is filling out tax forms for fanfic characters, to make sure you didn’t accidentally write them living beyond their means, too obsessive?
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.
There’s no such thing as too obsessive. There’s only what adds to your world and its story, what distracts you from actually writing it, and the middle slice of the venn diagram where those two things intersect.
I bought a book specifically to look up information about Henry V of England’s coronation in order to construct a plausible narrative of it for a fic. (That it’s proven useful for several other aspects of his life, and provides me with more books to locate for pertinant information of the early 15th century and that king in particular is just bonus.)
@thebibliosphere and @deadcatwithaflamethrower
Would you care to share yours?
Heck, where do I even begin.
I have endless amounts of fashion history resources, and references that I’ve collected over the years. Sadly most of them are at my parent’s house still, but I went out of my way at one point to research how prevalent arsenic was in clothing dye at the start of the 19th century
(Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present by Alison David is a fun read for anyone interested in this kind of thing)and fell down a rabbit whole of investigation that lead me to finding out something that had actually happened to someone my mother knew in the 1960s, a girl she went to school with who mysteriously died very early from “unknown causes”, that only with hindsight you realize are consistent with continuous low level exposure to arsenic.
Their house was built on an area of land that used to be home to a cloth factory, and they would routinely just drain their dye water into the ground. Meaning the ground was full of all kinds of toxic byproducts, including, you guessed it, arsenic.
They later concluded that due to the fact that she was always barefoot in the garden, she was exposed to more of it than the rest of her family. Which was why I later found out, my mother would always yell at me for going barefoot in the garden.
I didn’t even wind up using the knowledge I’d learned about fabric dyes in the fic (though I still might at a later date).
I’ve also handled (with gloves) 16th and 17th century wood cut out slides of pornography displays from a private collection, and some very old leathery dildos, also in said private collection, for a research paper…does that count?
1. That’s horrifying and now I’m real glad I wear shoes outside.
2. In the vein of “Collections of weird shit from the 17th century” I got to see a collection of 17th-Century diorammas made entirely out of human remains, Featuring Infant skeletons as apart of a class on the history of death and the handling of grave remains. Really beautiful work, but also very sad and hands down the creepiest house I’ve ever been in.
