What are some of the funniest misunderstandings you've had about media? Especially when you were a kid.
In the movie Matilda, the Trunchbull forces a boy to eat a large cake and says that the lunch lady's "sweat and blood" went into the cake. I remember thinking that the cake was made from literal sweat and blood which is why he couldn't eat it.
I had a friend who refused to watch Baby Driver until my wife and I told her and her husband how much we enjoyed it, then we promptly watched it that night and she said, "I'm sorry I didn't want to watch this guys, I was thinking of Boss Baby."
I had a friend I had to ask multiple times to watch Code Geass because he thought I meant Code Lyoko.
Oh nooooo!
we found the guy who only seen Boss Baby
When I was very young my closest understanding of what "video" meant was VHS tapes. It lead me to the conclusion that "video games" were prerecorded videos that had perfectly predicted what I'd do.
I'd sit perfectly idle in Toy Story for several minutes at a time. Then suddenly, BAM! Move left! How did they know?!
I was a dumb child.
It probably didn't help that some people would call game cartridges "game tapes" at the time too
Games used to literally come on tapes.
Yeah, on the C64 and stuff, but people would refer to NES cartridges as 'game tapes'
Admittedly that was somewhat intentional, Nintendo went through a lot of extra cost redesigning the US NES's cartridge slot to mimic a VCR.
"My parents said this was just like Pokémon, I'm sure they know what they're talking about and didn't just buy this VHS because the guy on the cover and Ash Ketchum kind of have the same haircut if you squint!" -Small me, about to watch Evangelion for the first time
And then,
"Okay, I am now aware that anime is not the same as cartoons and can in fact have blood and violence in it. Surely that is the limit, however, and I can safely watch this Mecha anime without it further challenging this assumption!" -Slightly less small me, about to watch Cross Ange and realize several things
A relative once gave me a bag with a lot of dvd's with animes on them ,he got them from a friend that worked on the police and they were confiscated from those who sells them on the streets , THERE WERE SOOO MANY HENTAIS mixed in like holy shit maybe 40%.
Wow, this is honestly one of the absolute worst ideas I can even think of.
As a kid I didn't know that the British said "ma'am" sorta like "mum" so I thought Dr. Halsey was Jorge's mother in Halo Reach 💀
I remember hearing that wasn't an uncommon mistake back when it came out. It's also in a weird way not completely wrong, since she is the closest things all the Spartan IIs had to a mother figure.
True, and he seems very protective of her so it kinda made sense in my brain at the time.
I used to think Boba Fett was Luke's brother because when I watched ESB on VHS I thought he said to Vader, "He's no good to me, dad."
To me it made perfect sense that Vader had a kid who's just a smaller dude in armor.
Lmao thats awesome
Well George is Hungarian & so is his accent but youre not wrong about the word itself :p
Is his accent actually hungarian? I know he speaks it throughout the story but he sounds very british.
It's a very mild Hungarian accent that slips into British English, probably because thats what he was taught for his ESL.
His voice actor is Nigerian-British so that's his natural accent slipping in.
Oh interesting
fam I thought this until reading this exact comment, the last 16 years have been a lie
When I first heard of them, I thought that My Hero Academia and Little Witch Academia were related. I knew nothing about either, and assumed it was just a series with a weird naming convention.
Like A Certain Scientific Railgun and A Certain Magical Index.
A Certain Academia
That reminds me that the editor for Index intervened with Kazuma Kamachi's decision to have every novel in ye series have a different variation of "A Certain..." rather than having just the spin-offs be alternative titles
When I first saw the trailer for Avatar, I thought by the name it was gonna be a .hack sort of thing, where the story takes place inside a video game.
Friend mentioned walking simulator games. I thought he meant games like QWOP.
I thought you just had to walk forward in walking simulators, completely forgetting that there were other directions. I played Soma thinking it would be more of a visual novel type game.
A friend at school was nice and printed out a text only guide for me for Doom for PC so I can grab all the secret rooms and such. Small problem, I only had Doom for SNES. While they are largely the same aside from floors just having a flat color with no detail there are no major differences. Well, aside from one other notable thing. While reading thr guide it would sometimes reference enemies, one of which is the invisible pinky demon. There are no invisible pinky demons in the SNES version so I beat Doom scared to death of an enemy that isn't even in the game, how how would I know an invisible enemy is missing? Good times.
SNES version also has some simplified level design for performance reasons iirc, which carried on into other console ports like the 32x and Jaguar.
It was only recently brought to my attention that The Handmaid's Tale is not a Downton Abbey-like show.
I was spoiled on something happening in Jojo Part3. But it was in a way that lead me to have a very wrong assumption. I was spoiled that Avdol dies. So when he had his fake out death I 100% believed it and was surprised when he came back. So I assumed when I was spoiled it was about the fake out. That only caused be to be double surprised when he died for real.
I will never forget one time when I was like 6yo when I was watching a couple of my cousins play a Lilo & Stitch game for the PS1 and during a level Lilo had to jump on some platforms. To do that, the game showed an X button prompt on screen, but for some reason my dumbass child brain interpreted that prompt as a warning sign, so I screamed "no, be careful, that X means danger! Turn back!"
God, that game was a core memory of my childhood years, along with the Bugs Life game. I was very confused when the movie itself did not contain the iconic character Giant Glowing Golem that Throws Fireballs.
Also I thought Lilo's attack was her brandishing a knife and just shanking the local wildlife (It's supposed to be a vodoo doll)
When I was a kid, my mom didn't want to buy me the Jungle Book VHS because, according to her, "you'll have nightmares at night because the kid becomes a wolf". To better explain this, the movie was localized in my country as "Mowgli: The Wolf Boy". For many years I still thought the movie was about a boy who could turn into a wolf, so I was very surprised to learn it wasn't the fact. Also, I'm pretty sure she came with that excuse simply because she didn't want to buy it and I would believe anything at that time.
For like two decades I thought that Jesus Christ Superstar was a movie about Jesus playing basketball
When I was younger, for some reason I was absolutely convinced that the His Dark Materials series ended with the main character's Daemon companion turning into a human and the two of them getting married, despite the fact that I hadn't read it and didn't know anyone who did. Years later that's exactly how the serial-numbers-filed-off reference in Steven Universe ends, so either there actually is a different but similar series that ends like that or Rebecca Sugar somehow made the same mistake child me did.
In the Matrix Reloaded, the Merovingian gives this big speech about how we’re all just slaves to our own bodily reactions and thus the stimuli we encounter, and how that means free will doesn’t really exist. His prime example is a patron in his restaurant who has eaten cake laced with code that makes her orgasm at the table, forcing her to head to the restroom to collect herself.
I saw this scene when I was 10. He was talking about human body functions, and showing how that woman ate something that creates a reaction that goes straight to your crotch, and she had to go to the restroom right away. The fact that the scene had a sexual element went completely over my head, and instead I interpreted it as the cake being laced with laxatives/diuretics. Either way, the theme is evident, and the Merovingian is clearly a jerk.
This misinterpretation was not helped by the end of the conversation: “We are all slaves of causality. And now I have to piss because I have drank too much wine!” AHA see??? Now HE has to piss! He’s a program! He doesn’t actually need to have to do that but now he can’t help it, he put the shoe on the other foot himself!
I thought Demon Slayer and Goblin Slayer were the same show for waaay too long. When the former was first blowing up and I was seeing frames and clips on social media, I thought "damn, they really switched up the art style on season 2 of this show."
Also, when that interview with Paul Thomas Anderson where he talked about loving the MCU was going around, I was really confused about why everyone seemed so surprised that the guy who directed all those Resident Evil movies liked superhero movies
Paul Thomas Anderson, Paul W.S. Anderson, and Wes Anderson all doing the Spider-man pointing circle.
I've been saying the three of them need to do a fight to the death to determine who gets to keep making movies
Well, it’s not exactly ’about media’, but, after my dad read The Hobbit to me as a kid, for a while I thought that black people were literally a different race like elves and dwarves
I read Gushing Over Magical Girls knowing nothing about it (In my defense, the fan translated title was "Looking Up To Magical Girls" at the time), assuming from the Mangadex summary that it would be a cute series similar to Demon Girl Next Door. And both do have the concept of, "Dorky girl winds up forced to be a supervillain and fight magical girls (tags: yuri)".
Reading that first chapter was an experience.
An eye opening experience
My very first interaction with Final Fantasy was fucking Spirits Within. You can guess how confused I was when I saw the games
For the longest time I thought Hunter x Hunter was the same anime as Masou Gakuen HxH. I knew nothing about either of them other than that they had similar titles. I think I may have got High School DxD mixed in there as well.
In Philadelphia (1993), after making a strong argument, Mary Steenburgen's lawyer character whispers to co-counsel as she sits down "I hate this case"
But I heard "I hate the gays"
I'm sitting here like, I fucking get it, lady, it's the ninth inning: we all hate the gays.
When I played Halo 4 at a young age, I thought that the old scientist woman that gets fucking flayed alive in the level Composer was Catherine Halsey, and that Cortana was only then officially doomed to die from that point. I may or may not have forgotten that the actual plot was about stopping the Didact and his Biobliterator.
Didn't help that her name was also Katherine. But would I have even known that?
Speaking of the Didact, I also thought he had mind control powers the Master Chief saved himself from by taking cover during his awakening, and that's how he managed to turn both the promethians and the covenant to his side on a dime. Which actually is kinda impressive anyway now that I think about it.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that Until Dawn wasn't a David Cage production, so there was a very long time period of "Wait, why are you saying you've always hated David Cage? I thought Until Dawn was good?"
Only having had the knowledge of seeing random screenshots and promo art online, I assumed Bill Cypher in Gravity Falls was a friendly quirky mascot character.
2/3's not bad.
When I was a kid, I misread the name "Chrono Trigger" as "Chrono Tigger". I also didn't know what the word "Chrono" meant, but I did know "Chrome", so I assumed it was sort of like that, and when I heard people talking about this game being one of the best games ever made I would scoff and wonder "why would I play a game about a metallic character from Winnie the Pooh".
That was. A strange one to believe in, and I'm glad it was a mercifully short assumption before I actually played the game and realized it was peak.
“why would I play a game about a metallic character from Winnie the Pooh”
r/BrandNewSentence
I'm going on 33 this month, so I was around for the real wild west days of the internet.
So when I got to around that puberty age and started 'really exploring' the internet, the first time I saw a picture titled "BBW woman" it was...A large, nude black woman.
So for the longest time, until I was like 19 at least, I legit thought the entire category of "Big Beautiful Women" was..."Big Black Women"
Somehow I never thought about it too hard until I was older, I blame society.
Pretty certain the site I saw that picture on gave me like five viruses too, thankfully Avast was actually good back then...Ah, memories.
I'm just now learning that that's not what BBW stands for. To be fair, it sounds very similar to BBC
Not a specific media, but I uh. Completely failed to understand what Slice of Life meant in terms of Anime. Which is a problem because it was always in how I searched for new shows to watch.
I didn't realize that it meant basically no overarching plot, and more explicitly meant sort of self-contained episodes with the same cast.
Turns out I actually don't like Slice of Life and need something with an actual story.
Oh tons of slice of life have stories and plot progress. They just don’t have arc villains.
Part of that's also anime fans forgetting that "Sitcom" is a genre.
I illegally streamed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and it had not subtitles. Even when the apes were using sign language. I thought this was a purposeful decision, and really thought highly of the director’s decision to commit to the theme of miscommunication and misunderstanding.
I was a little disappointed when I learned there were actually subtitles for these scenes
My first resident evil game was 2 (because my grandparents saw video game at a garage sale and assumed that meant it was kid safe). I didn't realize you could run away from things and didn't have to kill all the enemies for some time/ I didn't make it to the police station when I first booted the game.
Another dumb one was discovering different cable/ tv services have channels setup differently. My friend was trying to tell me the new digimon season was on "channel 5" at X time, but that was a news channel. We spent a few days arguing and then we realized my family had cable and he didn't.
Why would I start with Oceans 11 when there 10 previous entries in the series?
I remember my brother recommending me Demon Slayer and me binging it. I had no idea how insanely popular it was, so me asking about it to people was like me going "hey, have you heard of Jesus Christ?"
What do you mean Raditz isn't Vegeta before a haircut?
In WH40k, the Orks have a psychic field that allows their technology to work better than it should, especially when they're working together. But I thought that Orks ran on pure cartoon logic and could do anything if they believed hard enough. Orks can breathe in the vacuum of space so long as they don't think about it. Yarrick is an unstoppable super badass because they thought he was so fucking cool. The only reason the Emperor is still alive is because they think he's still alive. Silly shit like that.
Wait is that not how it works? That's how everyone made it sound like it works.
It's largely exaggerated by the fandom for humor, which then gets repeated without the sarcasm. And I mean, it's 40k, if you told me an Ork died from a finger gun because everyone really believed it, I'd take that at face value. It's less weird than the crocodiles that can fast travel.
It's more tuned for badass than comedy. They can make vehicles that shouldnt work hold together, weld 2 different guns together in a way that "could" work, but shouldnt, & it'll work for them, red vehicles DO go faster, purple-Orks arent invisible but they do get stealth benefits, stuff like that.
In one of the Austin Powers movies he accidently drinks a stool sample and we get this exchange:
"this coffee takes like shit"
"It is shit Austin"
"Good, then its not just me"
I always though that Austin was just cool with drinking poop as long as other people were doing it, I didn't know that shit could just mean something was bad yet.
I didn't understand that early cameras couldn't record in color and just assumed our universe didn't have color until the 1960's
I still don't know what's Warframe and what's Warhammer and I don't know what the 40,000 stands for.
I know this is probably a joke, but i feel the nerd urge to explain this regardless.
Warhammer is what happened when a bunch of British guys in the 80s got together to make a tabletop game. It was originally Warhammer Fantasy, and was named so because of the signature warhammer that the setting's primary human-worshipped god, Sigmar, wielded.
They (the British guys) eventually made a Sci-fi version set in the year 40,000, aka the 41st millennium. Hence "Warhammer 40k". There's no actual warhammers of significance in this one though.
Warframe is a completely unrelated shooter game, and psudeo-MMO, by Canadian developer Digital Extremes, best - and really only - known at the time for Unreal Tournament. It was sort of like a reboot or reimagining of their earlier release "Dark Sector", which was a flop.
When I was a kid, I thought the Final Fantasy games had to be played in order, since to me, the fact they were numbered indicated that there was a single continuous narrative being told over the course of the series. I looked up when the first game was released, saw that it came out in 1987, decided that that was far too old for me, and never played any of the other games. It wasn’t until I was in college that someone informed me that the series was an anthology.
Illiterate kid me misreading "Good Easter" on the computer where my dad downloads PSP games for our PSP. Expected a cute animal crossing kind of game. Anyways, the game was God Eater Burst.
Dissidia Zidane has lines about stealing hearts and kid me was like "Wtf is this freak doing"
Thought the original Star Wars trilogy was one movie that took place before the Prequels and thought the franchise was about bad guys with increasingly elaborate red lightsabers