I love to nitpick. Inconsistencies in TV shows, bad science, inaccurate historical costumes—I can’t not notice, and it’s fun to catalog them.

Unfortunately this makes me a terrible person, according to some. I’m only trying to win by putting others down. Can’t I just enjoy things? 

I argue that nitpicking doesn’t have to be about that. It can simply be another way to enjoy things—with a few caveats.

Nitpicking for clout, and why it sucks

You don’t have to go far to hear criticism of nitpickers. Which is fair; after all nitpickers did start the criticizing. Here’s a quote from Leonard Nimoy you sometimes see passed around:

Canon is only important to certain people because they have to cling to their knowledge of the minutiae. Open your mind! Be a “Star Trek” fan and open your mind and say, “Where does Star Trek want to take me now?”

I agree with this in part. You can easily ruin your own enjoyment of a show if you’re mainly watching it to see if it makes any mistakes, and if it does, you declare it Bad. I’m a firm believer in enjoying things. There’s a certain thread of criticism where people seem to think they are smarter, more thoughtful, better people because they dislike things other people liked. That seems a surefire way to stop liking anything, because you’ve got to be smarter than the people who had a straightforward good time at the movies, and that means finding something to hate.

There’s a whole series of books called the Nitpicker’s Guides. My brother owned them and would regale me with facts like “Spot changed from male to female over the course of The Next Generation” or “Kirk’s shirt changes color while he’s falling in Star Trek V.” And these are funny, but it doesn’t strike me as really engaging with the story when you’re primarily just hunting for mistakes. In fact it does kind of make me enjoy it less to know this stuff, things I wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t told me.

It seems better to join with the creators in good faith: they make the story, and you suspend your disbelief and meet it on the level they’re asking you to. It’s then that you’ll get out of it what they put in—and hopefully a little more, which you put in yourself.

Nitpicking because you can’t help it

That said, I don’t always notice this stuff on purpose. I wasn’t trying to catch the creators of Gravity out when I noticed that the physics simply wasn’t squaring with the way objects move in space. It’s just a thing I know a lot about and can’t help seeing. I come to shows intending to suspend my disbelief, but some shows make it impossible to do, because they don’t take enough care to build a world I can believe in.

I don’t want to watch shows that don’t care about their own plot and universe, where we are all supposed to be together laughing at the very notion that any of this could feel real to anyone. I want stories the author takes as seriously as I do, where they build a world I could genuinely believe in for the length of time I’m in them.

It just makes a thing seem much less real if constant liberties are taken with canon, science, or plausibility. I’ll believe some very out-there things, but the creator has to make me believe them. That means taking as much care as possible to remove inconsistencies and explain away the scientific liberties. For instance, I can’t believe in a ship that looks exactly like a sailing ship, with cloth sails, moving in space. But tell me that the sails are a special material that extends into a different dimension, or that in this universe there’s a fluid “aether” between the planets instead of vacuum, and I’m on board. I feel like the author is taking their story seriously, because they took the time to make it make sense.

There’s an attitude I see among some creators that they can do what they want, and we should just shut up and enjoy it. If we find fault, it’s because we want to find fault, because we’re obsessive nerds who nitpick for clout.

But that neglects the very real fact that we can’t enjoy things that don’t allow us to engage with them. They wouldn’t say, “You shouldn’t care that we shot this on our phones, you shouldn’t care that we hired bad actors, you shouldn’t care that this is our first-draft script, because you should just shut up and enjoy it.” It isn’t my fault if it isn’t enjoyable!

The reason they say this about plot holes and they don’t say this about film quality is that there seems to be a certain list of things a person is allowed to care about in a movie, and if we bring up other issues, we can’t really be serious—we’re just hating for clout, because obviously that couldn’t have affected our enjoyment.

I hate to always harp about this issue, but it really strikes me as anti-autistic bias. Anti-autistic bias rarely comes in the form of saying “I hate autistic people”—instead people bring up a collection of autistic traits, say, “You know what people like that are like,” and then hate on that unspecified group of unlikeable people.

Take this quote from Roger Ebert, in his review of Fanboys:

Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad-lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That’s why it’s excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They’re always asking you questions they know the answer to.

Gosh, I wonder how he feels about people who are “socially inept”! Do you think it would make the slightest difference if he found out some of these people have a diagnosis of Socially Inept Disorder which entitles them to use fandom as a disability aid?

Anyway. Some of us, because we know about niche topics or have a good memory for canon or are good with numbers or whatever, are going to notice issues other people don’t. There is no standard set of issues that is “genuine criticism” and everything else is your own fault if you noticed. Every brain is different, every taste is different, and if bad physics ruins a movie for you, there’s no justified reason for anyone to tell you you’re wrong.

Nitpicking for fun

There is some truth to the idea that I nitpick because I want to, because I’m collecting mistakes. Not for clout, though. Especially when reading hard sci-fi, it’s part of the fun.

Science fiction author Hal Clement once wrote:

Writing a science fiction story is fun, not work. … the fun … lies in treating the whole thing as a game…. [T]he rules must be quite simple. They are; for the reader of a science-fiction story, they consist of finding as many as possible of the author’s statements or implications which conflict with the facts as science currently understands them. For the author, the rule is to make as few such slips as he possibly can… Certain exceptions are made [e.g., to allow travel faster than the speed of light], but fair play demands that all such matters be mentioned as early as possible in the story…

I like this framing because it treats finding a mistake as something other than a criticism. When I say, “I think Mark Watney should have skipped the nitrogen-fixing bacteria and watered his potatoes with diluted aged urine instead,” I’m not saying The Martian is a bad book or that Andy Weir failed. Not at all! Weir made a detailed, thoughtful speculative story, and I’m engaging with it on its own terms by coming up with my own ideas of what could’ve happened. It makes me feel clever, and it doesn’t make me write nasty reviews, because I was having a blast the whole time, and that was the point all along.

That said, I would hate to reduce sci-fi down to this game. Hopefully, I want to get the reader so absorbed in my characters and their problems that they’re not asking themselves how the spaceship’s cooling system works. When I write something and find readers constantly commenting, “But shouldn’t he have said that, but isn’t that the opposite of what he said there, that’s not what would happen,” it makes me want to tell them to just go read something else, if they don’t like how I chose to write it. Because it feels like they’re not giving me the benefit of the doubt—they’re so absorbed with winning at the game that they are missing out on the story.

So I propose the rule should instead be more like this: 

You, the reader, come with me on my story, suspend your disbelief, try to put yourself into the universe I’ve created. And in turn, I, the author, will try to make it easy for you by thinking everything through, so that you’re not pulled out of immersion by too many mistakes.

This is a pact that can help us both enjoy what we’re doing. I’ll take your immersion seriously by keeping careful track of canon, science, and plausibility. In turn, you can engage with my work in good faith, knowing that I’m not being careless, so if something doesn’t make sense at first, it may be explained later.

Zero mistakes would be impossible. We’re only human. And that’s where the game comes in. If you notice one or two, give yourself a pat on the back. You thought of something I didn’t! You win! Don’t come and tell me about it, that would be rude, but if this is part of how you enjoy things, I think you can and should continue.

If, however, you’re reading something and start hitting mistake after mistake, benefit of the doubt you extended and weren’t rewarded, carelessness with past canon…perhaps this person isn’t playing the game, as I’ve described it. They don’t take their own work seriously, and they think the details they’ve ignored are things you shouldn’t care about. And in that case, it may simply be that the work is not for you.

That’s my line, I think. When nitpicking ceases to be fun, but instead feels like getting smacked in the face with the creator’s carelessness over and over, in ways you’d like to ignore but can’t. That’s when it’s time to Marie Kondo that thing: thank it for its service and lovingly return it to the library or take it off your watchlist. It was made for people who don’t care about the stuff you care about. 

There’s nothing wrong with you for caring about it—you’re not a terrible person for noticing. You’re not hunting through with a fine-toothed comb for clout, but just losing your immersion because of details you can’t ignore.

Nitpick when it’s fun

I wish more creators did care about minutiae, especially creators within large franchises with big followings. Because there are people who have cared deeply about this stuff all their lives, know all the details, and will notice you messed it up. And it feels sometimes like the big businesses that own these franchises simply don’t care how they made these fans feel, because they know they’re still going to show up. Some even disdain the very fans who form the basis of their success, because they’re nerds, because they’re pedantic, because they’re [whatever word they use instead of autistic so they don’t feel ableist].

But, given that they don’t care, I think it’s always better to spend your time on things that won’t make you nitpick unduly, that are written with care for plausibility and consistency. Nitpick when it’s fun for you, and when it stops being fun, try to move on. You don’t actually win any clout for catching creators out on details, and it’s no fun when they aren’t even trying to get it right. So find your own boundaries: when it’s fun to watch a show and laugh at the bad costumes, versus when it’s actually disturbing your peace to find the creators care that little about their own canon.

If you’re not having fun, it’s really better not to waste your time.