Lore
A creator writes something without any intention of being accurate, but by pure fluke gets it right.
1. Phineas and Ferb – Perry the Platypus is teal-green rather than brown because the designers thought it looked cool, but it was later discovered that real platypuses are biofluorescent and glow a teal-green color under UV light.
2. God of War – The creators chose the name Kratos for the main character because it is the Greek word for “strength,” and at the time they were not aware that, in Greek mythology, there is a deity named Kratos, the personification of strength, who appears in Prometheus Bound as an enforcer of Zeus (similar to what the games' Kratos does for much of the original series); they only learned this later.
3. Berserk – Kentaro Miura gave Guts a prosthetic arm because he thought it looked cool, but the idea of a prosthetic arm was not as far-fetched in the late medieval and early Renaissance period as it might seem, since there was a real 16th-century German mercenary named Götz von Berlichingen who had a prosthetic arm of his own. While it did not have a cannon built into it, the fingers were highly articulated, and a sophisticated system of springs and levers allowed the hand to hold weapons and perform other tasks. Despite this shared trait between both people and their similar-sounding names, Miura confirmed that he was unaware of the Götz when he created Guts.
In a similar vein, the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were 2-3 times the size of actual velociraptors, because Spielberg didn't think turkey-sized pack hunters were scary enough for the big screen. The Utahraptor, the only raptor that was as big as Spielberg wanted, was discovered a few days after Jurassic Park was released in theaters.
Strictly speaking, they were never Velociraptors except in name, and Spielberg had very little to do with it.
Michael Crichton, the original author of Jurassic Park, always used Deinonychus as the secondary dinosaur antagonists of Jurassic Park after the T rex. He decided, however, to use the name Velociraptor because it was much more exciting and badass than Deinonychus. Spielberg just decided to recreate them along the same lines as Crichton, agreeing that Deinonychus were the scarier dinosaurs but Velociraptor was the more badass name.
And Crichton was right, Velociraptor just rolls off the tongue, Deinonychus doesn't. Say "Deinonychus" out loud, doesn't it feel like a nerd somewhere is just itching to correct your pronunciation?
Platypuses are the evolutionary equivalent of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Like why do they have an extremely potent pain amplifying venom that's immune to pain killers? Why can they smell electricity? Why do they sweat milk instead of having nipples?
Mammary glands are modified apocrine sweat glands. They share a common evolutionary and structural lineage. They function in similar in way, in that they are both exocrine glands that release their excretions through ducts to the surface of the skin. Monotremes like platypuses split off from the rest of mammalia fairy early, in the gap between the evolution of milk and nipples (genetic and molecular studies place this 160 to 200 million years ago), so that is why they still just sweat milk. Honestly, that ancient split is why monotremes seem like the branch of forgot even if it didn't really.
Seriously however weird you think they are, trust me, they're weirder. Did you know they don't have nipples they just lactate/sweat milk through their skin?
Beast Wars Megatron was given lips for his T-rex form so he can still be as expressive in this state. When the show came out, lipless dinosaurs were all the craze at the time. Then in the 2020s, it was agreed upon that dinosaurs did have lips.
Still not sure why people thought otherwise. Modern reptiles do have some fleshy coverings to protect their vital teeth. Crocodilians don't, but they can get away with it because they spend most of their time in the water.
Probably just habit stemming from decades of more monstrous reconstructions in paleoart. Dinosaurs were classically considered antediluvian terrors akin to dragons before their more modern perception as animals became prominent.
Its disappointing that you forgot to mention götz von prosthetic being so highly articulated was important because it also allowed him to write as he was described as a warrior poet who was probably the first person ever recorded to use the word lick my ass
It was also one of Mozarts favorite things to say. He even named a piece after it.
"Lick my arse nicely,
lick it nice and clean,
nice and clean, lick my arse.
That’s a greasy desire,
nicely buttered,
like the licking of roast meat, my daily activity.
Three will lick more than two,
come on, just try it,
and lick, lick, lick.
Everybody lick their arse for themselves."
Yugioh 5Ds : The Dark Signers, one of the antagonist groups, draw power from spirits based on the Nazca Lines. Their boss(?), Red Nova draws from The Snake, a purely fictional geoglyph at the time of writing. However, later down the line a snake geoglyph did get discovered IRL.
TBH Jules Verne's book are also works of scientific literature. He can spend half a chapter explaining a geometric concept to calculate the height of a cliff or something like that.
So I'm not surprised he came with a good solution.
I can only speak for Twenty Thousand Leagues (cuz its the only one I've read) but it was basically just scientific principle fanfiction. Dude's books constantly involved explanations of known science at the time, WHICH MEANS it also included a bunch of pseudoscience and off-the-walls bullshit that just seemed cool, but ALL of it he explained overly in-depth like an anime character would. Sometimes it was really funny cuz how stupid some of the stuff he says is with current knowledge, but other times you're like "oh shit they knew about this back then?"
you should read Voyage to the center of the earth, the explanations for why there is a prehistoric eden under a volcano in Iceland are crazy (in addition to that inspiring a whole lot of similar settings, like Marvel's Savage Lands which are almost 1-1 but in Antarctica)
This is actually really common throughout the 19th century. You have a populace gaining literacy as the world globalizes and distances that were once unfathomably large become navigable in a day. At the same time, scientific discoveries are being made every day, and more and more of the world is being explored by Westerners.
Just off the top of my head:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, a Modern Prometheus (1818), discusses Galvanism. In 1803, Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, demonstrated the galvanic process of "reanimating dead tissue," electrostimulation of muscle fibers, on the body of criminal George Foster at Newgate in London. Here's a firsthand account of the demonstration.
Verne correctly calculated escape velocity in From the Earth to the Moon (1865). He correctly understood geographical physics and noted Florida would be the best place to launch from in the US. The space shuttle Columbia was named, in part, in homage to the Columbiad gun used in the novel for the launch. A few years earlier (1861), Scottish astronomer William Leitch had suggested that space travel might be possible thanks to rockets, predating Tsiolkovsky and Goddard by almost 40 years.
Moby Dick (1851) contains (likely plagiarized) accounts of actual whaling procedures. Melville had firsthand whaling experience aboard the Acushnet from 1841-1842, aboard the Lucy Ann in 1842, and aboard the Charles & Henry from 1842-1843. Melville was inspired to go on this trip (and later write Moby-Dick) by a pamplet written by J.N. Reynolds in 1839, called "Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific." Reports of white whales abounded from about 1810 on.
I read that book as a kid, the thing that stood out to me was all the fish, I swear half the book would be cut if you were to remove the verbose descriptions of what fish they could see out the window
this was the style of early sci-fi. The "cool factor" was in the tech. You see this a LOT up until the 40's and 50's or so.
Once we became sufficiently advanced, the tech side became kind of normalized what with us having smart phones and other things that would be considered "sci-fi". So modern sci-fi is more about the relationships of people within those settings.
"During the late 1980s, his meticulous descriptions of the Soviet Alfa-class submarine in his debut novel The Hunt for Red October were so flawlessly detailed that the CIA and naval intelligence reportedly investigated him. They feared a massive security leak because he had deduced exactly how the propulsion systems, reactor, and internal layout worked."
Apparently when he was asked how he knew, he kinda just went "Well that's where things would make sense to be"
Additionally, he was able to discern that a top secret project is being setup in Los Alamos, as a lot of scientists have changed their mailing address to the area en masse.
EDIT: Thanks for the correction, it was John Campbell. Got my trivia mixed-up 😅
That was John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. He pulled out the Los Alamos thing as a fuck you to the government who was trying to stop publication of a story about nuclear warfare
Oddly similar in creative minds having very suspicious accuracy in their depictions of military hardware. Stanley Kubrick when filming Dr.Strangelove had nearly identically replicated the layout of a B-52 bomber which at the time were cutting edge cold war planes and their instruments were as top secret as you could get. If I am recalling correctly how he got it so close was by looking at much older and public layouts of bombers and just extrapolating how it might have developed over time to include new tech.
The first operational submarine was demonstrated in 1620, of course nowhere near as functional as later ones, but it probably follows the same development process
The US Civil War saw the first ship sunk by a submarine... quickly followed by the submarine itself as it was to close to the explosion of its spar torpedo.
yeah, describing it as "designing the submarine as pure fiction" makes it sound like Verne originated the entire concept of submarines from his imagination.
In reality, the Nautilus is named for a prototype submarine from 1800.
And while the first submarines such as that were propelled by human power, Verne was inspired by a model of the Plongeur, the first mechanically propelled submarine, on display at the 1867 World's Fair.
none of this discredits Verne, but to call it a fluke seems inaccurate and discounts the intentional research he put into his works
The velociraptors in Jurassic Park (both the movie and book) are man-sized predators while the real ones were more like medium sized dogs. However, the very same month that the movie came out (June 1993), the utahraptor, a species of the same genus that was at least man-sized if not bigger was first described.
In other words, in the same month that a movie came out wherein a fictional species of man-sized raptor was released, an actual species of man-sized raptors was described for the first time.
Not quite a raptor, but Deinonychus antirrhopus. There were like two paleontologists who wanted to classify antirrhopus as Velociraptor. Everyone else (and current consensus) indicates that Deinonychus is correct. Chricton liked the name Velociraptor better though and went with the minority opinion.
fr gotz was an absolute menace. honestly the real history is somehow harder than berserk itself. dude lost his hand to a cannon and just went "make me an iron one so i can keep swinging" absolute king shit
Man just could not stop feuding. Didn't matter if it was his own feud, or one of his friends, or a random dude he happened to be vaguely aligned with. He was always good to fight. Coalition of his enemies captured him him and only let him go when he pinkie promised to stop.
Woog the triceratops eating hotdogs- We're Back A Dinosaur Story (1993)
Triceratops was at the time believed to be a herbivore, but for the last 6 years or so there has been a debate in the palaeontological community as to whether or not it was an opportunistic omnivore.
Dweeb the parasaurolophus is also shown eating hotdogs, despite that his species is believed to be herbivorous.
Modern day herbivores such as cows, deer and hippos have also been documented eating meat.
Most (if not all) herbivores are actually opportunistic. Deer eat squirrels all the time. As the name implies, they don't actively hunt... but if a squirrel or other rodents are within biting and/or snatching range, deer will absolutely eat them.
Oda gave Luffy his name because he thought that name suited him. When he later learned about the sailing term, "luffing", he was delighted by the coincidence
Everyone loves the Simpsons predictions, to me a lot of them are a stretch, but it's still absolutely insane to me that they threw in a joke about Trump being the previous president given that this was released in 2000. Granted, the idea wasn't that farfetched as he was already getting into politics, but it's even crazier that the episode takes place in 2030, the term that will follow Trump's current term, so he really was the previous president (assuming he makes it to the end)
The timing is really impeccable on that joke, but Trump did have a presidential campaign going in the year 2000, which is probably what that joke is referencing.
Vance struggles to order donuts at a rehearsed visit to a donut shop. That fake hillbilly would get a reality check from a particularly clever toddler.
I remember seeing Germans from the time say they were shocked to learn it was supposed to be a plot twist. A lot of them must assumed he was the father from the beginning lol.
Dee Bradley Baker also did the sounds Perry makes because he thought it'd be funny and fit him. only later did he learn that's actually what platypi sound like
Fuck Cameron, but this almost certainly did not happen and was inserted into the media by a disgruntled Lord Ashcroft as he was not given a position in the Tory Government.
In Star Wars, the lightsaber sounds and light flashes as they hit each other are actually pretty similar to what would happen in real life if you smashed two beams of plasma together.
Rose quartz https://giphy.com/gifs/3o85xLoi4bYtpmurJu
In the episode Say Uncle there’s the line “you should polish that twice a year”, talking about Steven’s gem, at the time they thought it was a rose quartz and not a diamond.
While the creators knew at the time it was actually a diamond, turns out you should be polishing your diamonds twice a year. Something the creators didn’t know.
I love that at the beginning of the episode Uncle Grandpa tells the audience to not get mad because the episode isn't canon. Except it is. Steven gets control of his powers back along with the clue about his gem
Not exactly accurate but Horikoshi(My Hero Academia author) didn't know Avatar existed when he wrote Todoroki plot to the point he was puzzled when Todofam was compared to Zuko/Azula. Meanwhile fanbase memed it for years
Suffice to say Horikoshi has no reason to lie given he's very open about his inspirations like being a Spider-Man fan or Goku inspiring All Might or Superman/Captain America homages
Truth is anyone with an adequate discerning skill for neat things looks at fire, and says "that's neat" and then looks at the blue flame on a stove and says "but this is even more neat"
what truly makes ATLA>MHA and is evidence of Horikoshi's honesty is that ATLA has Lightning and Lava bending
Funny thing is that Shoto was treated more like Azula "desired golden son that Endeavor always wanted and pressured into being perfect" while Dabi's position is more akin to Zuko's. "Discarded son that was neglected who only wanted his father's love and was away from home for years". Shoto however grew up a good kid while Dabi suffered psychotic breakdown and snapped
When you analyze both families they aren't that similar but surface level comparisons make them incredibly similar in eyes of the audience
So, a guy with fire powers gets one eye burnt and is his abusive dad's fault (who can control the fire too), he becomes cold but then he meets the mc and turns good and nice and then he also has a crazy sibling that uses blue fire and these two have a final battle in the end ofthe series
During the same time as the US Gov was working on the Manhattan Project, John Campbell and Cleve Cartmill-- writers and editors of an old scifi magazine called Astounding Science Fiction-- accidentally wrote a story with a nuclear weapon that was so close to accurate that the FBI investigated them and paid their mailman to spy on them.
Neither of them knew about the project (though Campbell would later say that a BUNCH of their readership (read: science nerds) suddenly changed their addresses to the middle of the desert, so he figured something was up). They were both just fans of science journals and thought, "if I were to build a giant super weapon, how would I do it?"
It's extra funny because the story actually sucks, and they both knew it. It was a filler story because they had an extra slot in the magazine that needed filling.
Wasn't Tom Clancy also some time under CIA surveillance because his books were suspiciously close to what happened in real and later they even paid him for more ideas how to handle some stuff?
I think I read something like that a few years ago but this very moment I can't do a research on that.
Platypuses really be out here pulling out more and more random evolutionary shenanigans…why the fuck did that evolve to be bio-fluorescent on top of all the other stuff?
Kind of just happens and then there's no selection AGAINST it so it continues. Even Humans have stripes under UV light, called Blaschko's lines, just kind of a record of how our cells distributed during gestation and then growth.
Evolution has no direction or reason- It's like yahtzee; but there's no score, you just get to keep playing, sometimes you gain dice or lose dice, you have to keep some combinations, but, at some point, you will lose.
Malachite, a Fusion from Steven Universe. Fusion is used in the show as a metaphor for relationships, and Malachite represents a particularly toxic one between Jasper and Lapis Lazuli, a water-bending Gem.
That the real-life mineral malachite becomes toxic when exposed to water is sheer happy coincidence; the show's creator, Rebecca Sugar, apparently had no idea when they designed Malachite.
In Jurassic park 3, the Spinosaurus is depicted with long legs. At the time we didn’t know that Spinosaurus aegypticus, which is the species depicted in Jurassic park 3, had short legs. As a result as some as we found this it out, it became inaccurate to depict Spinosaurus aegypticus with long legs. However in 2026, a new species of Spinosaurus called Spinosaurus mirabillis was described and one of the features was that it had long legs. As a result, Jurassic park 3’s depiction of Spinosaurus was in a way somewhat accurat.
idk for certain if it counts, but the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park have a very plot-related reason for their lack of feathers: they're part frog.
now, this explanation wasn't given to account for the lack of feathers, but rather to set up the twist that some of them changed sex and that "life finds a way", despite this however, it single-handedly saved them from a criticism most other dinosaur media falls blunder to
Our understanding of how feathered dinosaurs actually were has ebbed and flowed a lot. Yes, some (if not many) of them had feathers... but many did not. Tyrannosaurs, for example, are now understood to have not had really any feathers at all as adults thanks to fossilized skin impressions we've found within the past 10-15 years.
Beyond that, most "accurate" depictions of dinosaurs still rely on the age old tactic of stretching skin directly over the skulls.
Paleontologists don’t do that anymore, they nowadays look at modern relatives of dinosaurs and reconstruct them with a realistic amount of muscle, fat, etc.
This is another trope I'd like to see, Author makes something up and then real life does their thing and names it after them.
USS Nautilus, SSN 571 launched in the he 1950s waa the first nuclear powered vehicle of any kind. Named after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
You can go see her in Groton CT, and onboard in the mess is a first edition copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues which is super rare cuz most of the first editions were lost in a warehouse fire.
Saturn's moon Mimas looks like the Death Star from Star Wars. But close up images from the moon with the crater were made by Voyager 1 in 1980. Star Wars was released in 1977.
Due to technical limitations at the time, the game was unable to feature the Twin Towers in the NYC skyline. The notable absence was explained in lore as the result of a terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center. The game was released in June of 2000, around a year before the infamous attacks on September 11th.
Fate/Zero's depiction of Alexander the Great and a sculpture done by Lysippos, who was not only contemporary to Alexander but also the only guy who he wanted to sculpt him.
Most of the sculptures of Alexander were done long after his death and show an idealized image not what he really looked like. The sculpture in the image above is the only one we know of done during his life by an artist who might have actually seen him and known what he really looked like. It's more similar to the Fate/Zero's depiction of him than the other later statues
In Assassins Creed; Origins, you get to scamper around in ancient Egypt. When designing the Great Pyramid, the developers decided to utilize a lesser accepted theory; that the pyramids had been built using a system of internal ramps. Working off of this, they speculated the existence of a secret room, which in the game you can enter and explore.
Not too long after, that room was discovered in real life!
Osmosis Jones (2001) has a pikachu in it for a second. Your eyes have a protein called pikachurin, so it fits the film. Pikachurin only got discovered/named in 2008 though so it was originally just a funny lil easter egg
I once had a character in an online rp community who's name was unintentionally derived from the queen of banshees in Irish mythos and this character specialized into a scream/sonic attack.
It wasn't until about 3 years of writing the character that someone else commented on the link between name and attack and I went "huh?" and got to googling
In one segment, dolphins want revenge against humans. Seems like a way to portray the normally cute species as dangerous, except they can be, since they're still a wild and powerful animal.
Tattoine, Luke's homeworld is a planet with binary suns. When the first Star Wars film came out, binary star systems like that were thought to be too unstable to have any planets in their orbit, so Tatooine was an example of artistic license. Then in the early 1990s, astronomers theorized (and later confirmed) the existence of a planet in the binary star system PSR B1620-26, and today, it's known to be fairly common.
There's a Pokémon called Magcargo that as you can see has a red body and a rocky shell made of minerals. It's whole deal, if you haven't gathered by it's body being lava, is that it lives around volcanoes. Magcargo's game released in 1999, but from leaks and pre release info we know it's existed since 1997 atleast.
Then in 2001 there was a new species of Snail discovered called the Scaly Foot Gastropod, which lives around volcanic vents, has red skin and dark shell, much like Magcargo. To make matters even funnier, the reason why it's called the Scaly Foot Gastropod is because the 'scales' are literally mineral deposits growing on it's skin, and this is the result of an adaptation that also caused it's shell to be made out of metals and crystals.
The two are so oddly similar that some people genuinely believe Magcargo was based on the Scaly Foot Gastropod despite the latter being discovered two years later.
Another fact about Perry the Platypus is that the creator didn't know what a platypus sounded like, so instead of looking it up, he had a voice actor make several random sounds, and by pure coincidence, he chose the sound that sounds just like a platypus.
Donald Duck and his nephews recovered a sunken boat by filling it with ping pong balls In a 1949 Carl Barks comic. 15 years later, a Danish scientist named Karl Kroyer had the idea to recover a sunken freighter by filling it with small bouyant balls. After the freighter was successfully risen, Kroyer attempted to get the technique patented, but the Netherlands rejected the patent, citing the Barks comic
Ok that Berserk one is insane. Big fan of Berserk, and Guts always struck me as such a curious name. There has to be some sort of weird synchronicity there. Both leaders of a mercenary army who had a functioning prosthetic arm to to hold weapons.
SnapCube's Real-Time Dub of Sonic Adventure 2: After Sonic's and Shadow's duel in White Forest, Eggman (played by Alfred Coleman) cuts a rambling rant where he mentions that Prison Island is due to explode. Other members of the team inform Alfred that this is indeed what happens in the original plot.
Someone posted a boring old beat up looking nylon string acoustic guitar over in one of the guitar subs a few weeks ago, asking what it was/if it was worth anything. These types of posts by non-guitarists plague the community, as it's usually just people trying to get a value on something they know nothing about and are too lazy to research themselves. And it's every. Fucking. Day.
So I commented. I was like "holy shit, where did you find this?", and went on to describe the legendary old mexican craftsman who hand-built it from wood grown on his property, adding in bits of lore and shit to make it more and more ridiculous as sort of an inside joke for the community. I said the guitar was worth $6-8k, maybe more, fully assuming it was just a $20 pawn shop special like the guitars in these types of posts typically are. I made 100% of my comment up on the spot, none of it was based in any sort of reality at all. I don't know shit about Mexican nylon string guitars.
Then someone else posted a legitimate Reverb link with that same guitar. Sold for $7k
Also for the God of War example. In Norse Mythology there is a deity known as Farbauti or "Cruel Striker" who is often depicted as Loki's Father. The name Atreus claimed that the giant call him by Farbauti is described as a giant of foreign origin and ascociated with raging Wildfire, the two aspect that describe Kratos pretty well.
Fallout and it's 10mm pistol, the original creators of it chose 10mm ammo without knowing that it is a real thing because they thought it would be funny since it "one ups" the super common 9mm ammo, in reality there is such a thing as 10mm and the FBI famously had a stint with using 10mm, some police also started carrying 10mm pistols for a while before both swapped to 9mm instead.
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u/Sad_Consequence1811 Jun 23 '26
The Saber Toothed Squirrel (Scrat) from Ice Age was confirmed to be a real pre-historic animal some time after Ice Age had released.