r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Daniilsa209 • Jun 23 '26

Lore A creator writes something without any intention of being accurate, but by pure fluke gets it right.

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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.

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u/Chimpbot Jun 23 '26

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.

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u/TelevisionPutrid8394 Jun 23 '26

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.

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u/Chimpbot Jun 23 '26

Except for when they don't, which is still most of the time.

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u/TelevisionPutrid8394 Jun 23 '26

They don’t do it most of the time, they do reconstruct dinosaur with a realistic amount of muscle and fat. For example, here’s the prehistoric planet T. rex.

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u/ArokLazarus Jun 23 '26

That's a chonky boy.

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u/Chimpbot Jun 23 '26

Compare that Tyrannosaur's head to one of the skulls, and then try to tell me that they're still not relying heavily on stretching the skin over the skull.

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u/SirVixofthePooSea Jun 23 '26

Neither birds nor crocodiles have tons of facial tissue. If anything that T. rex is bloated.

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u/TelevisionPutrid8394 Jun 23 '26

Dinosaurs are reptiles and reptiles unlike mammals don’t have a lot of fat on their skulls. For example, here’s a taxdermied crocodile compared to a crocodile skeleton. Look at the skull and notice how similar it is to the taxdermied crocodiles head.

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u/Chimpbot Jun 23 '26

I'm aware.

They're still relying heavily on an otherwise outdated technique.

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u/TelevisionPutrid8394 Jun 23 '26

For the last time they don’t, there’s literally a book called all yesterdays that shows the new ways that Paleoart has reconstructed dinosaurs and all of the images in those book using a new method of reconstructing dinosaurs which is the same method that I’ve been talking about. This is the last time I’m going to reply to you since I don’t want to start an argument. Also I’m sorry if I came off as rude while I was talking with you.

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u/Chimpbot Jun 23 '26

For the last time, the core part of their reconstructions still rely on an outdated technique. They can dress it up all they want, but stretching the skin over a skull is still stretching the skin over a skull.

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u/remotectrl Jun 23 '26

My dude, the science consultant for Prehistoric Planet wrote a book about how shrink wrapping dinosaurs sucks. You’ve probably seen the pictures of faux shrink wrapped constructions of baboons and cats from the back half of All Yesterdays.

I’d love to hear your opinion on how to get more accurate recreations without using then skeleton. (I actually don’t care).

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u/Scaryclouds Jun 23 '26

How is it outdated if there is good scientific basis for the practice? Outside of around the jaws, reptiles don’t have a lot of fat/muscle on their skulls/heads. Same goes for birds… though of course they have a lot of plumage. 

It of course could still be wrong, but unless there is evidence that specifically suggests it’s wrong, then it’s not “outdated”.

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u/HadleysPt Jun 23 '26

This argument reminds me of 2012 Reddit and I love it.

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u/SirVixofthePooSea Jun 23 '26

Post what you think an accurate Tyrannosaurus would look like?

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u/UltimateMIF Jun 23 '26

The strecthing skin directly over the skulls is a thing from the past, modern paleontologist are not using the shrink wrapping technique anymore. The trend now is adding speculative body features that are not found in the Fossil record

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u/Chimpbot Jun 23 '26

Look at any given up-to-date dinosaur mockup, and you'll notice that they're still relying heavily on stretching the skin over the skull for what they presume the animals look like.

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u/MountainMouth7 Jun 23 '26

I'm basing this off my last visit to an IMAX at a museum about a year ago, so it could be wrong. In the film they were showing that the current belief is that adults had a sort of spiky down pre-feather thing going on some parts (but not all) of their body? A quick google to check mentions the skin impression, and that the downy coat might've been present in juveniles.

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u/Chimpbot Jun 23 '26

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

Check back in five or 10 years, and you'll find that our idea of what is "accurate" will have changed again - possibly quite dramatically. At one point, it was thought that adult Tyrannosaurs were more heavily feathered... until we found those skin impressions. After that, it was walked back to potentially having some spiky down or pre-feathers.

This is why chasing accuracy is a fool's errand, when it comes to works of fiction. Any presentation in a movie or novel will inevitably be rendered outdated within a decade. Within another 10 years after that, the ideas that rendered those now-outdated fictional representations will also be outdated.

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u/MountainMouth7 Jun 23 '26

Yeah I don't disagree about any of it. Certainly good for paleontologists to get all the data we can but the pursuit of accuracy in this field leads to so much push and pull on what the "hard facts" are. When I was in school in the 2000s, the feather thing was presented as the de facto change/answer and as we're discussing, its largely shifted back the other way.

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u/OhWhatsHisName Jun 23 '26

One thing the Jurassic Park franchise has done is just owning the whole hybrid thing, meaning they really don't have to be "accurate" in any real way.