Random: World-Famous Author Included Zelda: BOTW Ingredients In His New Book By Mistake

I love how he owned it. Ngl I do kinda wanna buy this book now. Its been a while since I read one and it might be fun reading a book with unintended botw easter eggs.

Oh my god, that's amazing, haha. And i love how he handles it!

Dude earns huge kudos for owning it like this. Really cool.

Hahahahhahaha this made my day! So funny.

😂 Excellent. Just excellent.

I love how he forgot to uncapitalize the words "Octorok" and "Hylian" lol. They look so out of place.

I love his response to it and I hope he does put Zelda in the thank yous in the next edition.

If Dana is right about the process by which those words ended up on the book, that is pretty effing dumb, honestly. How can you get any credibility as a serious writer if you just Google things mindlessly like that?

I kinda want to believe that wasn't the case tho..

Good thing he was writing a fantasy book.😄
EDIT: scratch that, he writes historical fiction. Hyrule monsters are canon in our world now - in case your 2020 didn't feel complete yet.

Damn I just saw this on Reddit lol

He responded in the best way possible. Still would be awesome to see him thank Zelda in the next version of the book

uhm, the book is not a fantasy novel but a historical drama set in the real world

edit:
also i did the google search and this is what i got: ingredients red dye clothes

Red dye ingredients
Apple.
Spicy pepper.
Hylian shroom.
Sunshroom.
Ruby.
Fire keese wing.
Red lizalfos tail.

like its obvious half of these things dont excist

@RazumikhinPG My thoughts exactly. Everyone acting like it's just a little cute mistake because it's BOTW, but to me it shows a total lack of professionalism when you just Google something and copy it into your book without doing any research on what your search revealed. But in this age, I'm not sure there's anything really strange about what he did as it seems to be the norm, when almost every tech/game site news, tech/game reviews and even movie reviews are basically just copies of what some other person or site said but when you check actual User reviews, it's totally different. It kinda annoys me when such people are referred to as journalists, so you can probably imagine how I feel about this person here being called an author.

@RazumikhinPG it's the norm though, writers aren't experts at everything they write so they need to google things for reference.

I remember listening to a podcast with Jim Lee, one of DC's major name comic book artists and he talked about before google/the internet artists would have to constantly add to their reference book they make which basically meant having to cut up magazines for things they may never even draw. So they see a picture of the inside of a commercial planes seating area, a logging factory or any number of random things in a magazine and cut it out on the off chance that one day years later he might have to draw it as opposed to now which is just spending seconds on googles images.

@Alztru I think everybody is aware of that. Including the author. I am sure he is really annoyed by his mistake and knows what it says about him as a professional. But there is nothing he can do about it now, so it's better to turn it into as much entertainment to others as possible and try to not take yourself too serious. But it is pretty clear that something like this will never happen to him again, and that all the other writers are going trough their draft-drawer right at this moment to double check their own stuff.

He's a transphobic POS btw.

@LillianC14 What means POS? Google did not help me.

@Yanina it means piece of poop but as there's swear filters on imagine another word for poop which starts with s.

I appreciate how he's owned it but at the same time it has made me kinda angry how an author can just copy/paste a google search and not care about the content, whereas I would have checked every ingredient in that list to make sure what it was. Which is why I'm not an author I suppose

@LillianC14 That literally could not be less relevant.

@LillianC14 Sorry but that is just not correct. Get past the headlines sometimes, and dive into the actual meat of the content you "consume".

Here's a good quote to start you off that you won't find in a headline:
“We are being told consistently by everybody that we are all allowed to self-identify, right? No matter who you are . . . Why is that any different for me than anybody else? I do not see myself as a subset of men. I don’t call myself a gay man. I don’t call myself a white man. If I was to call myself a cis man, I am defining myself in opposition to transgender people. I think the word is quite transphobic. If you tell me what you want me to call you, I will call you that. But by the same token, I expect to be called what I want to be called.” - John Boyne. (Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/john-boyne-i-am-not-a-provocateur-i-don-t-seek-to-hurt-people-1.4309925)

The world ain't black and white my friend. There are nuances of everything, and we, as human beings, are not either/or on most things.

As for something on-topic: That is quite humorous and I think that is awfully funny.

I'd probably do the same myself were I to write a book, but intentionally, because I enjoy references like that.

@TantXL it's relevant in that this is the guy who wrote a book about the Holocaust and refused to read a critique by the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, then wrote a book about trans people and went on a media crusade against critique by trans people.

So he has form as being arrogant and entitled and unable to take criticism from the very people he pretends to care about when he writes on serious subjects, but is happy to back down and mea culpa over a video game recipe.

Cheap marketing tactics.

That seems like a suspiciously dumb mistake to make.
If I wrote a book I'd do more than just take the first google result at face value.
I mean it's bad when even wikipedia would have been more credible.
Sheez!

@Damo I'm not surprised you say that. You do strike me as the sort of person who doesn't check their sources lol

"I don't know Italian, let me check this book about some language, it should teach me Italian." book about Spanish

@jump I never said Googling things is the issue. I use Google all the time. But when you do it mindlessly, aka without using your brains, and take the first result as FACT, that's pretty effing dumb.
Not to mention he wasn't surprised (at all) about words such as Hylian, Octorok, Keese and Lizalfos. I would quickly do a Google search on each of those words just to know I'm using them correctly (which would then lead me to find that they are LOZ words).

But yeah, as other people have mentioned, we live in an age where too many people have access to search tools but don't know how to use them, and create facts in fallacious manners.

My guess is he did a quick google search, stuck that in there as a placeholder, then forgot to ever follow up.

@Damo maybe one day you'll learn to check the sources of sources

This guy sounds like a hack

@jump Ah! Thank you for enlighten me. Sounds like something I should have came across before in the internet. Strange that I didn't.

@TantXL I mean hes being given attention and promotion as if he deserves it so, it definitely is relevant

As funny as this may be, I have a feeling Nintendo's lawyers are going to step in pretty soon and try to have publication and production of the book stopped until the passage in question has been fixed.

@AstroTheGamosian That means he made Nintendo actually do something this month.

John Boyne is an awful excuse for a human being. He gets litigious for any and all criticism and makes a point to fight with entire communities that he misrepresents in writing and then profits from.
I was more than fecking happy to send a few emails to Nintendo's legal team about it.

@Yanina word

@superguy123 The real red dye used to be made from an insect called cochineal. It sounds a bit fantastical. But I think apples should have given him the clue.

@Damo no need for that much fact-check to know those things are Zelda items.

Free publicity.

Those two requireds in such close proximity though.

@RazumikhinPG Exactly. Proves how schlocky formula writing like this really is. Also proves how low the standard is for most readers. Every book can’t be a classic, I guess.

People don't have the same background knowledge and experiences. Something might be very obvious for someone, but not obvious at all for someone else. Like these names "clearly being from Zelda", from the point of view of Zelda players. Also, I can only imagine writing a book a year is quite a lot of work. So I do think this is funny, and not pathetic as some people here seem to say. I wonder if the same people have been as productive during these 20 years as he has...

Hilarious. Cool that he owned it.

Is that all you’ve done Damo?? Slacker!! (Please read that with a sarcastic tone)

@Damo Is there a list of your physically published works anywhere? I'd love to pick up or check out a copy.

@TDCinFL The writing looks like complete rubbish. I bet that book is a slog to get through. Who wants to read a whole paragraph of made-up ingredients for red dye? Clearly not even John Boyne. Nor his editor.

@alpacatears Good. Because you can be sure he's suing his editor right now.

I'd never heard of him, but he's now world famous for being a hack that doesn't investigate his sources and just copy pastes from Google.

I'm gonna pad out the Navy SEAL copypasta into a 400 page techno thriller now.

This is funny, but he is trash