# The mundane unrealistic details that take you out of the batshit fantastically unrealistic setting **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 23, 2015, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755 "2015-03-23T02:44:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![BlankSlate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blankslate/32/80_2.png) [@BlankSlate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlankSlate)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2015, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/161 "2015-03-30T16:28:43Z")
> [@Zsofia](#): > > I never could with the idea that in the “real world” of the Matrix everybody forgot how to knit a decent sweater. > > I’m always ripped right out of things by shitty historic costuming. I could NOT cope with _The Tudors_. No. What material were they using to knit those sweaters? And do you think that’s air you’re breathing? ---
**Author:** ![BrianJ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/54ee81/32.png) [@BrianJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrianJ)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2015, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/162 "2015-03-30T22:31:48Z")
> [@Jophiel](#): > > Related, in the video game Dragon Age Origins, one of the characters speaks in a pronounced, almost silly, French accent as she comes from another country. I let it roll because I accept it as a device saying “Hey, she’s not from around here”. > > In a follow-up game, Dragon Age Inquisition, you have people from that country actually speaking in French. Not just a borrowed word here or there but full phrases. That bothers me more because now it’s not some France-like fantasy medieval kingdom, it’s “actually” France. Except that it’s not. I don’t remember full French phrases in Inquisition. I’ll have to listen for that. For me, about thw same game, a character named Mother Dorothea was in the first game, as an English accented priestess. 10 years in game later, in Inquisition she’s been promoted to head of the entire church… and has a French accent. I don’t know if continuity errors really count for the purpose of this thread. A better one is in Mass Effect, also by Bioware. One race of aliens mostly have a vague eastern European accent. Fine, until you meat one character who talks and acts like a US marine. ---
**Author:** ![Catamount](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/catamount/32/2840_2.png) [@Catamount](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Catamount)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2015, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/163 "2015-03-30T23:12:31Z")
> [@BlankSlate](#): > > What material were they using to knit those sweaters? The crappiest yarn in the world, apparently. > [@Jophiel](#): > > [Sunday’s edition](http://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2015-03-29) of the online comic Sinfest. Ignore the whole Devil world, Reality Zone, yadda yadda business and the heavy moralizing of the strip in general. I’m more bothered by the fact that a robot needs to _visually look at a map display on her arm_ in order to know where she’s going. I’ve been reading _Apartment 3-G_ for so long, I don’t even notice errors like that in comics anymore. (I do wish Tats would hurry up and get to the point, though. Either that or throw in some Pooch & Percy comics while we’re waiting.) ---
**Author:** ![CaptMurdock](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/captmurdock/32/11736_2.png) [@CaptMurdock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaptMurdock)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/164 "2015-03-31T00:00:22Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Heck, in Heinlein’s _Rocket Ship Galileo_ and in George O. Smith’s _Venus Equilateral_ series you have space ships being guided by cam-controlled _mechanical computers_, much like the Norden Bombsight. Computer Tapes, and the Digital Computers that go with them, would be a step _up_ in technology. > > I still love and read the stories. It’s the attitude, not the scientific errors or the obsolete technology. I love the old tech in Jules Verne’s novels, and I simply ignore the errors. Yeah, me too. Mind you, even as a kid in the late 70s, reading _Starman Jones,_ which had FTL ships utilized binary computers (as in, you had to _manually input binary numbers via switches_) which used spatial coordinates that had to be translated using _tables which the astrogater had to read from bound volumes_, I had to go “…what, dude? I think we had something more sophisticated than that going to the moon!” Granted, that book was written a decade or more before then, but really… :smack: ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/165 "2015-03-31T00:26:55Z")
> [@ExTank](#): > > The actual un-dead kind, not the Raged-up still-living _28 Days Later_ variety. > Aren’t actually dead zombies a sort of self-correcting problem? I mean, tissue still rots and degenerates, yes? And wouldn’t being exposed to the elements (as opposed to being tucked away in a coffin six feet under) only accelerate this? > Aren’t there wild animal attracted to the scent of carion? It’s generally assumed that whatever is reanimating the zombies is also slowing their rate of decomposition. The **Zombie Survival Guide** does more than imply this and outright states that the Solanum virus (which IRL is a _potato_ virus :p) cause all living organism from bacteria to carrion eaters to wild animals (but not humans) to instinctively about zombies. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/166 "2015-03-31T04:44:03Z")
There’s no way undead zombies can exist without magic, anyway. I mean, the human body uses so many complex and delicate systems just to stay upright that any concept of \*walking \*dead is simply impossible. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/167 "2015-03-31T05:05:11Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Cool! Thank you! I had taken Elizabeth’s armor, in the movie, to be not only fantasy, but absurd and exaggerated fantasy. I guess I’m wrong. Oopsie! I haven’t seen the movie, but looking at the still, what I thought is “St George!” I’m reasonably sure the design was lifted either from a tapestry or from a statue of the saint (Archangel Michael, who is also often represented in armor and fighting a dragon, tends to go for Roman armor). > [@Bricker](#): > > What’s Professor X’s power again? I can’t recall, but he’s been known to use it to evade taxes, get American passports for his students… One that drives me nuts is foreign-language troubles, such as signs in Spanish that have evidently been translated by the “a word, a dictionary, a brick” method of translating each word individually from English and picking the dictionary’s first offering, or when you have twenty people who are supposed to be from the same area but have widely-differing accents. Someone speaking more “schooled” than someone else sure, if it isn’t completely absurd (the lawyer speaks Cockney while the mechanic sounds like he has daily tea with Her Majesty), but twenty Mexicans of which one can’t pronounce his own name in Spanish, another has home-Spanish with a heavy American accent, another speaks Venezuelan, another… Watching such a story, I thought “guess this is what the people at the Dope feel like when they talk about the horrid [location] accent of this or that actor. After all, if casting and director can’t be arsed get accents right in their own language, how can we expect them to give a shit in one they don’t speak?” ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/168 "2015-03-31T05:21:35Z")
And from the other cultural side: My mother recently loaned me a book where the protagonist is the dual-citizen child of an American and a Spaniard. She was born in Spain; the family moved to the US when she was 9 and hasn’t returned since. At the beginning of the book she is a 24yo lawyer in a posh law firm in Manhattan, and she’s heading legal teams in court. The match of age and job would be hard to believe in Spain (where law school is undergrad) but in the US, I find it even more so. Templar rings that give their bearer dreams of the Siege of Jerusalem, ok, it’s a premise of the book. But 24yo heading litigation teams, I have problems with. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/169 "2015-03-31T06:52:11Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > And from the other cultural side: > > My mother recently loaned me a book where the protagonist is the dual-citizen child of an American and a Spaniard. She was born in Spain; the family moved to the US when she was 9 and hasn’t returned since. At the beginning of the book she is a 24yo lawyer in a posh law firm in Manhattan, and she’s heading legal teams in court. The match of age and job would be hard to believe in Spain (where law school is undergrad) but in the US, I find it even more so. Templar rings that give their bearer dreams of the Siege of Jerusalem, ok, it’s a premise of the book. But 24yo heading litigation teams, I have problems with. That reminds me of a Tom Clancy book featuring an 18-year-old Israeli fighter pilot. Flight school is three years long. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/170 "2015-03-31T08:28:01Z")
> [@SpazCat](#): > > Outdated technology jerks me right out of a story. For example, in _The Ship Who Sang_, you have hideously deformed children who couldn’t survive on their own put into metal shells and trained to become intergalactic spaceships. Spaceships whose computers are still programmed with **tapes**. There was a recent movie…Captain America 2 I think, where a nazi preserves his consciousness on a WWII-era computer (complete with spinning magnetic tape reels as he thinks). But actually it was one of the highlights of the movie. So ridiculous you couldn’t help but laugh. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 11:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/171 "2015-03-31T11:23:10Z")
In _Spiderman 2_, there’s a scene where Spiderman is fighting Doc Ock on a train. In the sequence, Doc picks up Spidey, throws him _forward_, only to have SM tackled him from _behind_ upon landing. Looking for scientific accuracy in a film where a kid gets super powers from the bite of a radioactive spider is a fool’s game, I get it. But you’d expect basic Newtonian mechanics to still work… right? You can watch this madness [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z00fTwhmYX0&t=1m42s). ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/172 "2015-03-31T11:52:50Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > In _Spiderman 2_, there’s a scene where Spiderman is fighting Doc Ock on a train. In the sequence, Doc picks up Spidey, throws him _forward_, only to have SM tackled him from _behind_ upon landing. > > Looking for scientific accuracy in a film where a kid gets super powers from the bite of a radioactive spider is a fool’s game, I get it. But you’d expect basic Newtonian mechanics to still work… right? > > You can watch this madness [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z00fTwhmYX0&t=1m42s). Actually, that’s marginally plausible, depending on Spidey’s drag. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/173 "2015-03-31T11:56:41Z")
If Spidey had so much drag as to fall behind Doc Ock, then how did he accelerate to tackle the good Doctor? He plainly didn’t grab (either with his hands or his webbing) any part of the skyway to add velocity. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 12:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/174 "2015-03-31T12:01:02Z")
Good point. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 12:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/175 "2015-03-31T12:41:30Z")
> [@CaptMurdock](#): > > Yeah, me too. Mind you, even as a kid in the late 70s, reading _Starman Jones,_ which had FTL ships utilized binary computers (as in, you had to _manually input binary numbers via switches_) which used spatial coordinates that had to be translated using _tables which the astrogater had to read from bound volumes_, I had to go “…what, dude? I think we had something more sophisticated than that going to the moon!” > > Granted, that book was written a decade or more before then, but really… :smack: In that novel, Heinlein postulated a jump drive technology in which the final stages of the jump process itself would fry any sophisticated computer, and was none too healthy for the people on board, either. They had mechanical computers and people flipping through books to compute course corrections because computers would be unreliable in the final few seconds before the jump, and those were the most sensitive, on the “guess wrong and you materialize inside a star” sort of problem. Ships that used real computers went out and never came back. ---
**Author:** ![Master\_Wang-Ka](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/master_wang-ka/32/3325_2.png) [@Master\_Wang-Ka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Master_Wang-Ka)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/176 "2015-03-31T12:59:59Z")
1. Goatskins. Any fantasy world is going to have people who dress in animal skins, sure. But unless they’re mighty low paleolithic, they’re going to make CLOTHES out of the animal skins, even if it winds up being a kilt and crude boots. But I have seen any number of cheesy movies where our mighty swordswingers and sorcerers are wandering around in the RenFaire woods… and there WILL be a character dressed in what appears to be goatskins tied on with twine. And I don’t think “barbarian.” I think “guy who couldn’t afford a renfaire outfit.” The ONE exception is Robinson Crusoe, a guy who had nothing but fish and goats to work with. 2, And I have no trouble with the dead rising to feast on the flesh of the living, but it irritates me when it’s been a year or three since civilization collapsed, but we can still hotwire abandoned cars… ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/177 "2015-03-31T13:06:05Z")
> [@Master\_Wang-Ka](#): > > 2, And I have no trouble with the dead rising to feast on the flesh of the living, but it irritates me when it’s been a year or three since civilization collapsed, but we can still hotwire abandoned cars… And what’s with all the hair product? Watch the final few episodes of a season of Survivor to see what women’s hair looks like after just a month with no shampoo. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/178 "2015-03-31T13:16:32Z")
Space and time travellers have no trouble communicating with the natives. Apparently, people everywhere from the Andromeda Galaxy to ancient Rome all speak perfect modern English. ---
**Author:** ![Master\_Wang-Ka](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/master_wang-ka/32/3325_2.png) [@Master\_Wang-Ka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Master_Wang-Ka)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/179 "2015-03-31T13:27:45Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > Space and time travellers have no trouble communicating with the natives. Apparently, people everywhere from the Andromeda Galaxy to ancient Rome all speak perfect modern English. Yeah, but it’d be a much more boring story if Mr. Spock had to stop and learn Mercotanese. Read a novel once: The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. Excellent book… but early on, our hero saves himself from a wrecked spaceship floating near Jupiter by melting some ice with his body heat, floating the water ON THE SHIP’S ROCKET FUEL, and igniting a spark with a sliver of sodium metal, thus firing the ship’s ROCKETS! Itched at me like hell. A space merchantman running between Earth and the gas giants, using LIQUID ROCKET FUEL? This, despite the fact that a lot of the book revolves around the fact that all of humanity has developed the psychic ability to teleport short distances; that didn’t bother me a a bit. But liquid rocket fuel? Ha! ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2015, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755/180 "2015-03-31T13:36:55Z")
> [@Master\_Wang-Ka](#): > > This, despite the fact that a lot of the book revolves around the fact that all of humanity has developed the psychic ability to teleport short distances; that didn’t bother me a a bit. But liquid rocket fuel? Ha! What’s the disbelief? It’s not like the fuel was used for take-off or landing, that was all some sort of field effect, as far as I recall. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755.md?page=8) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mundane-unrealistic-details-that-take-you-out-of-the-batshit-fantastically-unrealistic-setting/715755.md?page=10)