ways_back_room | DE: That wasn't on the tin!

I think the aspect that surprised me the most about research for Will was figuring out what foods and spices he would know about. I've had that come up with all my past pups, as well as various cultural aspects. So with Jane, what authors would she be reading, because its not always obvious. Though her canon did actually get that aspect right in terms of authors that she would read. With William, the issues of dime novels and the cost of living were the historical things that I keep coming back to research, one of my favorite tid bits is that bottle caps are a pretty new invention as are tab top cans. These sorts of small details that really make the past come alive are my favorite.

For Charles, its been researching how the brain works even though his perception of it is a little different as Marvel science works its own way. Still I've gotten a lot of ideas as I learned about how conceptions of how the mind and consciousness worked, because they've changed over time.

With Sameth, I discovered a great engineering author named Henry Petroski, who has taught me a lot about how structures are built as well as how engineers approach the world. I would recommend all of his books as they're all fairly quick reads since they're all collections of essays.

Moist has given me an excuse to poke more into the mythology of Discworld, which I find fascinating as Pratchett has this weird balance of deep world building and playing with ideas from our world at an angle.

Demeter has surprised me constantly with her weird view of morality. This is currently coming up in the thread with Gaeta where he accuses her of lying and she goes, yes, so. Its not a big deal to her as its something gods just do. Her morality is a weird thing, but one I find fascinating and hard to explain.

Tumnus has gotten me into lots of quiet world building, which is one of my favorite parts of having a canon like Narnia. As Narnia has a lot that's built in but then lots of spots to fill in. When I had the EP of him reading the Badger's journal, I loved just riffing on what ifs about Narnia's past.

The Pirate King has an incredibly idiosyncratic view of the world and always surprises me.

Edited 2012-09-25 13:31 (UTC)

I should check out Henry Petroski for Hank. =]

His books are fascinating and range from talking about small things like paperclips to bridges.

I think I should also reread Physics of the Impossible though the technologies would be a bit ahead of them. I should start looking for good biochemestry too as that is another field of Hank's.

Garak: After three-ish seasons of this wonderful, delightful friendship evolving and solidifying between him and Doctor Bashir, the guys upstairs got a gay-scare from one too many fans asking if the subtext was only subtext or going to lead to a relationship of some kind. Hoopla, Roddenberry & Co issue an official statement saying NO THEY'RE NOT GAY WHATEVER MAKES YOU THINK THAT OMG - the guy who primarily wrote Garak got sacked or shifted to somewhere else, and on-screen the characters' friendship started fraying like a sawed up rope...e presto! Romantic sideplots are go! All of a sudden, Garak falls head over heels for a Mary Sue of epic proportions, and Julian has Problems in his own Token Romantic Relationship with a Female.

The End.

For Lorne... I can't really think of anything specific right now. Aside from his (to me) totally inexplicable "canon" crush on Cordelia. That was weird. But then I have never, ever liked her as a character. >_> I like the concept of her as a Popular Rich Girl having to face the facts of life and so on...but I never, ever liked her as a person, if that makes sense. I can't see why Lorne would go for someone like her, to be perfectly honest. Not because she's female - Lorne's very, very pan n my mind...but because she's so annoying.

/end ramble

Edited (because my major pet peeves are all about needless/pointless romance for the sake of romance or mainstreaming characters to fit a straight(-er) stereotype >_>) 2012-09-25 13:41 (UTC)

You know Garak always seemed sort of asexual to me but yes romance out of the blue is always awkward.

Well, I have to say, I've spent a surprising amount of time researching how the Australian Army organises itself, and particularly the SASR.

Also, uniform. These days, I know where to go to find the bits and pieces I need (www.army.gov.au) but it took a fair bit of searching to find it, surprisingly.

And Falcons and Falconry! But I kind of knew I was taking that on when I apped a pup who has a Peregrine Falcon.

Erik, erm, not yet. And, I hope, not likely. I probably should do more research into how the US organises it's education system in general, though.

Alfred. Again, not come across anything yet.

Erik doesn't need to have done his own education in the US, for the record, even if he's employed by a US university and doing his mentoring of students and post-docs like Jane there. So that gets you off the hook a little!

This is true!

However, he's definitely teaching at Culver University, so would be more familiar with the US system than I am, even if he didn't grow up in/through it.

True!

I'm happy to ramble at you and/or answer questions if you like, but I was never a scientist, let alone doing graduate work in the sciences. So someone else might be a better resource for anything more detailed than "this is how US universities tend to be structured."

For the graduate work, I can make deductions! Based on how UK universities work, and the relative structures.

So, a rambly thing about 'how US universities tend to be structured', would be great :D

I think you have my email address, from Thor canon contacts, or you can post it here. Either works for me :D

Also! The amount of attention I paid to little details about Kenyan life over my holidays, would not have been as high, without upcoming canon to think about.

Sunshine - Though Sunshine's canon is already full of world-building details that hint about the differences between it an our world, I didn't expect how distracting and time-consuming it'd be to figure out how the existence of ALL THE MAGIC AND SUPERNATURAL THINGS would completely alter earth's history.

Human existence under threat for millenia means that people band together more, meaning fewer wars between human nations. Western religions condemn about 75% of the population (magic-handlers, Others, part-blood Others, followers of other religions, and general nonbelievers) and the general feeling (that would only have grown with the Wars) that whoever made this crapsack world doesn't deserve worship, gives the world smaller religious groups. Therefore, religious feuds and holy wars never have as big a historical impact, and religious holidays such as Christmas don't ever get huge and commercialized.

Also, figuring out what extent to which the world was damaged from the details given about the Wars in canon, and how that would affect every day life in terms of what foods are available, pricing, etc. Great fun.

Most of the research I've had to do for Ray's canon wasn't all that surprising. Freakish, yes, but not that surprising. I watched Real Ghostbusters kinda religiously when it was on TV and so I had a fairly good idea of exactly how far-ranging and weird background material could get.

Gordon's... Before Half-Life, I pretty much avoided first person shooters. They tended to make me motion sick, and had since the days of Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D. The biggest surprise of Gordon's canon was that I could play it without having to walk away from the computer until my head stopped spinning. I've found a few other FPSes since- the original Halo, Halo 3 ODST, the most recent Wolfenstein game- that have also been playable for me, so it may be an overall improvement in FPS graphics or it may just be me. I don't know.

Adrian's- I'll be honest, I've never actually played his canon all the way through. I think I got the training level and the first chapter or two done. Read a bunch of walkthroughs and watched critical bits of the rest on Youtube, so that should count for something. ANYWAY, the big surprise for his canon was how much of a pain in the neck it is to get my brain shifted into thinking of military things in terms of Marine Corps rank and structure, when up to now nearly all my military research has been on various Army types.

Mordin's- Why, why, why was I even the least bit surprised at how much of a pain in the tuchus it is to think of dialog that sounds like it's being delivered by John Moschitta on a day when John Moschitta is deliberately cutting certain parts of speech out of his sentences in order to hit a delivery target?

Medic's- I played Medic's canon last out of all the games in the Orange Box, and I played it for the least amount of time. It was fun, don't get me wrong, and I rather enjoyed it, but I guess the surprise for me was how difficult it is to do anything else (like make mental notes on what you're seeing and what you're doing) while you're playing in a multiplayer game. And then how difficult it was to care about the additions and changes being made to the game as Valve started adding hats, new weapons, etc. I haven't played in a year, if not more.

Ellen's- The Fallout universe runs heavily on the principle of "This is horrible. And hilarious. And just a little too much to believe." I kind of wish sometimes that I hadn't found out exactly how much of the really ludicrous stuff that doesn't involve fire breathing ants and killer mutant monster death lizards is closely modeled on reality- I mean, I knew the Fifties were a time when you could buy a My First Uranium Experimentation Kit as a Christmas present for your kid, and I knew about Radithor long before Nuka-Cola Quantum, but there's so much else freaky stuff that I found out about real world history... every so often I have to thank some of my older relatives for not destroying the world during that time frame and the years that followed after.

Arcade's- Mostly the same as Ellen's, except with an emphasis on "Huh, they really modeled the game's geographical area that closely on the real world? Funky."

Varric's- Bioware did 9/10 of the research here for me. There's so much world material and supplementary data in the game as it stands. I think, though, what surprised me most was how annoyed I got at the systemic flaws in an otherwise appealing game. The constant re-use of the same cave system every time the characters went into some dark tunnel or other, with the only difference being that certain areas were blocked off even though they appeared on the minimap. The insistence that Darktown was a stinky cramped horrible place to live and that the residents went there because it was too foul for the rest of the city to bother them, when the primary lightsource in Darktown was a set of windows overlooking the harbor that would've given any New York/New Jersey apartment at LEAST a $2000 boost to its monthly rent price. The way I couldn't stop wondering how the hell the Viscount was able to heat his palace with ceilings that high when the fireplaces were tiny, if present at all. The fact that Hawke can't jump or walk over a six inch high hummock on the trail if the hummock designates the edge of the trail on the minimap. Etc. Normally I don't get that picky towards my game settings, but for some reason stuff like that just rubbed me the wrong way about the game, and it really surprised me.

Zira's- I haven't played her very long, so thus far the major surprise for me has been how reading the book, and my high school fondness for reading Rod Serling's short-story treatments of the plots of some of the more impressive Twilight Zone episodes, made it possible for me to watch the movie and go "Holy God, this thing has Serling's fingerprints all OVER it". Seriously, I'd never seen Planet of the Apes before, only heard the premise and seen the Simpsons episode with the musical, so I saw the movie for the first time about two or three weeks back. Being able to see the stuff that was almost certainly studio executives at work, and the stuff that pretty much screams ROD SERLING WAS HERE, and the individual elements that were taken right from the book is kind of weird.

I have to say living near the area that FO:NV takes place, it amuses me just how close they actually were with a lot of stuff. It's pretty awesome.

The things I least expected to learn for Moiraine were Chinese history and nuances involving coffee preparation.

The political structure of the Firefly universe probably accounts for the greatest surprise overall. Never, ever, ever did I expect to need to pursue that in depth.

And yet.

Sometimes I catch myself asking, why am I looking up insect anatomy?

Palamedes is turning out to be a surprise as to how much early medieval history I am having to do and just how old he really is. His canon states that he's been alive since before the time of Arthur as if that is such a casual thing but damn that is like 1,500 years to have lived. So since I decided to have him in his past, as his book canon is only a week or so long, that means I get to learn about early medieval history of the Middle East and Europe, the rise of Isalm and the Crusades and that's only covering a couple of centuries.

Kate is surprising in the resistance she has with anything not to do with Batwoman. Having any sort of normal life or hobbies seems almost alien to her.

No one else is talking right now.

Edited 2012-09-25 16:12 (UTC)

Yeeeah, I'm going to just put everything I could say about Heroes right now in a box, and then do this.

Asami presents pretty constant research issues, though. Aside from my having to actually know things about cars and planes and other technology (which I really don't know much about), there's the constant "does this exist/have an equivalent in Avatarworld." And making those decisions usually involves a sequence of checking AvatarWiki, trying to remember every post I've read on atla-annotated, and then just looking up whatever thing it is in the context of Chinese history to the 1920s. The things I've done this for that I can remember off the top of my head include coffee (no!), ice cream (yes!), cultural attitudes toward sexual orientation (were pretty cool about it!), and vampires (no! But in the process of that I decided jiāng shī would make pretty great Avatarworld legendary monsters).

I don't think I've played Leslie and Manny enough for this issue to really come up too much.

Honestly? The sense of humor. For the longest time I thought The Legend of Zelda was one of those stuffy high fantasy games that were about as interesting as watching paint dry, and then I come to find out that, no, these games have a wacky, fourth-wall breaking sense of humor and they don't take themselves too seriously.

That actually reminds me of Ben's humor. He's very good for slapstick.

Henry I haven't come across anything yet, although perhaps my actually enjoying OUaT (and thus playing him) is a surprise.

Lois (and by extension, Jason): it starts with brightly burning stars in heaven, I did not expect to enjoy Smallville. (And I don't know why, it is such crap--but lovable crap! Ditto for Superman Returns.) But most unexpectedly? I fell in love with reading comics.

Tavi: First, I never thought I'd enjoy Alera more than Dresden Files. I never thought I'd be asking for discussions in crackchat about likely evolution of the Aleran language, end up trying to make up rules for so damned much of the world because of where Butcher left holes, getting into long discussions with one of my roommates over likelihood of x, how much research into what Roman life was like but then extrapolating to how Alerans aren't Roman and having to make it up... Butcher manages to have a beautifully detailed and still rather fuzzily developed world at the same time and it drives me bonkers. I will probably do more exploring of the world once I actually push Tavi far enough into canon to take him post-canon.

It occurs to me that someday when I have more thread brain, my Mars should meet Tavi for culture shock alone.

Tavi met Marc Antony once, found out he knew Julius Caesar, and it's canon that De Bello Gallico exists in Alera. He went into fanboy mode. It was adorable.

But... yeah. Tavi's also bemused by the concept of 'gods' as a rule.

So, once upon a time ~~in the magical land of Equestria~~ at D*C, there may have been a conversation that involved a fic with a drunk Lex Luthor that was interrupted by a real drunk.

I actually found it again.

The Difference Between Spandex and Growing Up

Robo and history. I expected a certain amount of it, but he got so much more of it when it was current events that it really is something to keep track of.

Artemis and her mass of cover stories and interlocking identities is another thing. Why else would I need to make up a newspaper for Star City for a character we basically never see there, and who lives in Gotham?

And, out of deference to the mass of modern teenagers who live in my head, I now listen to the top 40 countdowns once a week so I know what kind of music they listen too. It certainly makes the songs more recognizable when I go looking for mashups.

Thor/Avengers/etc: I knew I'd be making up a lot of stuff about Asgard, but I didn't totally expect how much I'd have to make up on the fly, not just about Asgard but about all the other realms. (I am entirely expecting to have to discreetly retcon some of that when Thor 2 comes out, which I don't mind as long as it's not plot-important to anything in Milliways.) It's more creation than research -- I do research how the comics have done things or how the Vikings did, but I also feel free to mix and match and toss things out the window if it feels more true to the movieverse or to Asgardian society. (Especially since Asgard did not actually arise out of Viking society at all, and has never been subject to the same technological limits.)

Edit: Oh, also interactions with other gods/demigods/etc who do consider themselves to be such. I'm playing Thor as basically an advanced alien who's been worshiped as a god, and it's easy to walk that line with humans or similar, but it can get slightly awkward when he's talking to deity-types who have different metaphysics going on.

Firefly: Building the society was way trickier than I initially anticipated! Canon gives us the broad Core Vs Rim class/resources divide, and a bilingual society that officially arose from two dominant political groups, and a general cowboys-in-space aesthetic, but there's a lot of nuance in terms of social class and social cues and coding and ethnic divisions and religious issues and political structure and so forth that just isn't specified at all. The whole group of Firefly muns has, I think, had a lot of fun with this over the years, but we've also had to make up a whole lot and hope for the best.

Claymore: Again, society-building. Canon gives us a lot of detail about some things, but what it gives us about how society functions for normal humans on an everyday basis is really patch. Clare's outside that society in a lot of ways, of course, but it still informs her assumptions.

Gundam Wing: Circus stuff! I especially remember the one time I got stalled in the middle of an OOM because I could not for the life of me find much information about how lion enclosures work in a modern circus. (In the 1950s, sure! In zoos, sure! All I could find about big cat acts in modern circuses was animal rights activists complaining about their very existence -- which I can sympathize with, but it doesn't help me RP.) I'm sure I could have found something if I'd gone to a library for more digging, but as it was I just made up something hastily and moved on so we could keep threading. But in general, the circus stuff has been something that I can't necessarily make up based on Gundam Wing canon but haven't always been able to find easy information on.

Also, engines and such. I can make it up for the pure technobabble stuff like giant robots, and I can make up layman-level summaries, but I've had trouble when characters who actually know what they're talking about have asked Trowa about the inner workings of his world's computers or cars or motorcycles. He knows the answer in enormous detail, but I sure don't.

Edited 2012-09-25 18:51 (UTC)

I can't help but feel that Eric Northman ought to meet Thor.

This may be an indication of a slightly sadistic streak in my nature.

Heh. I'm up for it! And the thought has occurred to me.

I'd rather wait until Thor's gone through his first movie and is powered up again, but after that, whenever you like!

That sounds absolutely perfect.

Hmmm, it wasn't really surprising, just enlightening: when I watched the first few seasons of "Rescue Me," I didn't truly understand how alcoholism affected a person's mindset and why it was such a crippling addiction until I personally got to know someone who was in A.A.

On the show, Tommy's relapses were incredibly frustrating and infuriating. I just couldn't comprehend why he couldn't just STOP DRINKING, but obviously there's more to it than that. It really is an effort to take it one day at a time. And so by playing him now, sober (as he is at this point in canon), I have to keep in mind that he can have a relapse at any moment.

I've watched the first few episodes and had to stop simply because of how close their portrayal of his alcoholism is. It's a scary thing, addiction.

Relapse is tricky, some people go on and off the wagon every month - others manage years and suddenly all it takes is one push to send you back down the rabbit hole again. What I see in Tommy (from the first four episodes and how you handle him) is that he has a very high motivation for sobriety in one hand and mountains of stress in the other which is like a powder keg strapped to his balls with a lit match in his mouth.

The first season isn't even the worst of it. He does manage to get sober by the end of season two, and stays sober until season five, when he thinks he can "control" it. And let's not get into how well THAT goes. Season six is the most painful of all when his older daughter becomes an alcoholic, too.

But throughout his sobriety he's constantly presented with reasons to drink again, whether it's his screwed up family life, his job, or traumatic memories, and those really give the viewer a sinking feeling of oh god, Tommy, PLEASE don't. And unless you understand how difficult it is, it's easy to write the character off as just another drunk.

Oh dear. I love it, but it's so triggery for me when I'm not in the right frame of mind because I know so very much where he's coming from.

*cuddles him*

(And I really fear the day he runs into Penny in bar. Hah.)

I was braced for but didn't expect Clementine's canon to end the way it did.

It's less past canon than future canon I'm worried about for Juliet.

Dixie's background's required the most study for me, mostly about the Mennonite faith.

DE: That wasn't on the tin!

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...I didn't even answer the DE prompt, did I? Oh well...

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