Your most pointless TV/movie/book nitpicks

[jian]

My common tiniest nitpick which I’m sure happens to everyone who lives in a town where they film things (I’m waiting for it to happen with Vancouver):

That thing where people appear to teleport randomly around a town you know, walking around a corner in mid-conversation and reappearing several hundred yards away. I first noticed this with Eskimo Day (a drama set in Cambridge) but then it was near-constant with Lewis (which was filmed in Oxford). It can be weirdly disorienting, even nauseating, to watch this. Of course, I can see why it happens and it’s not an issue for 99% of the population, but it can be quite off-putting.

(Another tiny nitpick about Lewis and similar detective series - that thing where they go and visit a suspect and don’t bat an eyelid that they apparently own a £5m house despite not having a very lucrative job or similar source of cash. To me it would be a red flag to work out how they afford it. A GP working in Blackbird Leys (maximum income £90k a year if they’re lucky) who didn’t inherit a ton of cash can’t afford a massive house in North Oxford and to send their kids to the Dragon, it’s completely unfeasible.)

 

[jian]

I also have a metric ton of nitpicks about archery and fencing but basically, I know why Flynning happens and others (such as Sellsword Arts and Blumineck) have covered it much better than I could.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

As long as Robin Hood is a sexy cartoon fox, I can forgive a lot.

 

[jian]

As long as Robin Hood is a sexy cartoon fox, I can forgive a lot.

Sadly, he is rarely a sexy cartoon fox.

 

[GreyLord]

Wrong. No US soldier would express the range of a shot in yards. Shooting is always in meters. That dialogue was just so completely wrong it ruined what was otherwise an amazing scene.

Sorry, late to this party. This seems like a weird nitpick...

Depends on the service

Did a quick lookup. While the US ARMY uses meters to coordinate with NATO allies, the Marines still use yards in many instances. Barry, according to a quick look up was a US marine.

 

[GreyLord]

Well, nitpicks...LotR and the Hobbit (live action) are too numerous to talk about when talking about them in relation to the books.

The biggest nitpick I have though are all those who complain about the Hobbit and how it deviates from the book.

The LotR deviates just as much (if not more)!

IF you do not like the Hobbit due to how it deviates...you should feel the same way about the LotR!

I had the biggest hang up about LotR until I just decided to view it as art in and of itself and stop trying to think it had much to do with the Trilogy outside of being heaviliy inspired by it.

The only difference between the LotR films and the Hobbit movies is that the LotR overall as a trilogy moves faster and is more interesting overall. LotR is more ground breaking and better put together.

They both are as horrible as each other though for how much they deviate from the source material.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

the real nitpick for me was that the showrunners chose to set the show in the late 12th century but made the central conflict be about pagan Saxons resisting Christian Norman invaders.

Ooof wow that's pretty bad. Particularly as there were a lot of real pagan places (in Central/Eastern Europe particularly) being attacked by Christian invaders at that time, but very much Britain wasn't one of them.

Also the Normans were really awful (c.f. The Harrying of the North, which was arguably a genocide*), but this was very much Christian-on-Christian violence.

* = There's a weird and very non-objective, agenda'd-seeming argument by a number of historians that it wasn't a genocide, but the archaeological evidence supports a truly massive and very unusual population destruction and replacement, contrary to their claims, and some of them are reduced to stuff like "Well at that time a lot of conflicts were incredible brutal, so it's not a genocide", which is childishly dumb stuff, because even if true (and archaeology shows it was unusual), what that would actually show is "genocidal conflicts were not uncommon in that era", rather than that this wasn't one genocidal. A particularly sad argument was made by one which essentially was "Well sure okay maybe people remembered how horrific and exceptional this conflict was for centuries in a way that makes it highly distinct from other conflicts of the era, but they were just being dramatic!", which is borderline DARVO. Given a lot of the people who argue against it being a genocide have made entire careers cheering later Norman rulers as basically making/saving (from whom?) Britain, or even William himself, it's hard to see them as being entirely honest here. Hardly the first genocide a few posh British and US historians decided to work hard to deny, I guess. Any white-people-involved genocide will have a lot of historians** rushing up to say it wasn't a genocide, just like any conflict where a lot of people died but white people weren't involved, the same historians will rush to say "Oh yes definitely genocide, those barbarians!" (I'm looking at you, Dan Snow).

** = To be fair, as someone trained primarily in archaeology, and secondarily in history, I hold the profession of "historian" (esp. if they write for the public) in a degree of contempt. The number of times they've proven dead wrong (or uncharitably, "liars") by actual archaeological evidence is truly beyond counting, and it's almost aways when the historians themselves were calling actual primary/secondary sources liars.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

IF you do not like the Hobbit due to how it deviates...you should feel the same way about the LotR!

That only follows logically if you believe the sole sin is deviation from the original at all, not the nature (or arguably degree) of the deviation.

Which would be a very strange and unusual view. Almost universally, people grade deviation from the original on the basis of whether it serves the story and the vibes of the original (and the new version), or whether it just ruins them, not just that "all change is bad" like we were antagonists in a Moorcock novel.

They both are as horrible as each other though for how much they deviate from the source material.

No.

They both deviate from the source material's specific plot to a similar degree, arguably.

However even if we say that, that isn't the end of the story. The Hobbit takes much bigger liberties with the personalities and attitudes of the characters in the story, for one example. Generally people are more upset by that than abbreviating, adding to or somewhat altering the plot. Even when it's quite well done in more objective terms (like the elf/dwarf love story in The Hobbit movies is one of the better-written parts, bizarrely, but rings kind of hollow in the cartoonish context the movies create and yet also doesn't fit the vibes of the novel).

And the specific deviations The Hobbit (the movie trilogy) makes tend to undermine the story and vibes of The Hobbit (the novel) to a far, far greater degree than those of LotR. Indeed the LotR movies convey the general vibe and themes and ideas and overall story of the books extremely well, to the point of making people who read the books understand them better in many cases! I would suggest The Hobbit did the precise opposite and quite strongly. Even if we viewed The Hobbit as deviating less plot-wise (which seems hard to credit, but let's say for the sake of argument), the choices of deviation it made were very bad, and in some cases it did the plot technically right, but in such a ridiculous and kinda-stupid way it felt almost like mockery or parody.

So you do have a pointless nitpick here, fair, but it's specifically reliant on people only seeing deviating at all as the problem, and ignoring the how/why/specifics of the deviation.

(EDIT: Also worth noting, not all parts of a book are necessarily seen by readers of said book as equally vital for a filmic adaptation. For example, with LotR, a lot of book readers never really got Tom Bombadil, and saw that as basically pointless, and the scouring of the Shire was also a bit "huh" to a lot of readers. So cutting those from the extremely long books to help them fit into three extremely long movies makes sense to the audience. Personally, I find both sections fascinating and they illustrate the weird radical politics Tolkien had well, but they barely served the story even in the original, they were more kinda "The author has arrived to explain what he actually thinks". I'd include them in a TV series of LotR for sure, but they're obvious easy candidates for cutting in a movie series version and help show how audiences get mad when you remove, add to or change stuff they value, not when you just remove, add to or change stuff period. You might see a similar thing with say, an adaptation of Tigana and the weird BDSM-y interlude in one part, or indeed the close-to-metaphor sequence that's next to it. They're interesting and technically connect to the message of the book, but don't really fit very well, and would probably be significantly altered or removed if Tigana was made into a TV series or movie(s). And I doubt most audiences would be mad about that - many might be relieved. Another example of a popular change might be aging up characters in source material where their ages make plot elements feel a bit questionable/dodgy. It's not "change = bad", it's "bad change = bad". Sometimes change can arguably improve how well something is understood in another medium.)

 

[jian]

Ooof wow that's pretty bad. Particularly as there were a lot of real pagan places (in Central/Eastern Europe particularly) being attacked by Christian invaders at that time, but very much Britain wasn't one of them.

Also the Normans were really awful (c.f. The Harrying of the North, which was arguably a genocide*), but this was very much Christian-on-Christian violence.

* = There's a weird and very non-objective, agenda'd-seeming argument by a number of historians that it wasn't a genocide, but the archaeological evidence supports a truly massive and very unusual population destruction and replacement, contrary to their claims, and some of them are reduced to stuff like "Well at that time a lot of conflicts were incredible brutal, so it's not a genocide", which is childishly dumb stuff, because even if true (and archaeology shows it was unusual), what that would actually show is "genocidal conflicts were not uncommon in that era", rather than that this wasn't one genocidal. A particularly sad argument was made by one which essentially was "Well sure okay maybe people remembered how horrific and exceptional this conflict was for centuries in a way that makes it highly distinct from other conflicts of the era, but they were just being dramatic!", which is borderline DARVO. Given a lot of the people who argue against it being a genocide have made entire careers cheering later Norman rulers as basically making/saving (from whom?) Britain, or even William himself, it's hard to see them as being entirely honest here. Hardly the first genocide a few posh British and US historians decided to work hard to deny, I guess. Any white-people-involved genocide will have a lot of historians** rushing up to say it wasn't a genocide, just like any conflict where a lot of people died but white people weren't involved, the same historians will rush to say "Oh yes definitely genocide, those barbarians!" (I'm looking at you, Dan Snow).

** = To be fair, as someone trained primarily in archaeology, and secondarily in history, I hold the profession of "historian" (esp. if they write for the public) in a degree of contempt. The number of times they've proven dead wrong (or uncharitably, "liars") by actual archaeological evidence is truly beyond counting, and it's almost aways when the historians themselves were calling actual primary/secondary sources liars.

Yeah, the Harrying of the North was definitely a genocide, but calling it that upsets a lot of English people who think genocides only happen to other people and are sure that if there had been a genocide they’d have been told about it in history class 30 years ago.

It’s like the persistent idea (at least online) that the English somehow won the Hundred Years’ War (because longbows are so awesome*) when actually we lost that war as comprehensively as it’s possible to lose a war, losing almost all our previous territories and pushing us into one of the worst civil wars in our history.

*Welsh longbows are indeed awesome but they were mostly the one cool trick that let the English win a couple of initial battles we still celebrate before the French comprehensively handed us our arses in a dozen more.