" claim.
- Women, in FATAL, are arbitrarily worse than men at some things and better than men at others. He uses Aristotle as backup for these shifts, which include morality changes that make women more toward the Chaotic Evil end of the spectrum. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn't then said, "these are our justifications assuming [Aristotle] isn't wrong." Then he states- this sentence comes right out of nowhere- that a woman has the highest intelligence score in the world. For normal people reading it, it might again seem like a simple desperate attempt at ass-covering- but this is mechanically impossible under his own rules, due to women taking a severe penalty to all intelligence scores (Apply exactly the same rolls to two characters and no matter how high the female's intelligence stat is, simply changing her sex to male will raise it.) He bald-faced lied about his own system in the very book that's meant to explain it.
- FATAL characters of low intelligence get to roll for bonus "Retard Strength". Byron Hall answered criticism of this mechanic with anecdotes about nursing sourced to "some females I knew in college".
Video Games
- The Mortal Kombat games from Deadly Alliance to Armageddon were known for their gross misrepresentation of supposedly real-world fighting styles, to the point that several styles such as Hapkido bear little to no resemblance to the actual styles. This is despite Carlos Pesina, the mo-cap choreographer, allegedly being a martial arts expert. This concept has wisely been abandoned.
- Music Quiz 2 on the iPod has at least two questions where the so-called "correct" answer is wrong:
- "How many great composers called Bach were there?": the "correct" answer is 2, but according to That Other Wiki the correct answer is at least 3 — Johann Sebastian, and his sons Carl Philip Emmanuel and Johann Christian. The Harvard Dictionary of Music has six different Bachs listed, and considering the whole family was full of musicians and composers, there may be more, but it depends on what the definition of "great" is.
- "Which of these composers were not from the Classical era?": the "correct" answer is Strauss, which is OK as far as it goes (the two Johanns were from the Romantic era, Richard was from the Modern), but another of the possible choices is Bach, and the most famous Bach was from (indeed, almost defined) the Baroque, which predates the Classical.
- Genji 2 was famously based on "actual battles that actually took place in Ancient Japan". Then came the giant enemy crabs...
Webcomics
- Darths And Droids gives a solution to Game Masters on how to nip this problem in the bud in regards to their campaigns. If there's a certified expert in the group who would nit-pick your valiant, yet ultimately doomed, attempts at realism, recruit them for their knowledge when designing your world. That way, not only will they not nit-pick your setting that much, they'll defend it when another player says something is unrealistic.
Other
- A frequent problem with open wikis is that
any idiot anyone can edit them — and idiots often do. Blatant misinformation once presented as "fact" on The Other Wiki includes a claim that Abba's Mamma Mia is a "cover" of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody (apparently on the grounds that the Abba song immediately followed the Queen one to the UK number 1 slot, and that both include the phrase "Mamma mia"). More appear (and are caught) every day.
- Bill Schnoebelen, who claims to be an ex-Mason, ex-Mormon, ex-Catholic, ex-Wiccan, ex-whatever-du-jour, has recently released a nine hour interview in which he tells about how he was an ex-vampire. Unfortunately for Bill, anyone familiar with vampire folklore would realize that everything he knows about vampires came from 20th century vampire movies. For example, Bill claims that when he was a vampire, the sun made his skin blister. While the idea that sunlight physically harms vampires is widespread nowadays, it was actually made up for the 1922 film Nosferatu.
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