there's always more to learn!

[cimorene]

You may remember I mentioned a little while ago that my wife has observed a bunch of people in It fandom who think Bev moved from Maine to Portland Oregon overnight because they don't know there is a Portland Maine. This is just one of the amusing tidbits she's discovering here, because it's a fandom with an ensemble of characters her age, and there's been a glut of fanfiction written by the very young who are writing things about the 1980s and 1990s without realizing they might need to do some research about stuff that happened decades before they were born¹. HOWEVER.

The other night my wife, who has actually been to America only a few times even though she uses English and consumes American media so much, said:

waxjism: This fic, set in the late 1980s, in Maine...
cimness: Yes?
waxjism: ... Has these children... drinking Dr Pepper... from two-liter bottles.
cimness: ... And?
waxjism: Liters! The metric system!

I never questioned the existence of 2- and 3-liter bottles of soft drinks! They've just always been there. But of course, yeah, the US is notoriously anti-metric, so her assumption was logical. She's familiar with milk coming in gallons! It's not even all drinks that come in 2-liters and 3-liters; it's really only soft drinks - and maybe some soft drink-adjacent things like Sunny D. I looked it up and apparently it was introduced by Pepsi in the 1970s and presumably the industry just followed their lead.

 

1. eg the lack of cell phones and cds, or the fact that everybody the characters' ages had an email address in their early 20s.

Comments

[hebethen]

...you know, I'd never thought about it that way before either. The US does use some metric things seemingly at random, doesn't it? Two-liter bottles of soda, hundred-meter dashes, 28g serving sizes...

[cimorene]

Yeah! No ideas for the serving sizes, but the race could be an international standard because like... olympics

[krait]

I have seen a 3-liter soda bottle maybe twice in my life; either they're very limited to specific regions, or possibly just to very specific stores? Honestly I forget they exist until someone mentions them, and I have to think about it. But yes, the hodgepodge US "I'm buying a gallon of milk and two litres of soda" approach to measurements is a headscratcher when you're trying to explain it! :D

[torachan]

I think it's generally only the occasional supermarket private brand sodas that come in three liter sizes. I've never seen name brands that do.

[cimorene]

Coke and Pepsi contract bottling to a hodge-podge of different independent bottling companies, so this can vary regionally! I saw a lot of 3 liter bottles of Pepsi branded drinks growing up, but those markets might be different now.

[cimorene]

Coke and Pepsi contract bottling to a hodge-podge of different independent bottling companies, so this can vary regionally.

[torachan]

Huh! Yeah, I've definitely never seen that here.

[templemarker]

there have been so many of those anachronisms that have temporarily thrown me out of IT fic. I eventually decided it was kind of amusing, that the writing demographic skews young enough that there's genuinely no awareness of what life was like before 2002. Some of the anachronisms are just wild though, like not knowing what voicemail systems were and how important they were, especially in college. Or just what would be required to even *get* to a computer regularly enough to do anything approaching the most mundane task we take for granted these days.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I suppose the period is ripe for this because it's just too recent for any gen-z people to realize they might need to do any research, or ask any questions even, and they are able to just unthinkingly project modern life back on it probably without remembering facts that in many cases they actually DO know from other tv and movies. And then it's also just far enough that the majority of people in that age cohort don't know everything they'd need to know to render the little details correctly.

[templemarker]

Yeah, agreed; and it's also the whole "how much research do I want to do for something that's for funsies??" question. I mean for me, research is a foundational part of writing fic -- it's both a joy and a torture! But there's merit too for the idea that you're just trying to write two awkward cuties hold hands without realizing that small portable hand sanitizers did not exist in any meaningful way in 1996.

[cimorene]

I carried hand sanitizer from Bath & Bodyworks in my purse in 1999-2000, I think. Was it really introduced right before that?

[templemarker]

I double-checked myself, and it looks like Purell hand sanitizer was introduced to the United States in 1997 as the first product for non-industrial/clinical use, though apparently hand sanitizer had been used in Europe more broadly since the 1980s. So a narrow window, but yeah, in the Musichetti IT timeline hand sanitizer would be a bit anachronistic! Crazy.

[cimorene]

Haha, that's really funny! So at the time when it first appeared, I must have been aware of a sense that it exploded in popularity suddenly, but my memory has pretty much erased that subsequently and now it's just the time when nearly everyone was carrying one.