Researching TOO MUCH for Fanfiction 

Have you ever gone down a wikipedia rabbit hole about theoretical biochemistry when arguing about a fictional planet? I have.

one time i tried to look up british slang terms on wikipedia to write a character's dialogue and ended up on the page for fucking Isopods

I’m a writing student so researching things that probably nobody cares about for projects is how I spend a lot of my life

I once spent about an hour researching types of blades and knives and google wouldn’t stop advertising me hunting knives for a week

Once I had to look up how long someone would be in jail for if they stole 7 tv remotes…for my Mickey Mouse fanfic

I had to look up when CPR was invented and, since it's the 1920s, I was pretty sure it didn't. Once that was discovered, I searched for predecessors to CPR that had existed since the 1920s, which ended up being just Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I THEN looked up if police were given medical training in the 1920s, but found no results and, since the character in question was a former police cadet, I said "fuck it" and gave him training anyways. And all of this, just so that I could give an alternate good ending to my previous Lackadaisy fanfiction where Freckle and Ivy got Aladdin'd. Edit: and those looking for the fanfic, it's "Ivy and Freckle in Watered Daisies"

I got recommended this after I researched Marilyn Monroe’s hairstyle for a characters description that I still haven’t written. Edit: Finished the book and somehow I still haven’t written the description

For an OC going through a snowstorm in 1840's Norway I spend a whole day researching which animals were hunted for their pelt at that time, how pelt was made into clothing and traditional norwegian outfits (both including pelt and not including pelt) Another day I researched (and even practiced) dances of that time like polka and slow waltz (was definitely more fun than reading about animals getting killed and skinned the whole day)

I've looked up lates 60s-70s prices- particularly for gasoline and beer. I also looked at If Germany had venomous snakes.

Spent hours researching psychedelics to pick something for a character with a heart condition to try at a college party that wouldn’t kill them. that’s only my most recent…

I’ve tried to find medically accurate information about stab wounds, broken ribs, and bird wings all to write some fics that haven’t been posted There was also the time where I remembered that the thirty nine clues book nine or so says that head wounds usually look worse than they are so I used that to make a character’s dialogue for a single line

i once spent like an hour and a half googling flower language just so i can foreshadow two characters' relationship, and then scrapped the chapter completely lol

I started researching OCD to see if I could have a character compare the symptoms to a magical thing happening in a fic, and within 24 hours I got myself an official diagnosis for OCD. Wild. For the record, real OCD was nothing like the magical thing happening in the fic, and the line got deleted.

Writing a Don’t Starve fanfiction where one of the characters catches and cooks a fish. The character humanely kills the fish before cooking, but I had to figure out how someone would do this in the wild. So, for half a day I was looking at how to give fish brain damage with sticks and learned about Ikejime To be fair, this did have plot relevance because a child (who’s the main character) watched it happen

I spent way longer than I probably should have reading up on moths because I wanted to find out if they could gag. I was writing about a shapeshifting character who happened to be in the form of a moth when something happened that grossed her out. As it turns out, moths cannot gag or vomit!

Just wanted to find an old Germanic version of the name Alfred. Ended up spending hours and hours researching if Germanic languages and cultures tend to have nicknames, what the purpose of nicknames is, who started the trend of abbreviating your middle name to just the initial, whether or not that’s considered pretentious, how old Germanic last names were given, how long it takes for names to evolve, how many different versions of the name John there are, the etymology and origin of the word “freedom”, and then I spent a couple more hours scrolling through name info sites because I got distracted and thought it was fascinating to hear about the supposed connotations of different names, and how well the ones I was looking at fit the character I was researching for. Oh yeah, I never wrote this by the way, it’s just a barebones AU idea sitting abandoned in my Notes app. Yay.

Spending several hours researching food associated with India's weddings for a part of a single chapter of smut...

Most of mine are food related. Usually you get the normal stuff, like how to describe and compare certain flavours and textures, but there is one thing I won't forget looking up in a hurry: "Can you freeze porridge" Cue rabbithole of me looking up the storage time of frozen porridge, whether it's frozen solely for storage or it's eaten frozen, how frozen porridge would feel to eat... All so I could have it referenced in a short paragraph that barely needed to be there, with the only excuse being that it was the fantasy equivalent of depression ice-cream. Also the character enjoyed it

I once extensively researched the design and function of prosthetic limbs in the 1990's for a throwaway character in a roleplay that I was planning. I didn't even get to use the character 😔

Penny minting and random penny facts for a creative writing assignment about writing from an object's POV. Also how medieval people talked for a now scrapped gay medieval romance between a lady and a maid.

I'm not a writer, but I did one time spent half an hour on reading wikipedia articles about the old Saxons just to make a comment on a video that said that Old English is "what the saxons spoke"(which is probably just bad phrasing(it was what the Anglo-Saxons spoke)). This did result in me learning that the closest relatives of Low German are English and Frisian(because it's basically just modern Saxon) followed by Dutch and then, as the West Germanic language that it is the least related to, High German.

For fanfic the two things I've had to look up too much of was priest outfits and traditional Portuguese dishes. The priest outfits make sense, but the problem with the Portuguese dishes is that I am Portuguese and all the traditional meals I looked up were just what my great grandmother served before she died. I was born and raised in America though so I don't really have traditional anything. As for the priest outfit. The basic things you need to know it that the little white collar is a clerical collar, the thing around their shoulders is the pellegrina, and the dress is called a cassock. I also hate the cassock because it's always worn with pants underneath and I don't like that. Pants or skirt. Pick one

I had researched about how much time it would take to reach New Jersey from New York by subway and swinging so Peter Parker could meet Batman.

i once researched the journey from Tokyo to Okinawa. This includes; what parts of Japan would logical need to be gone through, what transport would be used (no plane), how many times the character would have to book a hotel and for how long, the time it would take and the exact amount of money it would take (including food money). this was all for a stupid crossover fic i haven't even posted.

I accidentally made a thread about this topic in the RU-vid comments of a past video on this channel, so I'll steal one I mentioned there. Research into hormone disorders, specifically secondary hypogonadism aka disorders that hinder puberty due to a brain abnormality rather than anything to do with the genitalia (hence the "secondary" part). I wanted to find a condition that could completely negate puberty with minimal other side effects. Granted, this is for an original story and is actually a pretty important character detail... but it's still one I probably could've gotten away without doing the full research for and just saying "it's a hormone disorder". For anyone wondering, the condition I settled on was complete isolated secondary hypogonadism which entails the inability to produce or read GnRH. GnRH is a hormone that's sole purpose is to start the chain of production leading to the other, more important puberty/sex hormones, so no GnRH means no puberty while otherwise being perfectly healthy.

I learned a lot more fun facts about lobsters than I'm ever going to need to know in my life. Below is a list of some of the things I learned - Lobsters molt - Lobsters have a dominate claw - If a lobster loses one of their claws it can be regrown (it takes about 5 or so years for it to fully regrow) - Lobsters have 2 stomachs - Lobsters can and will cannibalize each other - For lobsters, urination doubles as them releasing pheromones (they also urinate from their eyes) - Male lobsters have 2 penises I learned all this (and more, that wasn't even half of the stuff) just because I wanted to know if lobsters bleed, all for a cookie run fanfic that I didn't post or even finish. (In case you want to know, lobsters do bleed. They're blood is normally clear, but when exposed to oxygen it turns blue, and when cooked it turns white and becomes a more jelly-like substance)

I spent hours upon hours on reading about gun anatomy for one scene of a character disassembling and assembling one back up, even got to disassemble one myself. In the end I never actually finished that fic and I'm still being pestered by my mutuals about it.

I deep dived into flooring used in the 1800's just so I could accurately describe the tile the blood was spilled onto in a midevil castle... in one sentence. I found out it's called encaustic tile by the way

Once researched a specific snake species for an hour or two for a naga character. That story never made it past a few pages. Still angry the species has green IN ITS NAME but is not always green. Maybe they were named by a colorblind person who just couldn't see the difference between green, yellow and red.

I did a lot of research regarding the prison culture and laws in Japan for a fic I have only ever published two chapters of (I might finish it at some point). I learned that the prison sentences for having drugs in one's possession are, honestly insanely long (like one can sit 7 years in prison for that) but also, that was perfect for the specific scenario I was writing about.

Flower symbolism. Any symbolism. I love including symbolism that nobody will even notice or care about.

I researched the odds of a pregnant individual delivering early/late just to decide what week my pregnant character would give birth in. But hey, now I have a dice roll which I can use in dnd too!

Once heavily researched about snake / eel bites and how to care for them just because the inciting incident for my fic was a protag a and b meeting cause A got bit by an eel and B wanted to help them, and especially considering B was literally a doctor i wanted to make sure they shared real, accurate medical information. It was worth it tbh

Shinto gods, specifically the shrine ornamentation of Inari-okami bc I wanted a clan who isn't part of the fic aside from being inconsequentially related to an mc who has no idea and will never find out about it to worship them. Oh and whether there was something for male shrine maidens, not priests, boys who would be in the same role or rank as a shrine maiden. Yh...

I feel like we're okay with nonsense in our fic, but we want to put it in there we don't want to have it be there without our knowledge

for maybe around four gory sentences, i spent around 2 hours researching the anatomy of a neck, how hanging works and how a mortician would treat a dead body. search history kinda was actually this (went into history to find these) 'how does the neck react when hanged' 'whats in the front of the neck' 'neck flesh torn' 'neck arteries and veins where' 'what do morticians use to cover up wounds' yes, it was an omori fanfic

My main fic rn is a modern coffee shop AU, so I now know how to make a side character's favorite coffee order, how much espresso you can put into a drink before it becomes lethal, and a lot of stuff about modern arcitechture. (The last one was so I called the small walls around flat-roofed building the right name, which is a parapet wall!)

I've researched how russian diminutive names work just so I could name two pets that are mentioned once

3:53 op totally missed the opportunity to say beelievable.

I’ve been asking this Danganronpa Tumblr blog, A Student Out Of Time, for advice on writing my fangans. The mod’s advice on certain topics has been very helpful, for example, I found out that torturing someone makes them LESS receptive to your ideas (this is for a mastermind backstory.) Edit: I’ve also been reading a lot of X-rated fics so I could learn how to write them.

I do more research for my fics than for my classes in school

Every single ace attorney fanfiction author knows at least a bit of German. I did so much research into the German language just to write like a line or two in a fic. Ich habe nicht gut Deutsch.

My friend started doing research on the pacific theatre in WW2 for a fic and it ended up becoming one of their new main hyperfixations and now I keep getting messages about it.

Researching japanese eating etiquette, yakisoba, its flavors and if it's okay to microwave it after it cools down, *_only for me to completely scrap that section of the chapter where this knowledge was used_*

I had to research how to identify the sword used based on the wound made by it, and now I know what pattern of wound a basket-hilted sword makes. This was for a Stray Kids pirate/mermaid AU where Felix was a surgeon on a ship. If you ever needed someone to perform surgery on a slash wound on a pirate ship with limited medical supplies, I'm your guy.

Tried so hard to find how much blood is in a squirrel for a short vampire story. Ended up needing to just estimate it and I'm still kinda sad about it. That squirrels are neither economically nor culturally important enough for us to have this information easily-searchable on the internet

Currently writing something that's set in Victorian Era US and I keep flip flopping back and forth between "I need to research as much as I can about clothing, building layouts and education institutions because I need to be historically accurate" and "This story is fantasy. I'm taking inspiration of the Victorian setting. It doesn't need to be historically accurate." Spoilers: It does to me!

a LOT of botanical stuff, like scientific names, climates, ect, all so i could make a botanical guide for SPACE PLANTS THAT ARENT EVEN CANON IN THE MEDIA. im still currently making it

Once spent around 2 hours creating an entire card game for a fic I had no plans of ever writing, and around 30 minutes of that were spent trying to learn how to play poker just to make sure I wasn't just accidentally recreating poker. Another time (for a fic I did actually write) I had to go look up different kinds of alcoholic drinks for a random throwaway line where the main character, a bar tender, was serving a customer. And another time I did alarmingly extensive research on the stages of bruises just to figure out exactly what color the main character should describe the bruises on another character as when he sees them. Never finished the fic.

Insane that people can be this diligent over throwaway lines but I've still gotta read about a character signing a receipt(????) in a Barnes and Noble... in _London, Soho._

I was writing a hurt/comfort fic abt a character with extreme medical trauma going to the ER for a life-threatening allergic reaction to nuts, and went down a two hour rabbit hole on what happens when you go to the hospital for a specific allergic reaction like that. I wrote about 300 words of that to-be-4000 word fic…

I researched gun anatomy twice in one day for one sentence to be correct, and I watched an entire multi-episode, hours long play-through of a game that I was rewriting for the fic. I think I wanted to know when the events happened, but again, I was rewriting it. Edit: I’ve now looked up if sixty shots of beer in sixty minutes could poison/kill a person for a fic that I’m *reading.* The first Quora answer I saw also answered for both kinds of shots. Edit 2.0: When _Pikmin_ came out to make an accurate incorrect quote, then didn’t bother and used _Among Us_ in another IQ. That’s not including the time I looked up medieval jokes and found a “Your Mom” joke. I immediately added it with no regrets.

I once read a detailed explanation of what different types of bows can tell you about the physique, circumstances and history of a character. It wasn't a fic but it was actually very interesting and I've used the knowledge not only in that fandom but in others since.

I was writing a Newsies Crutchie/Jack fic and I need Jack to read 1 headline, so I spent like 30 minutes reading news paper articles from 1898-1902 trying to find the most boring one possible

I did a ton of research on spices used in Middle Eastern cuisine for a roleplay surrounding Cyno and Tighnari from Genshin Impact, to determine what food Cyno could make for Tighnari, since he can't handle heavy spices. The verdict? Tahchin, which just so happens to be the base for Cyno's specialty food in the game.

I looked up if rubber existed in medieval times just so I could know if my POV character would feasibly use it as an adjective to describe the flesh feel of an aquatic monster. The answer? Yes, apparently! Wild rubber is a thing

i read a fic where a character was pregnant and running from their kidnapper and wanted to know if a miscarriage would occur due to blood loss from open wounds (they had injuries on their legs). ig it was way too specific because i never got the answer and ended up with more questions like “would the mother have the energy to give birth while injured?” (they ended up giving birth in an alleyway)

Im debating making a whole fic for a show pilot that came out literally yesterday, so if I end up needing to do research I might chime in with something.

I was writing something taking place in the American Civil War and found a specific troop and learned the name of the sergeant and everyone above. I ended up falling in so deep to some no name troop. I dropped the story in the end. 😂

not a fanfic, but couple years ago we had to write a short story for one of my school classes. i looked up towns in california with a population of at max 100, the price of shovels and trash bags, happy books to contrast the somber feeling of the story, and i did do some digging on the town (went on google street view to get a feeling of the place, i also looked up if it snows there) edit: another time i researched what the parts of a letter were called (for another assignment)

Researching what tf was goin on in Australia from 80-90/00 for Garfield ff Lyman is a pain

Not a fanfic but one time i did a ridiculous amount of research on the constellation of Libra for symbolism for a side character in a shitpost comic set in the universe my OCs' lore takes place in. I feel like it's worth noting that the shitpost comic in question originated from a joke about Better Call Saul.

4:20 having as a gravestone the millstone that killed you is fairly metal, ngl

i spent hours looking up space facts and also wikis about neptune for a concept i was making that i promptly dropped and forgot about

-Found out how much a kidney and a lung sold for so I could give my OC an excuse to not have to go to work. -Did research on the biological & economic benefits of solar energy to give them a solid group project -Learned how to make strawberry cake & frosting so I could have a cute baking scene -Researched how to create Polonium-210 and its affects on the body for a Fangan murder case

Only semi related, but I looked into the entire etymology of the name Barbara to see if I could if I could make a blonde haired pink garbed Barbarian D&D character named Barbie without being historically inaccurate. That search was a whole rabbit hole, but short answer: yes.

How Coney Island is structured and how it worked in the 1930's, before finding out that during the Great Depression, most people went there for the beach, not the attractions, so my characters just hung out on the beach and then went on one ride. This took me like four hours to research.

I took about 30 to 45 minutes yesterday looking for the original post in which the "entirely detached from the doorframe" extension of the concept of being "unhinged" was coined because I wanted to cite it. for an assignment that did not require citing sources.

I researched habitats of mythological/ folklore monsters to make sure it made sense for them to be in a forest in that geographic location, what they looked like, how dangerous they were, and if their body parts were associated with healing properties. Just so a character can get hurt trying to court their alchemist crush by collecting said parts for them.

why does your voice sound so relaxing, your voice legit reminds me too much of shgurrs which i also find to be a very pleasant voice to listen to.

For a chainsaw man fan fic I was writing. I had to go on 3 different inflation calculators just so I can name the price of a shotgun in 1987, inflate that to 1997, convert it to yen, all for the sake of writing a line from army of darkness but it worked in a Japanese setting.

I spent like, an hour yesterday researching what that opening in the wall that lunch ladies serve food from is called. I asked my entire family and all my friends and went down multiple rabbit holes that I am not proud of, and I just ended up calling it a lunch counter.

bro i have the hubris to say ‘my baseline knowledge is probs enough’ and if its ever a modern au i just go ‘i hope everyone else knows i basically put them in a quest domain caribert-style’

I researched a lot about the 1800s like what kind clothes they wore, what kinds of rifles they had, if trains were a thing in that country at the time etc.

I did a whole study on different types of wool and other things people make clothes from (leather, silk, etc.) To determine what my characters should wear, in the book, that i never wrote. 😭 BTW (perhaps ironically?) Alpaca wool is the GOAT!

There was this one time I came up with a mathematical formula for how long hyperspace travel would take around the time of the Knights of the Old Republic games if you had a relatively fast hyperdrive. I looked up how long it took the Millennium Falcon to get from Tatooine to where Alderaan was until a few hours ago, which was kind of inconclusive, then figured out roughly how many parsecs (which are a unit of measuring distance, not time) that was based on looking at a map that had markings for those, made it what I thought was reasonable for about four-thousand years worth of slower, then plotted out the route with breakers for where they had to come out of hyperspace because hyperdrives weren’t as good at navigating around system’s gravity wells yet. All for about a paragraph when one character asks “are we there yet” and the other decides to just walk them through the whole dang route. It might break up the flow a bit, but I think it’s cool. Also, this one’s not a fanfic, but I spent at least two hours researching cable cars just to figure out how a fictional world’s public transport system works. I don’t even know if the characters are going to have any scenes on said public transport yet.

I searched up when motorized wheelchairs were invented and turns out that they existed for a while, but were only commercially available in the 1950s. thankfully, the fic took place in the 1950s, so it worked out. on a lesser note, i searched up 1950s winter clothes for women at the time and, well, the only form of pants i could find were leggings (not pants). Plus, what was most common for colors so i could have the main character say that she was going to wear a black and red pokadot dress to match her friend.

I've searched up about marriage rings and their finger placements in certain culture(Chinese and Russian, mostly). For those curious, in chinese culture engagement rings go on the middle finger, while marriage rings the bride and groom wear on oposite hands. Russia wears on the ring finger, but they are also a bit unique as the rings are worn on the right hand as the word 'left' in latin means sinister, so because of that many believe that left hands mean bad luck (and probably why there was/is a lot of prejudice against left handed people)

I researched turtle phylogeny for hours just for a throwaway joke about a character who's canonicaly a turtle-nerd infodumping about how tortoises are actually a type of turtle and not a separate category. I didn't have any strong opinions about turtles before, but now I'm a turtle fan. Other bizarre and seemingly unrelated things I researched for the same fic: flammability of lard, the size of the largest trampoline ever made, how Supreme Court Justices can get impeached, and how fatbergs are removed.

started looking into different chair designs throughout the years and how theyd be placed in the room, all for one line in a house that is somewhere outside of realities where timeframes dont really matter same fic, went into a massive rabbit hole on how snow works and how itd react to certain materials stepping on it, how it reacts when thrown etc bc ive never seen snow as an aussie and wanted to be extremely specific. all for a line that got scrapped bc it was too clunky

I thought at first that I hadn’t done this but then I remembered that I spent a bunch of time trying to find words that rhyme with night and light because I for some reason insist that all species related to night furies and light furies have to rhyme, even though two canon dragon species that I think are related to them don’t rhyme (sand wraith and wooly howl). And I wasn’t even originally planning on writing anything with it, just drawing!

Videos like this make me want to actually read fanfiction for once instead of pretending to plan to because of the work people put into them

Spent HOURS of research trying to figure out if jade would burn or melt in fire and how quickly it would, say, if it only passed through fire for like a second…only to find the actual answer unsatisfactory and stretch the truth a bit…

I’m doing research on various animals for a Sonic the Hedgehog fic. For obvious reasons (people that aren’t a familiar with the franchise would have to be told he even is a hedgehog) I won’t get super in depth in my research, it’s mostly for little things like how the Babylon Rogues' beds are styled after bird nests, Bark the Polar Bear has black skin under his fur which is actually transparent and looks white because of how light goes through it, and what grocery stores would stock depending on what species live near them.

I went to the wikipedia page for the history of rail transport in great britain from 1830-1922 and looked at maps to make sure I got the locations right and that a train could actually take the characters there. It was for a flashback that’s kind of important to the plot, but the place names definitely weren’t. Literally the line was “I’m going to Brighton from London.” We don’t even get to see the characters in either place 😭

I was writing a short story for my creative writing class and I watched several multi hour ThatOrdinaryGamer videos to make sure I was portraying virtual machines correctly. Also for the same assignment I had to look up what chloroform smells like which did take significantly shorter a time but still need some digging for a one off description.

Not me but my sister for my thriller stories. Because I place the date and time on the story. My little sister actually went back to when the stories are set to see if I got the date right. Turns out I got it wrong.

I’ve never gone down a deep rabbithole,but one time I was writing a story and I felt the need for EVERYTHING to be right to the point I’d google things I know what they are just to be sure. “What does a trench coat look like” “Are most garages grey” And stuff like that

2:07 the ironic part is depending on the church's bell schedule the bells might only sound at noon or during funerals

In one fic I'm working on, I binged the Wikipedia articles for various months when that part of the story takes place (summer/autumn 1981)... just for the main character to point out contemporary news in lines as mundane as "Oh yeah, and Iran got a new prime minister today."

This is the funniest consequence of the information age, i love this

I did far too much research on what the smallest existing clock in 1403 England would be… for a fic I was only writing in my head.

just a few hours ago, i had to find out when fireproofing was first properly used, just so my frozen fanfic where the oc was elsa's pyrokinesis having twin sister was semi-historically accurate.

I've been spending a lot of time reading up on flower language for one line in a flashback where one of the characters gives her idol a good luck bouquet. Turns out, bells-of-Ireland (one of the only green flowers) are one of the biggest symbols of luck flower-wise. Don't mind the irony of said idol being murdered a few hours later. I can elaborate if needed.

I researched SO MUCH about Japanese, Chinese, and Korean war medals from 1800 onwards, where realistically, with how I made the scenario, it probably would have been easier to make more unique war medals early on. Also, historical figures that existed but didn't really do much at all, or were overshadowed by others, and trying to find out who they were with an entire 4 sentences existing around them. Unfortunately, reliable English language sources on pre-1880's-ish Asian history is very scarce :(

I once did a TikTok about this topic and one comment said: I had to Google how long a 4 year old can survive in electric chair 💀💀💀

one time I was writing a fanfic with a colorblind character and to make sure his perspective was done right I researched a lot about protanopia and other types of colorblindness. The information I gathered from it was only used maybe 5 times max in a 40-thousand word fic for details that weren't even noticeable unless someone was paying attention, but a year later in my genetics course in school I used my colorblindness information to create an in-depth presentation on it, so I guess it came in handy

I spent about an hour and a half researching steel cable suspension bridges built before 1928 in both New York and Chicago… just to namedrop one in a smut simile about tense muscles. Couldn’t find enough clear info, didn’t bother making the simile.

for an artwork years ago i researched different types of bows that were found to be used in northern europe, then how they compared to modern bows of different types. then researched different methods of holding, loading and firing different bows. then how long bowstrings are and what size bows are recommended for different heights. then how flexible different types of bows are and how they worked with different types of firing methods. then went into another deep dive into arrows... i ended up spending almost 2 weeks researching everything there is to know about bows, arrows and archery in general just to end up scrapping everything and just make a bow out of ice and justify it as the character having ice powers... no one ever asked me to justify anything and i'm pretty sure no one ever even commented on that specific piece

I watched a 10-hour documentary and 50 episodes of Teddy Ruxpin for a single-chapter diversion set in a needlessly-detailed cute family-friendly cartoon world that existed primarily as poster art.