A Fact Of Life Is Readers Get The Facts Wrong

I always hate bad ratings and bad reviews, but what really irks me the most is when reviewers get facts wrong.  I'm never sure if it's deliberate or they just remember things wrong.  But they'll misstate something or exaggerate something or say things happened a way that didn't happen.

I probably mentioned one time where someone on Goodreads said about Chance of a Lifetime, "How could he think he could never be a cop again? He'd have to have worked with and met many female police officers, some probably further up the hierarchy than him?"

Which was utterly ridiculous.  Of course Stacey knew there were female cops.  What the book actually says is:

[Dr. Palmer]: “Well, you could always try rejoining the police force.”

I sniffle but don’t say anything. I could try to go back to the academy. Maybe I could make it through and become a beat cop again. In another five or ten years I might even make detective again. That hardly seems fair.

So it wasn't that she didn't know about female cops; it was that she wasn't sure if she wanted to put in the effort of starting over at the bottom.  And why should she instantly want to do that?  She has a new, younger body, why not explore the possibilities a little?

Then there's this Girl Power "review" that is just so full of wrongness.  It still irritates me every time I see this because so many things this person says are just so dumb that I have to question if he read the same book I wrote.  I realized that in his second dumb point he actually combines two characters:  Elise (Aquaman) and Allison (the Flash) into one character.  Here's the quote:

2. You abandon your family or loved ones... and sleep with lots of random people you just met. The married character decides to just have someone tell his wife and child - who he is constantly terribly missing and loves immensely (supposedly) - that he's dead. Rather than go home as a woman. Let that idea sink in for a minute. Do you have a family? Would you abandon them and tell them you were dead if you were hit by a magic ray that changed your gender? Then he/she proceeds to hook up with random people in a bar. Why? Because... um... well... the author thinks that's how marriage and parenthood work? Like, if an alien ray switched your gender tomorrow... you should just die? Your wife would stop caring about you? Or would rather you were dead? I don't know. It doesn't make any sense.

Allison doesn't sleep with a lot of guys.  She goes to bed with her wife once without actually doing anything sexual but after they argue about telling their daughter what's going on (it's Allison's wife who doesn't want to tell their daughter), Allison gets drunk in a bar in Paris and lets a guy take her to a hotel.  He sticks his thing in her but it doesn't do much for her.  They're interrupted by an emergency and while Allison considers going back to see if she can be a "normal" woman, she doesn't and her wife invites her back home.

Elise is the one who sleeps with a bunch of guys after her gay boyfriend doesn't want to be with her now that she's a woman.  Then she goes home to Atlantis Pacifica and meets a kind, sensitive artist guy and they fall in love and make a baby.

I don't know how this doofus smushed the two characters together into one, but it's a clear example of a reader misremembering the facts.

Lately I got a couple of bad reviews for Eric Filler books that keep mentioning "chapters" when there are no chapters.  One says, "Truth is I barely was able to stomach chapter one. Read about half of chap 2. Then I skipped to the last chapter."  Huh?  There is no "chapter one" or "chap 2" or "last chapter."  There are exactly 0 chapters.  So what are you talking about?

But this of course doesn't just happen to me.  Someone's blog focusing on Supergirl, the author really doesn't like Tom King's widely praised Woman of Tomorrow--soon to be a major motion picture!  At one point he said, "She isn't a sad drunk, crying in suns and bringing kids to public executions. (See Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow.) "

And I thought, well, that isn't true.  She wasn't a "sad drunk" in the book.  Yes, she is drunk at first but that's because it's her 21st birthday and so she takes a rocket to a red sun planet so she can actually feel the effects of alcohol like a normal person.  This is mentioned in two different places at least:

That doesn't make her a "sad drunk."  Lots of young people go out for drinks when they turn 21.  Even I got a bottle of wine or beer or something on my 21st birthday.  It's just being Kryptonian she has to do something more elaborate.  Drinking one time doesn't make her a drunk.

The "crying in suns" isn't really accurate either.  I rearranged a few panels but you can see that after finding some monks slaughtered by space pirates, she says she has to scream and then flies into the sun.  I think then it's pretty clear she's not "crying;" she's screaming with rage.

As I said before, I don't know if these mistakes are intentional or just an exaggeration or a misremembering.  I'm sure we all do it from time-to-time.  Part of it is probably if you don't want to like something, you might go out of your way to poke holes in it.  And that can lead to exaggerating something or just outright getting it wrong, like suggesting that Supergirl is a drunk/crying in a sun or that Stacey Chance doesn't know about female cops.

It stinks that you can't fact check reviews.  So people can say something dumb, blatantly get details wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it.  You have to just leave it on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever so anyone who stops by might think it's the truth--especially if you don't have a ton of other reviews to counter it.

You think people might be more sensitive about this in the age of "fake news" but still it's more likely the author will be shamed for arguing with people who get stuff wrong.  Arguing with opinions isn't a good idea but if I can show you chapter and verse or images from the book that prove you're wrong, why can't I do that?  It's unfair but then I guess so is life in general.

Of course opinions can be pretty asinine too.  Like this "review" of Derelict on the Amazon UK site that accuses the story of "very little in terms of R rated content, character development, or even plot."  Seeing that, I was like, WTF?  Yeah, there isn't a lot of R-rated content, nor is there supposed to be; I don't really consider that a valid criticism since I never said it was R-rated or filed it under erotica.  

As for "character development" Dirk, the main character, starts out as a gruff loner living on a boat and diving old wrecks for scrap by himself.  At the end, Dirk is a young woman who's in love with another young woman (who also used to be a guy) and they're going out together to explore a new universe.  So Dirk is completely different physically and spiritually.  But nope, no "development" at all. [eye roll]

And as for "plot" the book is over 100 pages, though some of that is promo stuff at the end and whatnot, but still it's not short.  Dirk is seemingly killed by a ghost ship, wakes up in an alternate reality, gets turned into a girl by the psychotic little girl running things, spends years as a baby, grows up again, rescues a new person, becomes really good friends with the new person, starts learning how to fight the evil girl, and then with the new person and one other person they launch a scheme to overthrow the evil girl.  But nope, no "plot" either. [eye roll]

But of course I can't say that on Amazon even if it weren't on the UK site.  And everyone would just think I'm "whining" by arguing how wrong this idiot is.  Because for whatever reason artists are just supposed to stoically take whatever moronic criticisms people throw at them or it's the artist who looks bad.  That just seems a little silly to me.

It's the same way for athletes too.  "Fans" can boo and jeer and probably shout sexist, racist, or homophobic things.  Yet if the athlete goes all Tie Domi in the stands on the "fans," it's the athlete who gets in trouble.  Why do we expect them to take abuse like that?  I guess because that's just how things are.  But it's not how things should be.  I'm just saying.

But if I had my way, I'd do like Jay & Silent Bob at the end of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back where they use money from their movie to beat up everyone making snarky comments about it.  Of course I'd have probably been beaten to death by now for all the comments I've made.