Critical Research Failure cleanup

No. Dan Browned is about a creator representing inaccuracies about real life (not other works of fiction) as painstakingly accurate and meticulously researched.

Rule of thumb? If you have to work this hard to find something to fit your nitpicking under, maybe it's just not that important to pick these particular nits.

YMMV.The Simpsons S 11 E 5 EIEI Annoyed Grunt

• Critical Research Failure: Homer mis-titles Beginning of the End as "Grasshopperus", and Marge mistakenly identifies the film's star as Chad Everett rather than Peter Graves.

I'm pretty sure they wrote it like that on purpose. Barring that, it's a film from 1957. Not a lot of people who where watching the Simpsons then watched that movie.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Feb 23rd 2020 at 5:49:11 AM

I found this abomination on YMMV.Criminal Minds Beyond Borders. I think we can cut everything except maybe the Buddhism one.

• Critical Research Failure:
  • Some of the vehicles seen in places where RHD vehicles are mandated by law.
  • "The Harmful One":
    • The portrayal of Thailand was definitely over-the-top. Sure, you might get strong-armed into a ping pong tournament. (Ironically, the only people there who make you feel unsafe at all are the drunk tourists.)
    • The unsub in the first episode is inspired to perform Human Sacrifice by a form of Buddhism...which forbids harm to any living being.
  • "Whispering Death": Japan, "the suicide capital of the world" (actually it's Guyana; Japan is only 17th).
  • "Iqiniso":
    • The Apartheid-era South African secret police are identified as "the Office of State Security". They were the Bureau of State Security, commonly known as "BOSS." Also, those who gained amnesty did so openly-their identities are a matter of public record, thus negating the whole plot.
    • The Special Forces Brigade is under the South African Army. The police force either would deploy the Special Task Force or the National Intervention Unit. In this case for the episode, it would be the STF since closeups of the uniforms show STF insignia and patches.
  • "Citizens of the World": A cruise ship docked in Libya in June 2014? Seriously?
  • "The Lonely Heart": No, you can't radiocarbon date a metal object. Radiocarbon dating only works with organic materials.
  • "El Toro Bravo": A bullfight being held on a holiday doesn't mean that the bull is any more 'sacred' or 'worshipped' in reality than the goose is for being cooked on Christmas. In the past, when a bull killed a person it was traditional for bull breeders (the same guys said in the episode to be the ones who appreciate bulls the most) to slaughter both the bull and its entire bloodline. Despite the enduring myth, bullfighting is not, and has never been intended to be a fair contest between man and animal.
  • The almost non-chalant treatment of suicide in "Denial." See They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot.

I think the Buddhism one, and maybe the Libya one, can stay. Depends on when the episode was aired in the case of the latter.

Found on YMMV.Night At The Museum. Actual examples, or just nitpicking?

• Critical Research Failure: Unlike the Museum of Natural History in New York, the British Museum in London is solely confined to human history - mostly ancient cultures like the Romans and Egyptians - and has no reason to feature any dinosaur skeletons; they're all in the Natural History Museum.
  • They also don't have a medieval hallway, or a model of Sir Lancelot - who, it must be repeated, is fictional.
  • The British Museum actually released a statement pointing out all the things that the film made up.

Edited by GoldenCityBird on Mar 3rd 2020 at 3:07:14 PM

The fact that the British Museum has never hosted dinosaurs etc. fits better under Artistic License – History. Moving there accordingly.

Edited by Albert3105 on Mar 3rd 2020 at 7:42:03 AM

It's a first season episode, and the main page says the series started airing in March 2016.

Age of Empires II has some entries that seem like deliberate liberties taken by the writers, and an entry that argues with itself.

• Critical Research Failure:
  • In Age of Kings:
    • The final scenario for the tutorial campaign (the Battle of Falkirk) portrays it as a siege, and implies that William Wallace survives to continue his war with the English. While they were probably trying to avoid the historical Downer Ending, they could've just as easily given Wallace a Heroic Sacrifice. Alternatively:
    • The Battle of Falkirk should have had you playing as the English where you have to defeat William Wallace. It also should have been the second-to-last mission of the Tutorial campaign. The real final tutorial mission should have been the Battle of Bannockburn, after which the narrator of the tutorial campaign is revealed to be Robert the Bruce.
  • In The Conquerors:
    • The religious building for the Mesoamericans are still called Monasteries, and the religious unit is still called "Monk". However, their monk actually uses a different skin than other monks, making them look like a Mayincatec priest. At least they got the blood on the stairs.
    • The Montezuma campaign repeats the popular myth that the Aztecs mistook the Spanish for gods. ^note However, it is true that 1519 was the year of Ce Acatl, which is the year Quetzalcoatl was promised to return. Previously, during Juan de Grijalva's expedition in 1518, Montezuma believed that those men were heralds of Quetzalcoatl, as Montezuma, as well as everyone else in the Aztec Empire, were to believe that eventually Quetzalcoatl will return. Moctezuma even had glass beads that were left behind by Grijalva brought to Tenochtitlan and they were regarded as sacred religious relics. Historian Hugh Thomas concludes that Montezuma was confused and ambivalent about whether Cortés was a god or the ambassador of a great king in another land. In short, the "Aztecs mistaking the Spanish for gods" theory had some elements of truth in it, but was only part of the story.
    • In the El Cid campaign, El Cid was said to have been killed by an arrow and propped up on a horse in order to stop the truth from spreading. In reality, he died peacefully. This was probably done for the same or similar reasons as the Battle of Falkirk bit.

I'll just go ahead and delete the Age of Empires II entries.

Hey guys. Just throwing an idea out there, do you think that it might help to stop misuse if I went to the Trope Repair Shop and suggested renaming this trope to "Common Knowledge Failure" to get the point across that this trope is about inaccuracies about something even a non-expert could know as opposed to just research failures in general? I thought I'd start here because the answer I get could save me a wick check.

That might be a confusing name change, since we already have a trope called Common Knowledge. Although that's about common misconceptions people have about works instead of works that make mistakes about basic material.

Edited by chasemaddigan on Mar 17th 2020 at 1:55:51 PM

^ Okay. Thanks for the advice.

What about CinemaSins, where most of their "sins" are things that are answered by the films if the view simply pays attention?

Sounds more like Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer

...By the way, that trope has one of the most weird and obscure names ever. It's pure Trope Namer Syndrome, but hey, if it ain't broke I guess...

Cinema Sins used to have a Dan Browned page, but it was deleted for unclear reasons. Would it be acceptable to make a Cowboy BeBop at His Computer page?

I have a feeling that that subpage was originally a CRF subpage before being moved to Dan Browned.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 24th 2020 at 3:01:03 AM

I'd like to ask how valid this example on YMMV.Robin Of Sherwood is:

• Critical Research Failure: It's more likely to be a deliberate fudging of the facts given the attention to historical detail paid elsewhere in the series, but the depiction of Herne the Hunter as an medieval figure of pagan worship with worship stretching back to the Dark Ages misses the inconvenient point that Herne is a relatively modern invention. The figure wasn't first mentioned in writing until 1597 (by Shakespeare, of course, in The Merry Wives of Windsor) and even then he was described not as a pagan god or spirit but as the ghost of a human poacher. He was also associated with a particular locality - Windsor - that is no where near Nottinghamshire. His codification as the archetypal antlered pagan deity is largely a Victorian invention. Some historians have made the (rather wistful and farfetched) case for this romantic figure having real Celtic origins, though, so we can forgive the makers of Robin on the grounds they were writing according to a real, if marginal, theory.

Didn't bother reading beyond, "it's more likely to be a deliberate fudging of the facts." It's so convenient when the entry goes ahead and tells you that it's a shoehorn from the beginning.

Thought so, but I decided it couldn't hurt to run it past this thread.

This is on YMMV.I Carly:

• Critical Research Failure: In iStake Out, Freddie gets out of going to a swimming lesson to hide his tattoo on a cloudy day by convincing his mother to go buy cloud block so that he won't get "cloud burn." This is supposed to be an example of how incredibly overprotective she is of him for buying it, but it's actually possible to get sunburn on a cloudy day since clouds don't completely block out ultraviolet rays.

That's not an obvious fact the show got wrong. If anything the show got it right by accident.

Sounds like Accidentally-Correct Writing, then.

Should I move it to the trivia page under that?

I found this on YMMV.Takalani Sesame:

• Critical Research Failure: What happened when most American right-wing politicians and Moral Guardians discovered Kami, as they believed that the character was intended for the American version of the show.

What is that example even trying to say? Cut it.

...Yeah, I'm lost too. Put it out of its misery.