I mean last week I browsed google scholar trying to find details about the composition of ancient Byzantine shampoo and ended up google translating an article written in Hungarian, so. You’re probably fine, nonnie. We’re all quirky here.
Friends, please reblog and tell me what is the most obsessive detail you’ve researched at length for fic writing purposes!
It’s a tossup between research on transatlantic travel in the latter part of the 19th century, and research on orcas in Sea World.
Probably sluice gate construction and installation methods, for field drainage in Tudor England… and/or the life stages of various bloodborne parasites and their attendant bacteria plus the comparative structures of avian and mamalian lungs, so I could design a superficially plausible xenobiological plague vector.
I once spent 3+ hours researching bird species of the Himalayas to come up with the phrase “the little brown bird.”
I know so god damned much about sailing.
I’ve read a ton of dusty Victorian medical guides, so I could tell you a lot about the hilariously bad snake oil cure-alls that got advertised back then, or various home cures for stuff like snake bites or burns, or phrenology, or how masturbation causes the “brain softening”.
I now know a moderate amount about alcohol-based fuel cells – I spent several hours on a Wikipedia binge – because I needed to come up with a power source for robots that would be shelf-stable enough to still work after being left out in the woods for 12 years. (This one was technically for RP, and it hasn’t even come up so far.)
I technically know how to build a sloop from the 1800s, from raw timber. And I once spent six hours researching how an arc reactor would hypothetically work in real life so I could write one sentence of technobabble and make it sound legit.
1800′s Italian legal standards on a scattershot of different things. Thanks to a couple of RP things, I know way too much about dumb daily life things/mundane legalities/etc. for 1800′s Italy and 1600′s Germany.
Also I could probably do basic maintenance on antique firearms now.
Pooossibly a tossup between implanted RFID technology I did for a crackfic about smuggling data in a dog’s microchip, and intensive research about Luddites and early industrial revolutionary weaving technology I did for worldbuilding in a regency-era Changeling: the Dreaming fic. Jacquard looms are freakin’ cool!
For a generations-spanning ghost story with @rivendellrose, I printed out blank US census records for 1880 – 1930 and filled them out, not only with the central family, but with the info of all the neighbors.
Five different translations of psalm 39.
None of which made it into the story.
I know so much about scoring in figure skating. I read hundreds of pages of official rules and regulations as well as previous routines to ensure I could create a routine that was plausible for gold medal contention.
My favorite ever though is googling the time of a sunset 6 years ago in Georgia so I knew when a bonfire would start.
I read basically the entirety of the Illinois General Assembly website. Including pages for all the committees, commissions, and subunits.
I spent something like 6 hours trying to find out whether or not the Hummingbird Bakery in Soho had forks.
A deep dive into the varieties and relative costlinesses of wallpaper that would have been available in 1830s Paris;
Researching Monterey tide tables to ensure that a message written on the beach in mid-afternoon on a particular day in March would not be erased before sunset;
Spending hours learning the basic vocabulary, structure, and naming conventions of Mvskoke, which is only even descended from the language I was representing;
Learning reconstructed Proto-Italic grammar and researching the etymologies of at least a hundred Greek and Latin words in order to invent a pseudo-historical space language for one story.
How to build a Siege of Dapur-era Egyptian war chariot. Did you know they were glued together with wet cattle intestines?
Victorian porn and ancient Indian cosmetics, thankfully not for the same fandom.
I became a figure skating fan. I watch A Sports now.
That’s not actually the most niche knowledge I have put into a fanfic, but all the other niche knowledge /i already had/.
typical shift rotations for a first-year registered nurse, the technical procedure steps for veterinary euthanasia, and medieval dildo materials.
these were all for different stories. just to be clear.
And then of course fans showed their ass in the comments saying “if you have a problem with this you need to get a life” or you have other people that belong to predominantly white cultures saying “I think I speak for all Swedes when I say it would be cool for you to say Viking-like!”
I’m contiously frustrated with how critters, and people in general, respond to this kind of thing. We claim to be a loving and inclusive community but the second people have any sort of issues, regardless of if it’s a big thing or small in the way it is presented we have this kind of shit.
This is what I mean when I say it’s always something in d&d fandom.
from a fundamental standpoint, i refuse to believe that percival de rolo, whose response to seeing vex upset was to drop all of his defenses so quickly they made an audible clattering sound as they scattered all over the floor like so many pots and pans, has any capacity of being the stern parent.
if one of his and vex’s kids as much as sniffles and makes sad eyes in his direction, this man would dissolve into dust.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 