Your most pointless TV/movie/book nitpicks

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There's underwear in Andor.

They didn't take George's phone calls in the Andor writing room.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

There's underwear in Andor.

And it didn't even take a convoluted explanation, or even a whole movie to explain, did it?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Hot take #2: Peter Jackson committed character assassination against Faramir.

 

[payn]

Parsecs are a measure of distance.

Next you are going to tell me leagues are not a measure of depth.

 

[MarkB]

Hot take #2: Peter Jackson committed character assassination against Faramir.

The words he speaks in jest in the novel about the "happy chance" of finding such a prize being spoken in earnest in the movie is just gut-wrenching.

Jackson had this idea which he explains in the Fellowship of the Ring commentary that the way the characters were in the novels was in many cases just too idealised for audiences to buy, so that the way he adapted them was to be on a journey from a less heroic space to grow into being the version from the novels. And that works fantastically for, say, Aragorn, who has all the screen-time in the world to make that journey. But for the characters with shorter arcs it tends to mean that we spend far too much of their screen time with the less heroic versions of them. Treebeard and Theoden suffer particularly from this, and with Faramir it's just tragic.

 

[Dioltach]

I dunno, I thought it worked quite well. As long as you see Boromir and Faramir as essentially two versions of the same character. Faramir is the version that manages to overcome the Ring's lure, but we need to see its effect on him. Otherwise Boromire would also have been a weaker character.

 

[Deset Gled]

Back in your box, Geroge. We know you screwed up the first time because it sounded cool and you didn't know what a parsec is. Just admit it and move one, rather that coming up with some silly convoluted explanation.

To be fair to both Lucas and Solo, the explanation of parsecs and the Maw was in the expanded universe since the 90s. I'm not sure if Kevin J Anderson was the one who came up with it, but it was in the Jedi Academy trilogy, and it was one if the least ridiculous things to come out of those books.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Okay I got another one, from another relatively well-researched series (in S1 anyway), which is the hilariously overwrought but fun BBC series (feat. Rose Leslie of Ygritte fame), Vigil.

The first series was set on a nuclear submarine and the nitpicks I had were mostly related to set/SFX, which always seem a little unfair - like, the missile tubes were implied to be vertical and sort of in the middle of the sub - they're actually slanted and to the side - this is the case in most modern ballistic missile subs - and when they had the sub using its foreplanes to go up, they didn't actually animate that, they just showed the same animation from a different angle (the sets were fun though). The sheer amount of intrigue occurring on one nuke boat was implausible but it was fun if trope-y (also appreciated the flashbacks being handled pretty well, though the complex politics of the main mystery were largely both-sided/"what can one man do?"'d). Anyway!

The second series is about some flying military drones with a bizarrely Warhammer 40K vibe (each drone in the "squad" has different primary weapons, which is cool if highly implausible), and they've really tried to lock down a lot of the potential plot holes and narrow the scope of the mystery, and they did a good job. But holy naughty word did they screw up on one thing:

They had multiple characters in our air force refer to our air force as "The British Air Force".

No.

Just no. No-one actually in the actual air force, is going to call it that. That is the most civilian-or-foreigner-ass name possible.

It's the Royal Air Force.

Just like it's the Royal Navy. And I don't say that as a royalist (I'm not), but rather someone completely tangentially involved in the military - I was in the cadets for less than two years (long story), but even I know that. Like, anyone who has ever been in the navy or air force could have told them that - I imagine a lot of American soldiers could have told them that. The army isn't the "Royal Army", it's the British Army, that's different, but even being in that should let them know. They did a lot of other elaborate research but someone managed to mess up this super-basic cultural grounding element. If it was an American show or writer I'd understand, but it's a British show with British writers.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This was such an imbecilic error. The paper's topic is not plot relevant. There is no need for the audience to even see the paper - the stack of work we see could have had a textbook on top. Or, they could have glanced at a wikipedia page to know what to actually say there. But... no, they didn't.

Yeah this is an absolute classic form of "nitpick induction". Where a show or book shows or explains something that it totally doesn't need to, and only makes itself very mildly worse in the process. I love Becky Chambers' writing and characters in general, for example, but oh boy does she love an unnecessary technical explanation that is, well, wrong science-wise, and could have been just elided - it's easy to believe an android has an essentially limitless power supply for the purpose of the story, for example. Why explain it in detail and, in the process of trying to explain why it's not a perpetual motion machine, describe a perpetual motion machine?

 

[Ryujin]

Just like it's the Royal Navy. And I don't say that as a royalist (I'm not), but rather someone completely tangentially involved in the military - I was in the cadets for less than two years (long story), but even I know that. Like, anyone who has ever been in the navy or air force could have told them that - I imagine a lot of American soldiers could have told them that. The army isn't the "Royal Army", it's the British Army, that's different, but even being in that should let them know. They did a lot of other elaborate research but someone managed to mess up this super-basic cultural grounding element. If it was an American show or writer I'd understand, but it's a British show with British writers.

Another one, huh? I did 3 years in RCAC. Never made it above LAC, though. Wasn't really motivated to do so due to politics