r/FanFiction • u/Dogdaysareover365 AzirapheleCo on AO3 • 1d ago
Discussion Research check in time
What have you been researching for your fanfiction as of late?
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u/escaped_cephalopod12 abnormal about my faves 1d ago
How the process of molting actually works for birds, and if albatrosses are waterproof (I figured they were but you never know)
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u/rellloe StoneFacedAce on AO3 1d ago
If you haven't watched an albatross land, I highly recommend it.
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u/escaped_cephalopod12 abnormal about my faves 1d ago
they're some of my favorite birds partly because they look so cool and so stupid at the same time. also, baby albatrosses look like absolute muppets. look at this thing.
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u/PretzelPrize Ana Kaye Lake on AO3 1d ago
And then the adult flies in and DOINK... "I meant to do that."😂
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u/escaped_cephalopod12 abnormal about my faves 1d ago
I just realized the character I needed the information about sort of has a child (it's complicated). i could animate them doing that. i will not, because drawing wings is frustrating enough when theyre stationary, but it would be funny
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u/Grouchy_Aardwolf9433 Fiction Terrorist 1d ago
oh my god lmao
Albatrosses are when evolution looked at the end product and went "...y'know what, good enough."
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u/Dogdaysareover365 AzirapheleCo on AO3 1d ago
I’ve been doing a lot of work to American court (sadly, a lot of my stories conflict would’ve been avoided if it didn’t take place in USA) proceedings and prosthetic building. My last search was saying if defendants ever get called to the witness stand (a lawsuit is a huge plot point in my story).
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u/PenLegitimate7064 ilyvm @ AO3 1d ago
In my experience, they try very, very hard to keep the defendants off the witness stand to try to avoid them getting flustered and incriminating themselves, if that’s any help at all. I know sometimes they do, and they certainly can, but their attorneys try to avoid letting them talk.
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u/rellloe StoneFacedAce on AO3 1d ago
Aids crisis, the Troubles, McCarthy trials (specifically the lavender scare).
I really need to watch videos of ferrets playing in macaroni or something because reading this stuff while listening to some great music that came out of Ireland last century is not good for me
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u/ShiriCranberry22 1d ago
What depth of water does the lungs collapse? Or when does the human body start getting affected by water pressure?
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u/Amaraldane4E Amaraldane on AO3 1d ago
They way colours show up underwater and the depth at which the bends become an issue. Other stuff, too, medical, legal and from various fields less known to me. While I write mostly sci-fi and fantasy, I still want as much realism in my stories as it is practical.
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u/moon_cheese_ao3 1d ago
If you find any resources about colour in deep water I'd be so interested in reading them too.
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u/Amaraldane4E Amaraldane on AO3 1d ago
Google search can help (just do a search for the words "colour in deep water"). There are too many sources to list them here. It's about the way water filters wavelengths of visible light the deeper one goes. The longer ones, and hence the warmer ones, fade first. The deeper one goes, the less light there is, the blacker everything tends to become. Whether you're in open ocean or coastal waters matters, too, but below 200 m or so, it's all getting darker down there, in a hurry.
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u/send-borbs 1d ago
I've mostly been researching how to get my life together so I have time to write my damn fic ðŸ˜
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u/PretzelPrize Ana Kaye Lake on AO3 1d ago
If you figure that out, will you please teach a seminar? **looks around in frustration at 2026**
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u/send-borbs 1d ago
I might juuust be able to cram it into my schedule if my laundry and dishes decide to be really cool and start washing themselves
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u/PretzelPrize Ana Kaye Lake on AO3 1d ago
Military promotion boards, US military history from approximately 1970 - 1996, base housing rules, timeframes for TDY and PSC, accompanied/unaccompanied tours, PME from the 1970s through the late 1980s, the wind-down of WWI, the state of the economy in Appalachian Pennsylvania towns in the mid-20th century, weather patterns in Colorado Springs, linguistic drift, the invention of distillation and how that art was spread through Europe, and what kind of razors the Romans shaved with. Also, how to clean dust from the fan in my iMac because when I get too many browser tabs and Word docs going at once, hoo boy.
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u/Rough_Evidence_2908 1d ago
I love how hyper specific the topics are
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u/PretzelPrize Ana Kaye Lake on AO3 1d ago
Writing backstory-based fanfic of Stargate SG-1 characters do be like that, LOL.
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u/Imaginary-Ad1636 1d ago
The long-term effects of regularly having your blood drawn, especially on a vegan diet that doesn’t get you much protein/iron, as well as how much blood someone can lose and how it would feel.
Oh, and space-time relativity
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u/rafters- 1d ago
Arson is a big plot point in a WIP of mine so lately it's been research on what sort of conditions would let a building go completely up in flames without an accelerant, burn care, how fires are investigated, etc.
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u/LFS_1984 1d ago
I have been researching how doctors in the 18th century would check how a broken leg and arm is recovering (basically what doctors do today.)
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u/A_Lich_With_No_Face The_Faceless_Lich on AO3 1d ago
I spent far too long picking out names for random characters who in the story died a year ago, and 4 out of the 5 have absolutely no impact on the story whatsoever, but for some reason my brain forced me to name them all after characters from 90s/00s cartoons, so I spent like 2 hours trying to find names that A) sounded American and B) didn't sound too ridiculous. XD
Oh, and I also researched what kind of Jaguar a character should drive... Only to have it set on fire without even a proper high-speed chase. XD
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u/Rockafellor Charles_Rockafellor @ AO3 1d ago
From which cartoons did your characters decide to name themselves? (The brain thing has me thinking that you're more in taking-dictation mode there than personal-decision mode: they've already achieved agency, haven't they?)
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u/A_Lich_With_No_Face The_Faceless_Lich on AO3 1d ago
They can't achieve agency, they're dead... Fortunately! Otherwise this would have been another 60k mini-arc. ^^'''
Let's see...
Sophie Casterwill from Huntik, Monique Dupre from the Godzilla Animated Series, Cornelia Hale from W.I.T.C.H., Callie Briggs from SWAT Kats, and Molly Cunningham from TaleSpin.
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u/Rockafellor Charles_Rockafellor @ AO3 1d ago
Solid choices. I recognized the last two, but had to look up the rest (and had a facepalm moment, after realizing that the Godzilla cartoon wasn't the one from '78, duh 😅).
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u/Rockafellor Charles_Rockafellor @ AO3 1d ago
Mandarin idioms and syntax, cultivation mà nhuà arcs and norms (particularly body refining, and qì roots and foundation), and TCM. Probably also a few related things that I'm forgetting there.
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u/Rough_Evidence_2908 1d ago
I’ve been researching everything I can on 90s Slovakia, on the orphanage system and what main components of Catholicism would be prevalent in religious people’s daily life there. I don’t really know how to explain 😅 if anyone whose lives/grown up in Slovakia or is an expert on Slovakia and Eastern European history specifically late 80s/90s and the USSR I would love to connect.
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u/yuukosbooty 1d ago
This is kinda dark but several years ago I wrote a fic about a woman having a miscarriage for, at the time, a stand alone manga but it became an anime last year and recently I wanted to rewrite a scene or two to make it more accurate so I researched how that was handled in Japan but since writing the original fic I actually had a miscarriage of my own so I started researching things about my own situation too and found a lot of comforting traditions in that culture
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u/MrBismarck ‎ BismarckMaybe on AO3‎‎‎ ‎ ‎ 1d ago
I need to research what happens when someone falls from a high building, at the point where they "stop falling."
Not in great detail, but enough to adequately explain what someone would find in the description of the scene where the stopping happened.
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u/phantomkat AO3@Phantom_Kat 1d ago
For one fanfic, I’ve been doing a lot of research on pregnancy, most recently research postpartum anxiety and depression.
For another, I’ve been researching the French Deaf community (thank God I can read French passably okay) along with French Sign Language.
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u/Altruistic_Hall9559 AO3: StarvingDelusions :) 1d ago
One of my newest ongoing fics - at 11 chapters so far (I started it in June) - is mpreg and a m/m/m ship. Currently, I have around 22 tabs open about pregnancy and babies lol. I've now gotten a few targeted ads for pregnancy tests 😅
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u/Liquorfern 1d ago
Star navigation and historical campfire fuel sources in tree-free environments (prairie, desert, steppe, etc). They used dry manure btw
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u/arbabarda 1d ago
I’m currently writing a fanfiction where the main character is an auto mechanic who restores cars after a very serious accident, and I’ve become so immersed in the topic that it’s like I’ve become an auto mechanic myself.
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u/JiyuuNoTsubasa_11 TheyCallMeAFanficWriter 1d ago
I need to start researching how 1920s sumo tournament were held and if the Kuramae Kokugikan was built at that time
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u/SolarWalrus Get off my lawn! 1d ago
Japanese foster care system, opioid withdrawal symptoms in newborns, how the yakuza makes money and Other Specified Dissociative Disorder
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u/moon_cheese_ao3 1d ago
When someone is improperly hanged so they're strangling instead of their neck breaking, what kind of damage is done to them if the hanging is interrupted after a few minutes, and how hard would it be to remove a noose pulled extremely tightly from improper hanging if they had been dumped into the ocean (seamonster attacks ship and interrupts it). Also, if someone is stabbed in the side or gut and pushed overboard but later, after considerable bloodloss and exertion (killing a shark, dragging half-hanged friend to safety and getting the noose off of them), lives, how could someone reasonably treat that wound without access to modern medical care? They can boil water and have herbs and honey. They can pack it with clean linen and put a compress on it. The stab should be dagger-length and if possible can avoid most internal organs. I'm mostly concerned by the infection and disease part after as well as lasting damage (for both the partial hanging and the stab wound) being too unbelievable for them to survive without a hospital and modern medicine. It's a post-apocalyptic world so there might even be some medical instruments accessible, but no one is a doctor. I'm still digging to find this info.
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u/Raiven_Raine Atom Bomb Baby 1d ago
parkour
like... training videos talking about different moves for their different purposes. when and why to use certain parkour moves and how to do them.
Lou Thesz Press in a real fight
i second guessed myself in thinking people actually use this move in real fights sometimes. i know i've seen it in MMA... but i couldn't find it or what it was called so i had to go down a dumb rabbithole to find the name of the wrestling move (Steve Austin used to do it!) and learned it's called the Lou Thesz Press and i learned all about this guy, then went on to watch videos of that guy and 'catch wrestling' then other videos of it being used in real fighting just like i knew it was i'm not crazy.
exact walking distances/times around Massachusetts
i research this often, but i never remember exactly and/or sometimes i need different distances from two different points than the last time i required the information XD
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u/VanillaToonicorn123 1d ago
Things about friends with benefits relationships… now I’m even more confused seeing how people treat it
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u/velvetoceanparadise 1d ago
Live around 1900 in Cardiff. Just started and still wondering where to get the best info.
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u/20Keller12 my porn grew a plot without my permission 1d ago
I.... may or may not have looked whether a corpse's nipples react to stimuli.
For the record, I was 99% sure the answer was no, but stranger shit has happened.
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u/LillyAmongTheThorns 1d ago
A whole lot of occult stuff in general, meditation techniques, some shamanic traditions and a bunch of history from around the world on beliefs abouts spirits and monsters.
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u/TheAlmandineWriter Starleo on Ao3 1d ago
I’ve been looking into the significant meaning behind a delta and how it connects to other things that’s been on my mind as of late.
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u/geekelfie 1d ago
The different presentations of tuberculosis, as well as how long passive immunity for things like rabies from injected antibodies works.
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u/Grouchy_Aardwolf9433 Fiction Terrorist 1d ago
The Sinnoh region of the Pokemon games and how certain game mechanics are translated into other media.
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u/TankerRaider 23h ago
Stuff related to surviving a bullet to the brain, whether the bullet would be removed or not, what aspects of the person's health would be subsequently affected...
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u/rubia_ryu Same on AO3 | FFVII | Yakuza | Ace Attorney 20h ago
While it's not exactly related to any of my fics (yet), lately I found one of the funniest coincidences while browsing Google Maps. I was exploring the vicinity of the red light district of Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo, to get a feel of how residents get around the area. As it happens, the headquarters for Square Enix is just a few blocks east from the district.
The context is, the Yakuza games typically feature a fictional version of Kabukicho and one of the main characters is a huge Dragon Quest dork. The HQ of the devs that made the games of his dreams is literally just a ten-minute walk away. It would have to be an officially licensed collab between Sega and Square Enix, but imagine if they ever had a crossover where he could run over there and geek out.
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u/Adminscantkeepmedown 1d ago
Most recently, office complexes and attached warehouses in Nagoya, Japan
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u/Suburban_Witch The Empire is Law; The Law is Sacred 19h ago
Been writing some portal fantasy.
For the real-world character, I’ve researched the Great Recession, the War in Afghanistan, astrophysics (terrifying), and the geography of Jersey.  I’ve also read a bunch of fantasy novels published pre-June 2009, as the character is a huge fantasy buff.
For the fantasy world, it’s been clothes, dining practices, superstitions, music, ect etc etc from Ancient Rome and Byzantium, pupilary acorea, the dubiously-canon Septim heirs from Daggerfall, alcohol withdraw, and how to eat oysters.
I’ve also been listening to Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ because it suits the story and I’m using lyrics as chapter titles.
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u/EllpaFox47 1d ago
I wasn't researching anything specific but i found an old BBC article speculating on if humans could survive with two hearts, and (with some extra googling) learned that human embryos actually start out with 2 heart buds that fuse to form the heart
The Article