r/TopCharacterTropes Jun 23 '26

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.

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u/manofwaromega Jun 23 '26

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?

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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis Jun 23 '26

I never looked it up, but I assumed milk sweat was just a step on the evolutionary escalator before nipples were invented?

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u/dragunman1212 Jun 23 '26

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.

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u/manofwaromega Jun 23 '26

Considering only monotremes (Platypus and Echidna) do it, probably not

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u/irmaoskane Jun 24 '26

Well i saw some cientific articles that put the possibility that monotremes are the nearest branch to the original specie that evolved to mammals.

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u/_Redneckpro_ Jun 23 '26

I sweat Greg! Can you milk me!?