Anime & Manga
"Do you want to know the greatest and also the worst device that humans ever invented? It's television. Television controls people by bombarding them with information until they lose their sense of reality. [snip] Television has created a people who believe instantly in dramatic fantasies who can be controlled by little dots of light."
— Dr. Londes, Cowboy Bebop
Film — Live-Action
"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."
Literature
"The Guide is definitive. Reality is often inaccurate."
"Things that try to look like things often look more like things than things. Well-known fact."
"I bought half a shelf of books on Ancient Egypt, and after a while I decided to make things up, because when you got down to details the real thing was just too weird."
— Terry Pratchett, The Folklore of Discworld, on the process of writing Pyramids
"He'd write a book about his experiences, if he thought anyone would believe it"
— Terry Pratchett, "about the author" section, several Discworld books
'"Tis strange — but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,"
Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,"
"Truth, you know, doth often wear the mask of fiction. If you think you are hearing lies, the worst is yet to come. And yet my story is cold and unadorned truth."
— Raymond Cannes, Paradox 1929
"A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it."
"Important point: just because it has happened in real life does not make it believable in a story. If a reader says she didn’t believe such a thing would happen, it is no defence for you to say, "Oh, but that did happen! In 1982 I was walking along..."
— Nicola Morgan, Write To Be Published
"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen."
— Alex, A Clockwork Orange
"For example, few novels contain plot twists like the ones in the news story about a band of thieves posing as police officers who were forced by circumstances to try to arrest a group of policemen disguised as a gang of thieves. The real police were — you guessed it — on the trail of the thieves who were posing as police. If a novelist were to submit such a plot to a publisher, it would probably be rejected as incredible or unrealistic."
— W. Lance Bennet, News: The Politics of Illusion
Sometimes you'll know your material cold — and you'll be absolutely correct — but your readers' previous experience disagrees. [...] It's not much comfort to be right if your readers toss the book aside because they're convinced you're talking through your hat.
— Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance
"My dear fellow, life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."
Live-Action TV
"I didn't think it was very realistic in the movie and it turns out it's pretty realistic."
— Dwight Schrute, The Office, "Stress Relief"
"Man, reality sucks!"
— The Cat, Red Dwarf
"Reality makes a crappy special effects crew."
— Adam Savage, MythBusters
House: I was not wrong. Everything I said was true. It fit. It was elegant.
Dr. Wilson: So reality was wrong?
House: Reality is almost always wrong.
Dr. Wilson: So reality was wrong?
House: Reality is almost always wrong.
— House
"The problem here isn't that Bernie Sanders is a crazy-pants cuckoo bird. It's that we've all become so accustomed to stage-managed, focus group-driven candidates that authenticity comes across as lunacy."
Theatre
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as improbable fiction."
— Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 4
Web Original
"It is absolutely amazing to me how the things readers single out as ridiculous are the things that are the most autobiographical."
— David Willis on reader reactions to this strip
"The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction."
— Tom Wolfe, Advice to Writers
>the main villain is named Hitler.
>his right hand's name is Himmler.
Obviously, the DM makes the names on the fly.
>his right hand's name is Himmler.
Obviously, the DM makes the names on the fly.
— Anonymous post on 4chan /tg/ board
Cueball: We could use a power orb. They give off thousands of watts of power 24/7.
Megan: Huh? How do you recharge it?
Cueball: You don't. It's just made of a metal that emits energy.
Megan: OK, come on.
Hairy: Can we please be serious here?
Megan: Huh? How do you recharge it?
Cueball: You don't. It's just made of a metal that emits energy.
Megan: OK, come on.
Hairy: Can we please be serious here?
— xkcd, "Plutonium"
"Really, if I was writing a piece of fiction this plot line would be rejected as implausible."
— Broomstick commenting on her legal issues, StarDestroyer.net
, StarDestroyer.net"The buildings that you see in a model railroad layout are not only interesting to look at, in many ways they look more like the real thing than the real thing does. A model factory looks more like a factory than a real factory does, because the modeler abstracted out the irrelevant bits, and amplified what makes it unique."
— Ocean Quigley, SimCity 5 Blog
If a screenwriter were to adapt Poe’s story into a modern setting using the exact same beats as the news cycle from the first week of October 2020, the reviews would say it was just too convenient. “Lazy storytelling,” critics would write. “Not believable.” Nor would critics find it credible if a film adaptation of The Masque Of The Red Death were re-released on the same day that America’s own Prince Prospero announced his diagnosis in this hypothetical fictional reality. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.
—Katie Rife, Red Death, White House
"I get that the devs didn't want to go full wholesome world is saved, but I don't think the idea to split up both Vietnam and Korea into a communist north and a capitalist south is very creative, sure north Vietnam wins, but for as far as I know, Korea will stay divided."
"I also don't understand how it's cannon for the PRC to win the civil war, only to leave the ROC alive on Taiwan? They are supported by the soviets, with a little help of the Soviet Pacific fleet they could easily wipe their eternal enemy off the map and the Soviets would score a huge victory on NATO."
"I'm also disappointed by the rumours that Khrushchev is the canon successor of Stalin. Stalin wins the greatest war in the history of the world and in return he gets someone who is hell-bent on destroying his legacy and growing corn?"
"I'll just stay playing from the 1936 start date, thank you."
"I’ve never been to Las Vegas but I love it in concept because it sounds so made up. Imagine if you were reading a fantasy novel and they were like “smack in the middle of a deadly inhospitable desert there is a glittering city of indulgence and lawlessness and cheap sin that has specifically engineered itself to obfuscate your sense of time and keep you there as long as possible while they take all your valuables.” You’d be like yeah that’s some wizard shit."
you could slap this in a cyberpunk video game and critics would pan it for being too on the nose
—Tumblr comment about an incredibly ironic picture
"Whoever wrote the script for Earth should be fired. Characters like this can't be this inconsistent and terrible."
—Rags, Every Frame a Pause Episode 181
Ben Collins: Seen a lot of Law & Order, haven't seen a twist as good as "Alex Jones' lawyers accidentally sent Sandy Hook parents' lawyers the entire contents of his phone and his long-hidden financials, but they waited 12 days to let him lie" in my life. Just an absolutely wild day.
David Slack: Because on Law & Order. we wouldn’t have let a lawyer do something that dumb.
John Rogers: But now we get to 100% slap this on the table during a notes meeting, next legal procedural.
David Slack
: Because on Law & Order. we wouldn’t have let a lawyer do something that dumb.John Rogers
: But now we get to 100% slap this on the table during a notes meeting, next legal procedural.—This Twitter exchange with writers commenting on Sandy Hook parents vs Alex Jones defemation case.
with writers commenting on Sandy Hook parents vs Alex Jones defemation case."Private submarine carrying several billionaire tourists goes missing while surveying the wreckage of the Titanic."
Well, it had to happen eventually. This is where big-ticket extreme tourism and shooting untrained assholes into space and such was always going to lead – frankly, it's surprising that it took this long for a major incident to crop up.
"One of the missing passengers is the president and CEO of the company that owns and operates the submarine."
Huh. Well, points for putting his money where his mouth is, I guess. I wonder if–
"The missing CEO's name is Stockton Rush."
Oh, bullshit. That's not a real person – that's the name of a guy who builds an inexplicably 1950s-themed underwater theme park and then gets eaten by a shark in a cautionary tale about the perils of libertarianism. That's the name of a guy who carries off an oceanfront real estate scam that somehow ends with Superman fighting a telepathic squid. Fucking "Stockton Rush". Unbelievable.
At this point I'm half-expecting the next article I read is going to reveal one of the other passengers is a self-styled "explorer" who has strong opinions about the continued geopolitical relevance of the British Empire OH WAIT
me at 15: I hate this stupid trope. People aren't going to just turn stupid and ruin everything just because things have been "too good" for "too long". Why does this author think that people are inherently stupid and evil?
people on social media in 2024: I'm not going to vaccinate my dogs or my children because polio, measels and rabies are so rare they're not a real threat anyway uwu
me at 30: Ah. I see.
Web Video
"And then there's the criticism that the film is melodramatic, which I also find odd because the melodrama of the situation is why we remember the Titanic disaster at all. It was the largest moving object in the world built by human hands at the time as well as the apex of Edwardian glamor, it was to be the captain's last voyage before he retired, and the ship sank on its maiden voyage. Any publisher would throw that concept out for being way too over-the-top if it had not actually happened. It is a fundamentally melodramatic historical event, so there's not really anything tonally off about having a "big emotions" romantic epic on board the ship right before it sinks."
"This is a moment that belongs to another world, one where cycles close and stories end. Where there are heroes, and the heroes win. A moment like this ... has no business in our world."
— Jon Bois about the end of game 5 of the 1995 American League Division Series, The History of the Seattle Mariners
of the 1995 American League Division Series, The History of the Seattle Mariners"People in the future will argue over whether he was a real guy, or just a character invented as a perfect example of stupidity."
—Ash Scott on Giorgio Tsoukalos, in a YouTube comment
This whole debacle is such an incredibly apt metaphor for the flaws inherent in the colonial system and how the lust for gold literally blinded them to the true unique value of the New World that if I'd read it in a book I would have called the writer a hack. "Oh, the colonizers dismiss the incredibly valuable and unique resource of the colony as worthless scrap because they're too busy digging for their own personal currency they've arbitrarily assigned value to? Yeah, nice, and I bet the real treasure was the friends they made along the way, right?" Man, nothing owns colonial Spain harder than it owned itself.
"Basically, a sequence of events so absurd that we depart from the realm of fiction into history"
—SsethTzeentach, on WWII
"My question before we watched that long cutscene was, 'Could Armstrong actually get elected today?' Raiden — and through him, the writers of the game — say no. Raiden asks, 'How did you ever get elected?' He accuses Armstrong of being insane, as if that is somehow a disqualifying factor in American politics. Metal Gear Rising was released in 2013. And back in 2013, I don't think everyone realized how totally okay the American people are with crazy.
"Not only are we okay with crazy, we love crazy. We love getting outraged over crazy. We love cheering on crazy. We love watching crazy on both Fox News and CNN. We love watching clips of crazy on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. We cannot get enough of crazy. In today's meme-obsessed and social media-dominated Internet landscape, Armstrong's antics and ramblings would dominate the news cycle. It would start with memes, and then it would get serious, and more serious, and more serious, and finally, it would become lethal. Because Armstrong's ideology would kill millions.
"Armstrong is a charismatic character, and so there is something undeniably appealing about his worldview here. He speaks of a radical form of freedom where absolutely anyone can do whatever they want, say whatever they want, be whatever they want… isn't that exactly the kind of freedom Americans love most? Don't Americans hate being told what to do? 'We're not gonna wear seat belts! We're not gonna wear face diapers! We're not gonna take your poison shot! We're gonna do whatever we goddang want, because this is America! Land of the free, numbnuts!'"
Western Animation
(The kids watch the film's prop department paint black patches on a brown horse with fake horns and udder)
Martin: Uh, sir... why don't you use real cows?
Prop Guy: Cows don't look like cows on film. We gotta use horses.
Ralph: What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?
Prop Guy: Eh, usually we just tape a buncha cats t'gether.
Martin: Uh, sir... why don't you use real cows?
Prop Guy: Cows don't look like cows on film. We gotta use horses.
Ralph: What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?
Prop Guy: Eh, usually we just tape a buncha cats t'gether.
— "Radioactive Man", The Simpsons
Real Life
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't."
"Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance."
— Linda Degh (folklorist)
"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."
— Niels Bohr
Truth of course must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
"Few people have the imagination for reality."
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
"Deschamps-Braly has found that trans men are much less concerned with acquiring an Adam’s apple than trans women are with getting rid of one. Nevertheless, he and Ousterhout jointly developed a procedure for building a new Adam’s apple for trans men. In a detail that even a Hollywood scriptwriter might deem too much, it is made from cartilage extracted from the patient’s rib."
— The New Yorker, on facial reconstruction surgery for transgender women
, on facial reconstruction surgery for transgender women"It was absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked! "
— Sir Edward Hulse on the Christmas Truces of World War I
of World War II call that the Tiffany Problem. Tiffany is a real attested medieval name, it's a variant of Theophania, it appears in twelfth century documents from Britain and France, and you cannot give it as a name to a character in a historical or fantasy setting because it looks too horribly modern.
