Common Knowledge: Difference between revisions

{{examples}}

* The entire genre has a few:

** What was the first anime? ''[[Astro Boy (anime)|Astro Boy]]'', of course! All fans of the genre know ''that!'' Except, it wasn't. While the 1963 anime was groundbreaking in many ways and set the standard for the genre for decades to come, it is no more the first anime than ''[[Gundam]]'' was the first anime to have [[Humungous Mecha]]. What ''was'' the first? Well, depends a lot how you define "anime". If one defines it as "Japanese animation", there was a three-second short called ''Kazato Sashin'' that features a boy drawing Kanji and bowing. This was believed to have come from ''way'' back in 1907, predating ''Astro Boy'' by over five decades.

* Played with in episode 15 of ''[[El Cazador de la Bruja]]''. On coming across an abandoned hot springs resort styled after a Japanese onsen (in the ''Mexican desert''!), Nadie asks Ellis what she knows about Japan. In the North American dub, at least, she says, "It's a foreign country ... a small country in the East. There's people called 'geishas', and they all eat samurais, and paint their faces with tempura." Nadie adds, "From what I hear, [[Spoonerism|kotakus and ogals]] are all the rage there now."

* As far as most folks know, [[Spider-Man (Comic Book)|Spider-Man]]'s chief superpower is his ability to shoot webs. Unfortunately, this is '''not''' among his super powers at all. Webshooting was instead the ability of a device Peter Parker had built for himself. Spider-Man's actual super powers are his ability to cling to walls, his "spider sense", superhuman strength and agility. It's only in [[Sam Raimi]]'s [[Spider-Man (film)|movies]] that he gained the power to shoot webs naturally, although this did [[Canon Immigrant|make its way to the comics]], [[Snap Back|briefly]]. The subsequent adaptations also went back to separately-built webshooters.

** Speaking of Spidey, remember, it's not Spider Man, or Spiderman. It's Spider-Man! Don't forget that hyphen!

* While everyone thinks of Clark Kent changing into his [[Superman]] clothes in a [[Phone Booth]], the truth is that [http://www.supermanhomepage.com/other/other.php?topic=phonebooth he's hardly ever done so in the actual comics]. He does, however, do so in the [[Superman Theatrical Cartoons]], which, incidentally, was also where Superman first truly "flew".

* [[Zombie Apocalypse]] movies in general. Everybody 'knows' that [[Brain Food|zombies eat brains]]. This only happened in one series of films, ''[[Return of the Living Dead]]''. In every single non-parody portrayal of a [[Zombie Apocalypse]] after that, zombies merely want your flesh, not your brain.

* ''[[Star Wars]]'':

* Fans of [[Raul Julia]] often state that his final movie, released after his death, was ''[[Street Fighter (film)|Street Fighter]]'', where his hilarious [[Ham and Cheese]] performance of M. Bison was done as his [[Last Dance]]. In truth, while it was indeed his final big-screen film role, he also starred in the much lesser known, made-for-TV movie called ''[[Down Came a Blackbird]]''. Julia passed away a mere two weeks after production ended, and it was released posthumously in 1995, a year after the release of ''Street Fighter''.

* ''[[Frankenstein (novel)|Frankenstein]]'', which the public has unilaterally made the name of [[Frankenstein's Monster|the monster]], not its creator, and the monster usually ''is'' named Frankenstein in adaptations not striving for accuracy. This example falls squarely under [[I Am Not Shazam]], but it's such a potent example that it merits mention here as well.

** Even better, people typically believe that Victor Frankenstein is a doctor. In the original novel he does not have a doctorate of any sort, and is merely a medical student.

* “The Road Less Traveled” by [[Robert Frost]] is quite possibly the most misunderstood poem in literary history. [[Discussed Trope| Most believe]] it is about not adhering to conformity and taking the choice ''you'' want to take, even if it is unpopular, because that will “make all the difference”. In truth, the narrator’s description of the two roads indicates he ''first'' thought the one he took "was grassy and wanted wear" but then he realized there was really little difference between them. He is now wondering if he made the right choice, wondering what might have occurred had he taken the other path (which he had wanted to explore later, but never got a chance to), and whether his life might have been better if he had. If anything, the narrator is saying that life had many opportunities, but there just isn’t time to experience them all.

* The ''[[Land of the Lost (TV series)|Land of the Lost]]'' is not [[Earth All Along|Earth in the distant past]].

* Common Knowledge from ''[[Star Trek]]'':

* On ''[[Starsky and Hutch (TV series)|Starsky and Hutch]]'', the heroes' chief informant Huggy Bear had a lot of different jobs over the course of the show, but pimp was not one of them.

* Despite it being disproven for years, there are still people who are convinced that "Puff The Magic Dragon" is nothing but a long, badly-hidden drug reference.

** According to [[Word of God]], "Purple Haze" is a love song where Jimi Hendrix describes a dream he had where he was walking under the ocean.

* Fans of [[The Beatles]] often chuckle at the old story that claims Dick Rowe, the A&R representative for Decca Records, failed to sign the band because he felt rock and roll was just a flash-in-the-pan fad that wouldn’t last, causing Decca to miss out on what would have been the greatest deal in their history. Except this never happened. Rowe was not even at the Beatles audition, and it was the band’s own Brian Epstein (the “fifth” member of the band) who rejected Rowe’s offer to print records using Epstein’s funding.

** Also, it seems to be Common Knowledge on this wiki that the Sword in the Stone is called Caliburn. It's not. Caliburn is simply an older word for 'Excalibur', and whilst it has been ''used'' in some of the original tellings of the legend to mean the Sword in the Stone, that's only in versions of the legend where Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone ''are'' the same sword (or, at least, have the same name). The notion of Caliburn and Excalibur being different swords came much later.

** Similarly, in the earlier texts, the Holy Grail was not a cup, nor was it even referred to as holy. It its first appearance, ''Perceval, le Conte du Graal'', which translates into ''The Story of the Grail'', it appeared as a dish.

*** It's also worth observing that the King Arthur stories are older than the Holy Grail's inclusion. There are a lot of people who think the King Arthur tales are always about Holy Grails and Lancelot/Guinevere betrayals and don't realise versions exist without them.

** King Arthur is more properly a legendary king of ''Britain'', not England; in early traditions Arthur is said to have fought the Anglo-Saxons who gave the name England ("land of the Angles") to Britain.

* For Christianity; everybody "knows" that [[Satan]] and the demons rule over hell to torment the damned. Except that [[The Bible]] plainly says that Satan and his demons will be punished right along with the damned. Hell is Satan's prison, not his kingdom. (His kingdom is actually earth.) Also, Satan, along with every other demon, was once a glorious angel, and they rebelled against God. In Christian belief, nothing originated as evil.

** Continuing the Hell theme: fire, brimstone and eternal torment are often described as "Old Testament". The Old Testament does not mention Hell at all. The entire concept is a Christian innovation (maybe inspired by the Zoroastrians, but just as likely as a misconception of the passages in Revelation (no "s" at the end, btw) that describes God throwing death, Hell, etc. into a ''lake'' of fire and brimstone, after Judgment Day).

** Also, the Immaculate Conception is not the conception of Jesus by the Virgin Mary, but the idea that Mary herself was born free from original sin. Unlike the virgin birth, which is universal to all denominations of Christianity, the Immaculate Conception is a specifically Catholic dogma that is rejected by a majority of Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.

*** In addition, we never see Mary Magdalene anoint Jesus with perfume or wash his feet in the Gospels. The unnamed "woman who was a sinner" mentioned above did that, and much later, just before his death, a different Mary anointed him with perfume again—but that was Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

** On the subject of biblical whores, the woman to be stoned in John was certainly ''not'' one. She was an adulteress, which under Mosaic law, meant she must have been married; a single woman sleeping with a married man was not considered adultery. Prostitution was not only legal, but almost ''expected'' if a woman [[Defiled Forever|had slept with (or even been raped by) a man who refused to marry her]].

*** Actually, it's more confusing that that. Some of the listings of angels differentiate archangels and Archangels, with the lower case being a lower, serving set of angels counter to our concept of "arch" indicating highest and the capital being the order of angels that sit closest to God. However, the Bible itself rarely makes any comment more definite than "thousands of angels" and most of the listings are made outside the Bible and have grown to include the various deities of minor villages which were anglicized in order to attract more worshipers to the church by convincing people that their gods worked for the true "God".

** Christians do not become angels when they go to heaven. They just go to heaven. Angels are an entirely separate order created by God, and none of them were ever human.

** Noah did not just bring two of every animal aboard the ark. He brought two of every ''unclean'' animal, ''seven'' of every clean animal, and ''seven'' of every bird. After all, birds live in flocks, and if you're going to eat some lamb, you'd probably want to take more than two lambs, right?

** The Magi did not come to visit Christ on the day of his birth at the stable. By then, some time had passed and Jesus's family is noted to be living in a house. Indeed, the story of Herod and the Magi is found in Matthew, whereas the story of the census and the inn is in Luke - nothing in Matthew suggests that Mary and Joseph did not live in Bethlehem before fleeing to Egypt (the two birth narratives, while not necessarily irreconcilable, have very few details in common).

** Job's wife did not die. His ''children'' all died, and his slaves, but his wife is actually a minor character in her own right (Job's misfortunes all come in the opening chapters).

* Many/Most of the examples listed under [[Sadly Mythtaken]].

* [[Oedipus the King|Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother.]] While that is factually true, most people assume that he knew about this fact, which he didn't. He had no clue that the man he killed was his father nor that the woman he had sex with was his mother. His parents in fact had their son's fate foretold to them, so they left him for dead. He was then adopted and, once he reached adulthood, heard a similar prophecy and went to drastic lengths to ''avoid'' doing such horrible things to people he ''thought'' were his parents. He then got into a fight with a stranger and killed him, not knowing that it was the king of Thebes. He later married the recently widowed queen of Thebes as a reward for ridding the city of the Sphinx on his way to the city; some versions of the story have the queen wearing a necklace that kept her youthful, thus making it even less likely that Oedipus would think she was his mother. It was many years again before anyone learned the truth. The [[Oedipus Complex]] which is named after him doesn't help this misconception.

* [[Norse Mythology]]:

** Everyone knows that the Norseman's version of heaven is Valhalla, a great feast hall where the honored dead spend all day fighting each other (training for Ragnarok) and all night partying with Odin and the Valkyries. But that's actually only half-true. Asgard actually had ''two'' palaces for the honored dead, the other one being Sessrúmnir, Frigga's hall. Presumably, this was similar to Valhalla, but seeing as very little surviving texts give any detail of it, Valhalla gets all the attention.

* [[Yokai]] are often called "Japanese ghosts" by Western fans of anime, manga, and/or Japanese film. While many stories of Yokai do suggest they were formally-living humans, they are more demonic representations of unexplainable things, like disease, bad weather, or negative emotions. The true term for a "Japanese ghost" would be [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABrei Yūrei], which also appear frequently in Eastern media. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1DSaJVPVms (A good analysis of the difference is given here.)]

* At ''[[World Wrestling Entertainment|Over The Edge]] 1999'', no one watching on PPV saw [[Owen Hart]] fall to his death. He was being lowered during a pre-taped interview segment, which didn't cut away until he had hit bottom.

* There are a lot of things that are Common Knowledge in the IWC which can easily be disproven by looking at things like ratings and sales would easily disprove. Like that the WCW and ECW Invasion in 2001 was a ratings disaster [https://web.archive.org/web/20071222103338/http://www.100megsfree4.com/wiawrestling/pages/wwf/wwfraw.htm despite the ratings showing that it actually viewership remained steady and even went up a little during the angle] until near the end when [[Real Life]] events drew people away from it.

** it also became Common Knowledge that he only claimed to have lost his smile so he would not have to lose the title to [[Bret Hart]] at [[Wrestlemania]] and did not even need surgery. This is strange for a couple of reasons, first Michaels surgery was covered on tv and they even showed footage of him getting the operation done and he walked with a cane on tv for several weeks while he recovered and returned to his old job as a commentator. Secondly Hart was at the time the most booed face in the company after his 7 month vacation and feud with [[Stone Cold Steve Austin]] it is unlikely that they would give him the belt at the biggest event of the year, also they did give him a brief rain by winning the Final Four and losing it the next night to Sycho Sid, they could have easily had Hart as champion at Wrestlmania without Michaels he just was not over enough to justify it.

* "Pirate" is never ''rhymed with'' "pilot" in ''[[The Pirates of Penzance]]'', even in the song about Ruth's confusion between the two words.

* Shakespeare:

** The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is often associated with ''[[A Midsummer Night's Dream]]'', but in truth, the story is much older. [[Ovid]] likely authored the first written version (basing it on far older [[Oral Tradition]]) and both [[Geoffrey Chaucer]] and [[John Gower]] wrote adaptations long before Shakespeare. In fact, it is likely the Bard wrote ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' with [[Homage|the myth at least as his inspiration.]]

* ''Final Fantasy II'' for the SNES was ''not'' based on ''[[Final Fantasy IV]] Easytype''; it's the other way around. Although ''Final Fantasy IV Easytype'' was released first, it was a port back of the changes made in ''Final Fantasy II'' to the Japanese version, and also has a few key differences from ''Final Fantasy II''; the most notable being that it has an entirely new version of Zeromus, while ''Final Fantasy II'' just had a downgraded version of the original ''Final Fantasy IV'' Zeromus.

* Ports cost almost nothing to make, because it's just moving data from one system to another, which is why any port to a more powerful system (or [[Dead Rising|less powerful]]) is shovelware. Except none of that is true. Even if the systems are nearly identical (like [[Game Cube]] games to the [[Wii]]) they are not ''actually'' identical, and you need plenty of testing to catch any unforeseen incompatibilities. If the systems are different, and/or less powerful than what the game is being ported from, you have to rewrite the whole damn thing. That often means the ''only'' money saved is on design (since the game is already made). People bashing ports for being cheap clearly [[Did Not Do the Research]]. Developers acting like the myth is true is a major cause of [[Porting Disaster]].

** It's not entirely Common Knowledge. Poison and Roxy originally were female and were changed to transgender characters because Nintendo believed American gamers would have a problem hitting women. The Common Knowledge aspect is when the change occurred. They were changed to crossdressers before their first appearance, but the overall reason for them not being female is correct.

** Truth be told, that is not officially confirmed either. The word "newhalf" is, in fact, a derogatory term in Japan, comparable to calling a woman a whore. (Seeing as she was little more than a Mook at the time, calling her a name like that didn't seem unusual.) When plot development gave her more background and personality (causing the controversy to expand), ''[[Final Fight]]'' director Akira Nishitani claimed that it was up to the player whether Poison and Roxy were male or female, but that his ''personal'' opinion was that she was a woman. On the other hand, at Comic Con 2011, Capcom Senior VP Christian Svenson said that Poison's gender is [[Ambiguous Gender| ''supposed'' to be ambiguous. In the end, this controversy has never officially been resolved, and whether the two are male or female is up to each individual player to decide.

* ''[[Penny and Aggie]]'' are not Canadian. In early strips, T and Gisèle put them in a purposefully ambiguous location on the Eastern Seaboard, and due to a previous collaboration by them set in Canada, many assumed this one to be set there as well, some ex-readers or (very) casual readers still so assuming. However, as strip became more plot-driven, T was forced to choose a side of the border, and the setting is now unarguably American [[All There in the Manual|even to someone who's only read the comic proper]].

* For ''[[Homestuck]]'' a lot of the time, all non-fans really know is that the main characters/most popular characters are the grey-skinned alien trolls. Nope - the trolls don't arrive until act 4, and then not in person until act 5, and while they're not all minor characters they are definitely subordinate to the kids. Also, while they're certainly popular with the fandom, the fact that they show up so often in fanart is probably more to do with the fact that there are ''a hell of a lot'' of them, and that [[Andrew Hussie]] is very, very good at characterisation, so even the [[Those Two Guys]] equivalents have quite distinct personalities.

** Casual fans or non-fans associated with the fandom also usually think the series has a lot of gay romance. In actuality, there are two gay characters, and a few bisexual characters, none of whom have their romances anywhere near seriously taken. The most common one, John/Karkat, was immediately sunk as a ship after it was introduced canonically, but to hear the fandom, it's pretty much all the series is about. In fact, the portrayal of the gay characters is not without [[Unfortunate Implications]], since the bisexual characters are mostly [[But Not Too Bi]] and the same-sex relationships tend to be portrayed as creepy, hopeless, or [[Played for Laughs]].

* [[All Animation Is Disney]]. Only it's not.

* Despite what anyone tells you ''[[X-Men: Evolution]]'' did '''not''' move the location of the Academy to California. It just took place in a...[[California Doubling|very California-like New York]]. Which admittedly is ''really'' odd ''because it's animated''.

* ''[[Transformers]]'': Optimus Prime actually turned into a cab-over truck, not a regular truck. A cab-over is a special kind of truck which has a flat face and the cab sits above the front axle. A regular truck has the cab behind the axle giving the front an elongated look. [[Transformers Film Series|The Movie]] features his alternate mode as a regular elongated truck because the animators found that, with their commitment to avoiding [[Shapeshifter Baggage|mass-shifting]], a cab-over model resulted in an unimpressively-short Optimus; some subsequent adaptations, including ''[[Transformers Prime]]'', followed its lead.

** Prior to the live-action movies, several Optimus Prime toys were released in regular truck forms, most notably the Combat Hero Optimus Prime and Laser Optimus Prime from the Generation 2 line. Their only non-toy appearance was a brief appearance of the Combat Hero version at the end of the G2 comic.

** This is explicitly stated in the two parter "Do the Handicapped go to Hell?" and "Probably". The episodes, although they portray fundamentalism and "fire and brimstone" preaching in a negative light, clearly Sister Ann, who argues that "if people are good, they can get into Heaven" is portrayed as the [[Only Sane Man]] and even [[Jesus]] comes in later and reiterates this message.

* Just about everything people today know about King John of England is common knowledge, he was actually a very skilled diplomat and general and under him England was bigger then it had been under any king since the House of Danes ruled and would not be that big again until the house of Stewart. He was able to get most of Ireland to recognize him as lord, and also took significant land in Wales and Scotland which England continued to hold for centuries. He also did not inherit any French land, his brother King Richard had lost all of it to King Philip II of France by the time John became King. He was able to retake most of them and then lose them again a couple times (they were finally given up by his son Henry III). He also inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine after his mother died meaning that he actually had more French land then when he started. He was also able to re-establish England’s independence form the Holy Roman Empire which it had become a vassal state of under Richard. John also was considered to be to kind and friendly with the Jews which was one of the things his enemies used to rally against him. He also was not tricked or forced to sign the Magna Carta. It was a peace agreement between him and rebellious Lords that he did not want to fight with because he was preparing to invade France. However they then changed the treaty after it was signed to give them more power and authority then was agreed to and so King John had it null and voided by the Pope. The fact that no other king was named John was not a slight against him but an unfortunate coincidence as three crown princes were named John. He did not receive his [[Historical Villain Upgrade]] until about 500 years after he died when somebody decided to make him the antagonist of [[Robin Hood]] (who had previously been fighting his grandson King Edward). About the only thing that people know about him that was true is he increased taxes on the nobles, which were a necessity as he needed a bigger army for the bigger kingdom and also had to pay a lot of people for his brother mistakes like getting captured and held for ransom by the Holy Roman Empire.

* King [[Henry VIII]] of England also has a lot of "common knowledge" associated with him. First and foremost it is that he never had a son survive childhood which is false as he had just as many recognized sons as daughters: 2. The first was Henry [[Fitz Roy]] Duke of Richmond and Somerset, who was illegitimate and survived into his late teens. The other and more important one was King Edward, while he was also in his late teens when he died but he did something that would have an impact on England till this day which his father is given credit for. It is also common knowledge that he had all his wives beheaded because they could not provide him a male heir. While it is true that he divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, for this reason, she was also unable to have a daughter as she was in her late 40’s and had stopped menstruating (the armed rebellions she supported against him probably also had something to do with it). As for the other wives two were beheaded for adultery, one died in childbirth, one was a political marriage designed to create an alliance which fell through and the final one survived him. He also was not the founder of the Anglican church or even converted to Protestantism, he just refused to recognize the current Popes because they were pretty much puppets of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the time. He considered himself catholic and even kept the title Defender of the Faith given to him by the church. Finally he was also fit active and handsome for most of his life. While it is true that in later years health problems limited his mobility and caused him to gain a lot of weight he was not like that for most of his life.

** The closest this comes to being true is in his mundane arithmetic calculations. Like pretty much everyone, Einstein might occasionally forget to carry a one or misplace a unit (his genius is in the bold leaps he made, not in being an obsessive calculator) and his work was so important to him that he had contemporaries double-check those parts.

* The myth that you don't use [[90% of Your Brain]] is blatantly wrong. You use your entire brain, just not all at once, and the percentage you use at one time is between 15 to 25 percent. And no, you don't get [[The Sorcerer's Apprentice|magical powers if you somehow manage to use it all at the same time]]—that would actually be having a seizure. In early psychology (before access to imaging technologies like MRIs to see brain activity), the usage of a good portion of the brain was ''unknown,'' which isn't to say that we didn't use them, just that no one was sure quite what they did (now many of these areas tend to be associated with personality, self-control, planning, and memory).

* Two of the most stubborn psychological myths are the above 10% and the idea that some people are "left" brained and some people are "right" brained. Experiments on people who have had their corpus callosum (the cords that allow the hemispheres to communicate) severed has shown differences in how the hemispheres work that has created the traditional definition (for example, someone may be able to draw something with their left hand, but only name it with their right), but not only is it not as cut-and-dried as people tend to believe (that the left hemisphere is logical, the right hemisphere is creative), there is ''no'' evidence of hemisphere dominance. Further, it has no association with handedness.

* Another psychological myth is that there is a region of the brain associated with memory, and that damage to it would cause someone to forget everything. In fact, there are several regions associated with memory (since it's so complex), and damage to any one of them may result in retrograde or anterograde amnesia (inability to create new memories) along with a bunch of other memory processing and storage problems.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ben Big Ben]. The famous bell tower in London, right? Well, wrong. "Big Ben" is the nickname for the Great Bell of the striking clock at the north end of the tower; the tower itself is part of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Westminster Palace of Westminster].

* If you see a statue of a nude male figure, seated, leaning his chin on his hand as if in deep thought, you probably assume you're looking at a recreation of a statue called "The Thinker". Except this is technically not true. The male figure is, in fact, part of a much larger sculpture by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin Auguste Rodin] called ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates_of_Hell The Gates of Hell]'' which depicts a scene from Dante's ''[[Divine Comedy]]''. In fact, the male figure is properly called "Le Poète", or "The Poet" (leading many to believe it is supposed to represent Dante Alighieri, or maybe even a likeness of Rodin himself) and was a late addition to the larger project, added 24 years after it was first commissioned. It was given the name "The Thinker" by foundry workers, making the concept of a [[Fan Nickname]] and [[Ascended Fanon]] [[Older Than They Think]].

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[[Category:Did Not Do the Research]]