by cmsellers » Wed Sep 19, 2018 4:52 am
Another one that I was reminded of because of the people who bitch about the people who bitch about therapod dinosaurs not having feathers: "It's fiction, get over it."
I really hate when people insist that we should ignore perpetuation of inaccurate information in fiction because it is fiction. Artistic license is a thing, but it has to justify my suspension of disbelief. All-too-often the justification for inaccuracies is some combination of laziness and familiarity. It becomes a cliche, but not a cliche that serves a real purpose, and lazy, annoying, pointless cliches break my suspension of disbelief
The example that reminded me of this peeve is featherless therapods: feathered therapods cost more to animate and are less iconic, so for one or both of those reasons therapods are still presented as unfeathered, or sometimes with a few weird token feathers that don't change the dinosaur's profile.
I see the same justification being used when myths are perpetuated. I can't think of a recent example, but I can recall that I have seen such examples and the reaction has been "it's fiction, get over it." There are cases where this would make sense, such as deconstructing tropes or having a pretentious character say something notoriously false. However I definitely have seen cases where the writers were clearly presenting an urban myth as fact, and when I googled it, I found the people who bring it up being assailed with "it's just fiction, get over it."
I am pretty sure I even saw this in the Cracked comments section occasionally, when a writer would invoke a myth to make a joke, but not a joke about that myth and not in a way that suggested they knew it was untrue. And of course people would call the writer out, and several people would insist "it's comedy, get over it."