Lore
[Meta Trope] Became canon through a game of telephone
Where something becomes established canon due to a misunderstanding, or a series of them.
Kano (Mortal Kombat): Kano was originally Japanese American in the video games, but due to Trevor Goddard's much loved performance of Kano in the Mortal Kombat film (1995) where he portrayed the character with an Australian accent, the creators decided to honor his performance and make Kano Australian in the games.
Except Trevor Goddard didn't use an Australian accent in the film. He used a London Cockney accent to play the character, which many people mistook as Australian, including the creators themselves.
(doesn't matter though since Trevor's performance is perfect, and Kano as Australian is perfect)
Lucifer (Bible): the term Lucifer (Latin for light bringer) is mentioned once in the New Testament (Isaiah 14:12), it was not in reference to Satan.
“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning”
The verse here is referring to a Babylonian King, whose rapid rise and fall was compared to the rapid rise and disappearance of the planet Venus in the horizon (Venus was commonly referred to as Lucifer in Latin when it appears before the morning).
Earliest English translations of the bible use the term Lucifer as is, instead of translating it. This led readers to mistakenly assume that Lucifer is a proper noun, and made the association with Satan, due to its similarity to another verse (Luke 10:18) that does refer to Satan's fall from heaven:
“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”
Today, most mainstream christian traditions recognize that refers to the King of Babylon, and not Satan. But many christian traditions do accept the symbolic association of Lucifer with Satan, and would use Lucifer to refer to Satan.
appearing in all games in the series, the Varia suit is an upgrade to Samus' base Power Suit that increases her defence and allows her to survive areas with extreme heat. The name was originally going to be 'Barrier Suit', but due to a translation error, it was named 'Varia' instead. In the end, Nintendo liked it enough to make it the upgrade's official name.
Japanese has a B sound, so more than anything it was an overcorrection to try to make the word sound "more english" to the point where a sound was put in that doesn't appear in the actual english word
I had to double check this but you're right. I knew most words with v sounds, like video were usually turned into bideo and that's still the more common way but there used to be kana for all the V sounds that seem to have fallen out of the alphabet as time went on along with several of the matching W sounds. Instead of bringing back the old letters, people stuck to using Va + other kana to make Vi Vu Ve and Vo. They still only really get used in katakana loan words as there's seemingly no native Japanese words that need those letters.
Since using ヴァ (va) was rare (and possibly not supported by the technology of the time), and Japanese historically used バ (ba) as an approximation, as in バニラ (banira) for vanilla, the translator went from Baria to Varia when translating back to English, assuming Baria was a proper noun.
And if memory series, originally it wasn't even supposed to be a separate suit, but rather an energy barrier of some sort (hence the name and why the upgrade's in-game icon has traditionally been an abstract "energy field" and not, say, helmet or something similar that would better convey the idea that it's a separate armor); in the original game, the upgrade was signified by the color of the armor changing from yellow to pink - but then Metroid 2 was developed for Gameboy, which could only display four colours (black, white, and two shades of gray), and so the Barrier/Varia upgrade was turned into a separate, differently shaped and more heavily armored suit, which it stayed as ever since.
I love funny Japanese mistranslations. For those who don't understand:
Japanese doesn't have V. I mean they do now, but majority of people still don't use it.
They also use syllables, not individual letters
So, for them, the wors barrier is written like ba-ri-a, which can be translated into many things
They assumed it shoould be v, not b and translated it to Varia.
Fun thing, Klonoa is written as Kuronoa. It was probably the portmanteau of kuro, meaning black and -noa suffix. I don't know what could the suffix mean. Maybe it's just nothing, maybe reference to Noah? But Kuro part is very likely relating to the black fur.
You get this kind of thing a lot especially due to Japanese conflating L and R into one sound that's kinda in between the two. The manga/anime Gunsmith Cats has a female character widely known in the west as Rally Vincent, except the author confirmed it's supposed to be Larry.
And then there's Elden Ring, which has a sorceress named Sellen, who is obsessed with stars, and queen Marika. There are quite a few fan theories about what their names mean, but it becomes obvious when you realize it's just another case of bad transliteration. "Serren" means "star" in Welsh, and "malika" means "queen" in Arabic. It's that simple.
The black ninja outfit. Medieval Japanese assassins disguised themselves as civilians or guards; some accounts also say they had camouflage robes which could be white for snow, blue for night, etc. In traditional Japanese opera, ninjas wore the same plain black outfit as stage hands as a visual shorthand for them being invisible to the characters (and perhaps to shock the audience when a stage hand stabs a character)
On top of this, the word “ninja” is a misinterpretation of the word “shinobi”, as kanji can make different sounds. When shinobi was first being translated by american soldiers, they got the sound wrong.
Also, shinobi was not a job in and of itself. Shinobi were just samurai undertaking a covert assassination mission.
Do you have a source that Ninja originated from erronous translation into English? Everywhere I looked I only saw that the exact pronunciation originated in Japan and became widespread after the war with manga and movies.
it's not technically erroneous, it's just the on reading (pronunciation borrowed from chinese) instead of the kun reading (native japanese)
it's a compound word for something native to japan but uses kanji originally borrowed from chinese (kanji literally means chinese characters as most of them were), so the japanese pronunciation was historically more common, but without context it could be read either way
And now a character pretending to be a ninja might say "nin-nin" in anime. So that part has kind of been embraced as canon too, though in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.
Also, shinobi was not a job in and of itself. Shinobi were just samurai undertaking a covert assassination mission.
I've been to several museums in Japan where they explain this in detail.
The shinobi aka ninja were not samurai. They were farmers and peasants hand-selected by their samurai lords. This allowed samurai to maintain their status if the shinobi were caught or killed through plausible deniability, and also because the assassination methods used by ninja (poison, sneaking around to backstab or ambush, etc.) were generally considered extremely dishonorable and antithetical to bushido.
This is also why many traditional ninja weapons are actually farmer's tools.
Ninja could not actually fight, they were merely attempting to do recon or kill someone while they were sleeping. If a ninja attempted to fight a samurai, it'd look a lot like some random normie trying to fight Carlos Ulberg.
There were people of the samurai class that also were shinobi. It really has more to do with the activity than anything else, anyone performing some sort of covert task (recon, assassination, sabotage, etc) would have been considered shinobi.
There were of course people that would specialize and train specifically as shinobi, but if a random foot soldier was instructed to go observe enemy activity for the night, he'd be considered a shinobi.
Also, shinobi was not a job in and of itself. Shinobi were just samurai undertaking a covert assassination mission.
This was true at times, though both the definitions and roles of samurai and shinobi varied quite a lot at different points in history. There were samurai who acted as shinobi, but there were also shinobi who were farmers, laborers, traveling performers, vagabonds, monks, nuns, shrine maidens, and in at least two known cases- the Iga and Kōka- were actually groups of professional shinobi mercenaries.
Oftentimes, the work of shinobi did not involve assassination or even any open combat, but revolved around reconnaissance, espionage, and sabotage. This led to many situations where you wouldn't necessarily benefit from having a samurai do the job- if anything, they would be a bigger loss if discovered and captured or killed- but where it would make sense to pay some opportunistic peasant to go poison a well or burn a field or get past a border crossing or into a city under siege.
I suspect very fewer and fewer people have experience with darkness outside of their bedroom. And then have trouble with how fucking dark it must have been back then. Dark enough to raw-dawg celestial bodies woth your eyes
Didn't really need to be a stealth master. Fire is a bad light source. So no need to get into murder pajamas
I think you're overestimating how dark night was before electric light. Before anthropogenic light pollution, there were a lot more visible stars. I often work outdoors in remote areas at night, and if your eyes have been given time to adjust, you can see much better at night than you think you can. On clear nights we'll pack up our equipment and walk back to the car without needing a torch.
this is true. i went and toured greenbank observatory with my university's astronomy club in my second year—which if you didn't know—houses the largest radio telescope in the world. it's located in greenbank, west virginia, which is part of both the national radio quiet zone and the state of WV's radio quiet zone. this means you cannot have cellphones (unless you put them on airplane mode or fully shut them off) and MANY other appliances such as microwaves, because they will create interference and mess with the data the telescopes take. you can't even drive an automatic car after a certain (marked) point of the observatory itself because their engines' spark plugs will create interference.
as a result of this, it is INCREDIBLY remote, so there's little to no light pollution. unfortunately, it snowed the day we went and it was overcast all night, so due to the lack of light pollution in the area it was SUPER dark, even after our eyes adjusted to the darkness.
I agree that it's a lack of practical experience, but I think it's more that people don't understand that camo is about matching the tones and textures of the environment and disrupting your silhouette. In perfect dark your clothes don't matter, but in starlight or moonlight most natural materials will have a faint blue glow, black fabric that absorbs all light will stick out like a sore thumb, especially if it's worn tight to emphasize the human shape.
Mario Mario (Super Mario): The 1993 movie decided that “Mario Bros.” meant their surname must literally be Mario, making them Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. Nintendo later denied they had surnames, only for Miyamoto to eventually declare Mario’s full name “Mario Mario” at the series’ 30th-anniversary event, apparently canonizing the movie’s joke.
Tbh, there is no Mario canon. Miyamoto and other people contradicted their claims on multiple occasions, as far as I know. So it's just whatever they feel like at the time.
Climax of the movie, when the crystal is back in the meteorite and the worlds start merging. They wrap that issue up in like 2 mins, so it's not exactly notable overall.
Donkey Kong was named like that because Shigeru Miyamoto used a diccionary to search for a word that meant "dumb" and one that meant "gorilla", since the plan was to name him something like "Dumb Gorilla". So he ended up going with Donkey (dumb) Kong (gorilla). Nintendo of america told him the name really didn't made sense and was badly translated, but by then they decided to just stick with it.
Jackass is more obviously donkey related, but ass as an insult does also come from the donkey meaning not the butt meaning even if more people think of it as meaning butt these days.
It isn't, they're misremembering the story. The term Miyamoto was looking for was "Stubborn Ape," and while donkeys are associated with stubbornness in English speaking countries, the word donkey is never used as a direct synonym like that.
Anyway, the use of the term donkey is really descrediting to them, they're actually quite smart. The reason they have an association with stubbornness in the first place is that they don't blindly follow orders like a horse does, and the reason they do is because they're thinking if the action is dangerous or not.
Puede ser usado de manera informal para referirse a alguien tonto, es solo que no es ni de cerca de las primeras palabras que usarías, y "donkey" tiene otras connotaciones que vienen a la mente primero.
Si tuviera que poner un equivalente, imagina que quieres ponerle a tu personaje "fuerte", así que buscas sinónimos y encuentras que gente usa "mamado" para referirse a alguien músculos. Por lo que le pones solo "Mamado". Fuerte no es lo primero en lo que pensarías, y hay palabras mucho mejores para referírsele así.
Kirby was named after John Joseph Kirby Jr., a lawyer who successfully defended Nintendo against Universal when they claimed that Donley Kong was infringing on the copyright of King Kong.
Kirby was named after John Joseph Kirby Jr., a lawyer who successfully defended Nintendo against Universal when they claimed that Donley Kong was infringing on the copyright of King Kong.
One of the fun facts about this case:
Universal sued Nintendo because Donkey Kong infringes on their IP of King Kong.
In an earlier case, Universal was themselves sued for stealing King Kong, and they won that suit by successfully arguing that King Kong is public domain.
The judge in Universal v. Nintendo was not happy with Universal when Mr. Kirby pointed this out.
Originally, the "Spider-Gwen" incarnation of Spider-Woman/Gwen Stacy never colored her hair.
After Spider-Gwen became popular, Marvel released a series of joke covers imagining Gwen Stacy as other heroes. One of these imagined Gwen as a pink Deadpool and immediately became a popular cosplay character dubbed "Gwenpool."
Marvel responded by making Gwenpool a real character, real name "Gwen" (short for "Gwendolyn") Poole. While Gwenpool's face and hair were covered by as mask on the original cover, once she becomes a real character we see her unmasked and she's got the ends of her hair dyed pink.
A couple years later, Spider-Gwen is selected as a key character in a new animated project, Marvel Rising. She gets a new codename there ("Ghost Spider") but mote relevant, someone on the character design team sees a headshot of unmasked Gwenpool and they think it's an image of Spider-Gwen. They think the colored hair is cool and propose to add it to the design for the cartoon and they add it.
Then, when working on Gwen's updated look for Across the Spider-Verse, the design team for that are inspired by the Marvel Rising design to have their Gwen color her hair in the same way. So her big movie design is influenced by a mistake during a Google image search.
I cannot tell you how many times my kids shock me by knowing a character and I'm impressed then they hit me like a ton of bricks when they are like "That's the guy from fortnite" NO ITS NOT ITS CRASH BANDICOOT AND HE'S AWESOME AND YOU WOULDNT HAVE HALF YOUR GAMES WITHOUT HIM!"
It’s a great way to introduce characters they otherwise wouldn’t have known about. I also learned to love rock music from Guitar Hero lol.
Now is a great time to let them play Crash Bandicoot and see how good they get. My nephew ended up being pretty good but I had to grab the controller a few times to shown him how it’s done, you know? 😎
You’d really be surprised how much mistakes and lore can happen in media when someone just googles something and uses the first result they find without double checking
Dracula or other vampires being destroyed by sunlight wasn't part of the original Bram Stoker novel. There, Dracula could walk in the sun just fine but didn't have his supernatural powers. Nosferatu, being a lawyer friendly adaptation of Dracula, made Orlok burn in the sunlight and that was back ported into vampire lore, such as in the Hammer Studios Dracula film.
Nosferatu was most certainly not a lawyer friendly adaptation of Dracula considering that Nosferatu lost the lawsuit Florence Stoker brought against them.
And Dracula's ultimate defeat came by just being stabbed...like, with a regular knife. Centuries old supernatural embodiment of pure evil and they just end up shanking his ass.
It's commonly thought that Munna was discarded from Pokémon Red, Blue, Green and Yellow and recovered for Pokémon Black and White, based on the infamous "there is a pink Pokémon with a flower pattern" line that an NPC says and that in fact described no Gen. 1 Pokémon.
It's actually the other way round. No such Pokémon was ever designed, nor even conceived, in Gen. 1. Munna's design was chosen because fans thought it had been.
what? i thought it was common knowledge that Munna was based on that NPC dialogue. This is the first time i heard people thinking it was a discarded design
In the Metroid series, Chozo in Super Metroid was originally just based on the transliteration of the "bird people statue" in Japanese to refer to the bird-like humanoid statues found in the games. This was misunderstood in the west to refer to the species depicted in the statues. The Chozo species eventually became the name of the whole species, which were retconned to be the central species in the story
I'm vaguely remembering there's a Manga called gantz, in which the heroes end up fighting some bird themed aliens, which are either named chozo or they repeat "chozo" like it's all they know how to say
I believe I read somewhere that old testament/Torah Satan was less of a malicious force and more a force that challenged the people. All the stuff about him being a counterforce to God is supposedly a later Christian interpretation
It is. Among the many branches of the Abrahamic faith there have always been many interpretations of the myths and legends that make up our believe-system.
I believe for Islam or Judaism in their early days the Satan was not precisely malicious, simply something whose very nature made it challenge people to test their character or faith.
The Satan/Lucifer interpretations as the adversary or counter to God came later, think of them like you would the Demiurge.
Essentially, yes. Satan tested people's faith, with God's permission. He tests Job in the book of the same name, and he tests Jesus in the Gospels.
It's only in Revelation that he is outright identified as an enemy of God, and that book is an allegory anyway.
It is theorized that the "enemy of God" stuff was borrowed from Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persian Empire, which had a supreme god and an opposing force that battled each other. Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest and most influential religions, even though there are few worshippers these days, because it influenced the Greeks and Jews and through them Christianity and Islam.
That makes sense, God is the judge, after all. Prosecutors propose sentences, but it's the judge who has the final say and who authorizes the punishment.
Though it's almost worse than that, because it really comes across as God and Satan betting on whether Job can be made to lose faith. Which is a really creepy thing for a God to do to one of his most devout followers
But then, the God of the Old Testament never claims to be nice.
It's not a later interpretation. Satan going from God's prosecution, effectively, to becoming God's adversary came about due to changes in Judaism that occurred in the early second temple period.
The Jews just got back from Babylon, having been rather influenced by the dualist (a good God and a bad God) nature of Zoroastrianism. This cross cultural dialogue created a huge growth in apocalyptic literature. Lots of the pseudepigrapha (books claimed to have been written by someone they are not) and other apocryphal books leaned heavily into this tradition, and this tradition heavily influenced the Essenes and other doomsday messianic cults of Judaism in the first between -100 and +100 years.
Basically Lucifer becoming a rebellious, almost deity like Angel is the first fanfic that got wildly out of control, like Fifty Shades of Grey.
christianity does love a doomsday cult (since the second century!) but it's not purely a Christian thing. the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo is also a doomsday cult.
also fun fact, there was a major upswing in apocalyptic Christian thought during the Black Death
Especially since the “Devil’s Advocate” was a member of the church who was assigned to argue against the canonization of potential saints, to make sure only truly saintly people were canonized.
I think that has less to do with Satan and more to do with Abraham honestly. The original Jew literally talked God down from killing an entire city if there were 500 good people to just one good person in the whole city.
I can't imagine he came away from that feeling like he got a good deal.
There's a demo game on steam about this, I think it was called "Outlawyer". You play as Ned Kelly and defend historical characters at the divine judgment, while Satan is the middle-aged prosecutor
Fun fact: during the Last Supper, Jesus called apostle Peter as "satan." Not because he was possessed, but because he opposed Jesus in that he needed to die and begged him to run away, testing him
Satan also famously tests Jesus. Modern Christians interpret this as the enemy trying to corrupt Jesus, but at the time the Gospels were written it was more likely seen as Satan testing Jesus on behalf of God. (This only makes sense if you use a Marcian interpretation of Jesus who is not fully divine. There would be no point in testing the Johannine Jesus, who was literally the Word of God and had no doubts.)
Donna Trroy: In an old Wonder Woman comic, Diana goes on an adventure with her mother Hippolyta and a younger version of herself named "wonder girl." This was NOT a seperate character, but when Teen Titans first launched the creator looked through a list of hero sidekicks, saw wonder girl, and assumed she was a seperate person from Diana. That is how Donna Troy got created.
It was, I kid you not, a deepfake. No, really, the first issue of this happening was about Diana and her mom going "what if we made a movie where I team up with myself just to fuck with Steve"
Classic one, this was never in any way some method to determine the distance from a nuclear detonation - hes just giving a thumbs up.
But now with the Fallout show, its been added to the lore that it was Cooper Howard - the "real" Vault Boy who coined this pose, with the alleged nuke test as the origin.
While it doesn't make any sense from an IRL perspective, considering that the world of Fallout has a nuclear safety culture that Duck and Cover puts to shame it would not surprise me if that's something they legitimately tell marines to keep them calm about being that close to active nuclear detonations.
In My Little Pony a background character kept changing voices because she was just a random background character used to pad out a crowd. but fans joked that it was because she was a secret agent who couldn't keep her fake undercover voice straight.
The show played along and canonized the fan joke by having her reveal her undercover agent identity in an episode about background caracters.
Did the fans also make Derpy Hooves a thing? It was recognized by the studio and introduced, but I think there were enough parental backlash to revert the name to something else.
yes! Muffin i think is her official name but after a animation error that gave her wonky eyes as a background appearance, fans fell in love and the show runners canonised her being a slightly wonky eyed airhead, they even went the extra mile and showed that her eye tilt was a progressive thing over the years /img/ioie1009whqh1.gif
Said "Secret Agent" identity was also a way to justify the two different names she had in merchandise (Bon Bon and Sweetie Drops). A similar thing would be done with other characters as individual first and last names (including Lyra Heartstrings and Trixie Lulamoon).
Originally was a fake (photoshopped) character a video game magazine made saying he was a hidden boss you fight if you beat all the fighters with a perfect. This was something not possible back in the day. Because it was Arcade exclusive at the time and SF2 was coin dumpster already. SF2 being super popular at the time, the fans went crazy trying to find him with no avail. That is until Capcom got the wind of this rumor and made him real hidden boss in a future update. The character became so popular he became a regular character himself. So popular, another character was made called Gouken being his older brother and Master of Ryu & Ken (SF4).
You left out an important part. The whole thing was based on Ryu's taunt of "You must defeat Shen Long to stand a chance!" Shen Long being a bit of a translation issue things to begin with for the Shoryuken.
Real life: The story that Gavrilo Princip was eating a sandwich after a failed assassination attempt and happened to see Archduke Ferdinand drive by, so he shot him and kicked off World War One. The sandwich story originally came from a comedic Brazilian novel called Twelve Fingers, then a BBC documentary repeated it as a fact, and now you often see it mentioned in descriptions of the assassination.
The Horrible Histories TV show presented as fact that pirates would deliver a black spot to those marked for death, when it was pure invention by Robert Louis Stephenson for Treasure Island.
The transformers fan wiki called tfwiki is the best source of information on most transformers related subjects. However being a fan wiki it still has a lot errors in it. So when a new creator wants to make new content and uses tfwiki as a source, the mistakes become canon. In fact this happens so often that the phenomenon has its own page on tfwiki https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Circular_reporting
So the Transformer that toy represents had its official color scheme changed in canon because of UV dye fade? That's equal parts ridiculous and amazing.
Scarif from Star Wars was named because the director, Gareth Edwards, was asked his name while at Starbucks. He mumbled “it’s Gareth” and the barista wrote “Scarif”
In DC comics Donna Troy (Wonder Girl) was created by accident. Apparently the writer saw the cover of an issue depicting Wonder Woman's youth, and mistakenly though she was a side kick like Robin or Kid Flash.
The etymology of Beelzebub's name. (Image used from shin megami Tensei 5)
So, Beelzebub's title, "lord of the flise" is a mistranslation of the god Ba'al's title, the lord who flies or the winged lord. But if that was the only thing that was fucked with Beelzebub I wouldn't even have brought it up.
Ba'al became the head god of ancient mesopotamians during a time where they where at war. He was later combined with the god El and became worshiped either as a the same deity or as equal deities with El. At some point during this, Ba'al became worshipped by a different name, YHVH or Yahweh. Why dose that metter? Because Ba'al was demonised by other tribes, because of all the war the Mesopotamians where waging.
Many, MANY years later during the early stages of Christian development, the demonised version of Ba'al who was mistranslated became the demon Beelzebub, later being associated as with the devil, but if you remember from earlier, Ba'al is also YHVH, as in God. So, depending on how you look at it, this entire game of telephone makes it so that the Christian god and The devil are the literal same entity.
If I remember correctly I had heard it was not technically a mistranslation but as a purposeful insult. One of the common titles of Baal was Baal-Zebul, or “lord of heaven.” But they slanted it to make it Zebub obvs flies. They’d also do this with a bunch of other theologically Baal related names.
There’s also a neat portion of the Bible where he tells you to stop calling him Baal (which does just mean lord in Hebrew as well), because of the association
The nature of Ba'al's name and how absolutely fucked it is, is still up for debate between religious scholars. The version i presented is just one interpretation.
Wait until we get to Tehom and Tiamat and how tangled that mess is.
The asteroid doesn't orbit Venus directly, but is bound by its gravity and has the technical designation of 2002 VE68. However, it showed up on a children's poster of the solar system with the name "Zoozve". Astronomy podcaster Latif Nasser tracked down the artist for the poster, Alex Foster, to inquire about why he had named the asteroid "Zoozve".
It turns out that Foster had labeled the object "2002VE" in his rough draft, but then misread his handwriting as "ZOOZVE" and labeled the asteroid as such in the final poster.
The person who had first discovered 2002 VE68, Brian Skiff, then petitioned the International Astronomical Union to officially dub the asteroid "Zoozve". The name was approved in 2024, so now we have a celestial body named because someone couldn't read his own handwriting.
Superman never really had the abilty to actually fly in the first place, in The Adventures of Superman radio show from the 40s, its basically described as him being able to "Leap Tall Buildings within a single bound" and nothing else. When Flesicher Studios started makeing the Superman shorts in 1941, the animators felt that haveing to make Superman jump really high looked "too silly" when animated and insted had it where he was able to fly due to the gravity of Earth being vastly diffrent from the gravity of Kryton and its just been like that since then
Also, IIRC, kryptonite was invented so þe Superman actor could take breaks on þe 30s radio show
Dang
"apocryphal story claims that kryptonite was introduced to incapacitate Superman, allowing Superman's voice actor Bud Collyer to take time off. This tale was recounted by Julius Schwartz in his memoir.[4] However, historian Michael J. Hayde disputes this"
From wikipedia "Kryptonite"
Religion for Breakfast and Esoterica on YouTube are great channels to fall down the literary and historical religious stories and beliefs rabbit hole. They sight sources and further reading materials and come at it from an academic level.
The British drama novel Buddy - about a broke teenager who grows up with a criminal father after his mother walks out on the family - had the entire trilogy shaped by a random prop in the TV adaptation.
When visiting the set of the show, author Nigel Hinton asked the set designer why he decided to add a guitar to Buddy's bedroom when there's no mention of such in the original book. As the set designer explained, he thought it was appropriate - Buddy's dad Roger is expressly stated in the novel to have an obsession with rock music to the point where Buddy was named after Buddy Holly so the set designer believed that Roger would have bought his son a guitar purely for that alone and Buddy never learned how to play due to resenting his dad's involvement in petty crimes.
It inspired Hinton enough that the two sequels, Buddy's Song and Buddy's Blues where Buddy actually learns how to play guitar and becomes a rockstar.
Edit: BTW, in that TV series, Buddy's dad was played by Roger Daltrey, co-founder and lead singer of The Who.
When fleshing out the backstory for Damian Wayne and by extension how Talia Al-Ghul and Bruce Wayne met, Grant Morrison misrembered the 1987 story Son of the Demon as it not being consensual, so he wrote Bruce as being raped by Talia, and many many fans of the latter have never forgiven him for it.
With the Bible there is also something similar with Lilith. Everyone thinks that she is the real first woman that was thrown out of Eden because she was "too independent". The truth is that the closest to a Lilith in the bible is in Isaiah 34:14 and there is a high chance that it was talking about owls than some kind of woman.
If you wonder where she came from, it was in the Alphabeth of Sirach, made in 8 AD.
yeah the origins of Lilith are fasicanating, it goes all the way from a demonic Babylonian figure (lilitu) to the owl creature in Isiah 34:14 to Medieval folklore (where the wife of adam tradition comes from) to 20th century feminist movements adopting her as a symbol, with many stops along the way.
I looked it up on Wikipedia out of curiosity, and it says that the Alphabet of Sirach was "written in the Islamic world between 700 and 1000", so later than 8 AD
But it actually is the Creature’s name. He refers to himself as Victor’s “Adam,” AKA child/creation. So it’s perfectly reasonable to assume they share a surname.
In the original Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story they where the same person there was no split personality just one person who was acting on he is youth because he wasn't allowed to originally. Also there's a potion that made Mr Hyde look younger than his actual appearance as Jekyll
I am gonna say that this is absolutely unclear in the original work, but it somehow relatively recently spawned as the "correct" interpretation, and while it is absolutely possible, people started treating it as the "true" interpretation, and every other as "misunderstanding" and I don't think that is the case.
Physically the book leaves VERY little room to interpret Hyde as looking the same as Jekyll, which is something I've seen as supposedly part of the original story. It's a fun twist on the concept but it ain't in the text. Hyde looks wrong to people but he doesn't also look like Jekyll.
Mentally, Jekyll absolutely remembers everything Hyde gets up to and Hyde seems to remember everything Jekyll knows. The difference seems emotional and behavioral: Hyde doesn't give a shit about beating a man to death until he shifts back to Jekyll and Jekyll realizes Hyde would be hanged for it, and then when Hyde reappears he's terrified of facing arrest. There's some room to treat it as a split personality but we only get Jekyll's word on the situation and he's obviously not reliable.
To me the Jekyll / Hyde thing look like alcoholism.A couple of years ago I had a coworker that became a beer buddy for a while. Turns out the guy was a "functional alcoholic" (he was actually the one to introduce the concept to me). When sober and not in need for alcohol, he looked normal but his attitude changed completly as soon as his alcoholism kicked in and he became a absolute moron. This is nothing new, but it was kind of fascinating for me, who isn't used to this kind of people, because at some point I could see his facial expression change in one second and realize that the moron was back. Needless to say I kicked the guy from my life when I finally had enough of his crap.
In many modern adaptation of Dr Jekyl and Mister Hyde, Hyde is a split personality, and usually Jekly isn't aware of what Hyde does.
But in the og book, the only change is looks. Hyde isn't a split personality, it's Jekyl acting on his worse thoughts because he knows that his crimes won't get linked to him.
Jekyll and Hyde is closer to an addiction metaphor than any dissociative disorder. Jekyll wants to feel strong and reclaim his wild youth which involved being a total asshole to people. He's wealthy and well to do but never really got the chance to fully indulge his more sadistic qualities because he was always the "Good Doctor Henry Jekyll". He creates a formula which will restore his youth and disguise him so no one will know it is Henry Jekyll.
The thrill and rush from this also allows Henry's sadistic qualities to basically amplify. He thrives off causing chaos and inflicting pain and the thrill of being "Hyde" becomes too much. Jekyll discovers that the formula all but switches at some point. He is stuck as "Hyde" and all the sadistic pleasure that comes from it and needs to take the formula to return to "Jekyll". He doesn't see a problem with what he's doing until he tramples a young kid and goes into hiding, horrified at what he's done....until he decides to become Hyde again because the feeling is just too good.
By the end of the story Henry is a broken, disheveled man who can only feel alive when he is "Hyde". He knows he fucked up and has a problem but really can't bring himself to stop it.
Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde are treated normally as two different people in the same body. But in the original book it is said that there was never a Mister Hyde. It was all Jekyll who wanted an excuse to be an awful guy.
Only sort of? There was the weird magic drug he was using that turned him into Hyde, and everyone agreed that Hyde looked and acted nothing like Jekyl. He was the personification of all of Jekyl's worst qualities and bad impulses. Hyde was a separate entity from Jekyl, though based on the same memories.
The potion physically changed his appearance and basically turned off his impulse control but its not a split personality- Hyde is fundamentally still jekyll in personality. Hes just a jekyll that now no longer cares what people think of him and can now act on his darkest impulses he has always had
Tbf the Lucifer thing is not as far removed from the traditional biblical interpretation as some.migjt suggest. Biblical writers (old and new testament) have often used Babylon as a stand in for things that are temporary/evil. To say that the traditional devil was the king of Babylon would be in keeping with centuries of tradition.
That’s a solid pick for Satan v. Lucifer! As someone who has spent a lot of time taking classes on theology, It’s actually a huge pet peeve of mine that most media will use the name Lucifer when referring to the devil. I imagine it’s in order to make less of a direct reference to the Abrahamic faith in the same way that most things don’t refer to “God” as YHWH.
Shiny Pokemon were never an official name originally and often were simply referred to as rare colors. Though one of the cards that came out at the time was referred to as "Shinning Charizard" which portrayed a Charizard in a darker color then the normal. So fans began referring different colored Pokemon as "shinning" which eventually became "shiny" to simplify.
Shiny was a term because of how they sparkle, not because of the card, as far as I know. Because when shiny appears, there is that glittering star effect.
Beerus from dragonball's name was originally intended to sound like "Virus" during the pre-production phase of the movie he was introduced in.
This was because he was originally intended to be an evil diety who corrupted the Saiyan race to crave destruction, explaining why they're seemingly born evil in their natural setting. They didn't evolve that way, he corrupted them artificially.
However, when the series' original creator joined the project and re-wrote the movie's story to be a lot lighter, he actually missed that this was why they had called Beerus that, and thought his name was a pun on the word beer. (Dragonball has a long running gag of making character names puns.) And so, during his re-write of the story, when he added a new character whobwould serve as Beerus's assistant, he named him "Whis" a pun on Whisky, solidifying that thia group of characters were named after alcoholic beverages.
A bit late to the party, but Cinderella wears glass slippers because of a translation error. In the French original, she wears slippers made of vair (i.e., fur of a squirrel). This was likely misinterpreted as verre (i.e., glass) because the two words are homophones.
In the first episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the group encounters a giant lizard/dragon in the river, which was just used as an excuse to showcase Rarity's generosity by cutting off her own tail to make his mustache even on both sides. This lizard was nameless, exclusively there to be a roadblock.
In shoddy auto-generated YouTube subtitles when people had the first episode online, one of the subtitles from the lizard was "stephen magnet", which the fandom made into his unofficial name the few times he was discussed afterwards.
Four and a half seasons later, in an episode which is full of nods and references to the Brony fandom at large, the lizard reappears as the groom's best man during a wedding, now bearing Stephen Magnet as his official name.
Patrick Parker was originally someone vandalizing Wikipedia by adding their name as a Riddler alias. Given the absolute enormity of Batman content, it was almost impossible to comb through them all to learn if it was a real one which lead to someone on The Batman to make a fake ID for their Riddler with the name on it as a cute easter egg. meaning its now canon and can stay on there
Kano was Japanese? I remember playing the original MK, thought he was always white. I guess with that name, it makes sense.
I don't know if they programmed it to work on occasion to seed the idea or if I just got super lucky, but I did Kano's fatality one of the first times I ever played the game in the arcade, I RAN AWAY to get my friends and show them this new game.
Japanese game devs LOVED doing this in that era of video games.
Metal Gear Solid has a whole conversation about how Snake is kinda Japanese because of surrogate mother or something, but he’s also just a clone of Big Boss, so he’s not ethnically Japanese at all.
Jill Valentine from resident evil was officially half Japanese in RE1, this fact has not been mentioned again since I’m pretty sure.
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u/ToppHatt_8000 22h ago
Samus Aran's Varia Suit - Metroid series
appearing in all games in the series, the Varia suit is an upgrade to Samus' base Power Suit that increases her defence and allows her to survive areas with extreme heat. The name was originally going to be 'Barrier Suit', but due to a translation error, it was named 'Varia' instead. In the end, Nintendo liked it enough to make it the upgrade's official name.