-7

Who was able to teleport an item into the chest of his loan shark

enter image description here

I'm not sure why I was grilled so harshly when I included all the info I could remember that was relevant. How do I know he was a loan shark? I believe that's a rather specific detail I remember. Maybe I don't have half a million points on here, but don't assume I'm a noob. That was disrespectful.

8
  • 12
    You weren’t grilled and that wasn’t disrespectful. The user left a generic comment to give you some pointers. Then a comment with specific pointers to help jog your memory to see if there’s anything else you could add. It’s common practice and quite a good one in my opinion. If you could explain why you felt this was disrespectful we might be able to provide better feedback for you here though.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Aug 20, 2021 at 7:08
  • If I had more info, i.e. character names a simple Google search would have answered my question. I came here because I trust the community and respect everyone here. If I say I was half asleep, do you expect me to remember the running time of the show or movie? All the details I recalled brought out the correct answer, and how am I supposed to know if the character is male, female, trans, otherwise, or black, white, Hispanic, or mixed, how does any of that matter if I gave adequate information? Aug 20, 2021 at 11:48
  • 10
    @DavidWilkins How do you expect anyone to know if you've provided enough information until you've accepted or otherwise confirmed an answer? Those comments were posted before that happened.
    – Null Mod
    Aug 20, 2021 at 12:12
  • 3
    At the very least, you could've told us when "recently" was, and where you watched it (USA? UK? Mainland Europe? Japan? Argentine? Surinam? Nigeria?).
    – SQB
    Aug 20, 2021 at 16:01
  • 1
    FYI, I deleted all the those comments as they are no longer necessary.
    – Null Mod
    Aug 20, 2021 at 17:09
  • 1
    @SQB - Is there a lot of Surinamese science-fiction programming?
    – Valorum
    Aug 21, 2021 at 10:54
  • 1
    As someone who mostly post Story ID questions, I can assure you that there was nothing disrespectful in there. Sometimes, I was practically sure that I remembered everything I could. But after being prompted with some of these questions, I realised that I did forget to mention a few more details. Since you work in IT, you can compare it to this: sometimes, people approach me to say "I can't login, it's not working". Upon asking them for more details (which they hate), I suddenly realise there's just a 404 and the login page itself doesn't work at all, rather than the login system not working.
    – Clockwork
    Aug 24, 2021 at 9:08
  • "there was nothing disrespectful" => At least that wasn't the intended intent, is what I mean.
    – Clockwork
    Aug 24, 2021 at 9:11

2 Answers 2

16

You weren't grilled harshly, you were asked to provide some basic information we generally ask of all requests. If you don't believe me, go through that tag and look at the comments on the questions.

While you painted a very vivid scene that proved to be enough to identify it, we get a lot of questions looking to identify a book, film, and so on, that lack basic information.

Such as when the querent read or saw the work. Sometimes, it's only a vague reference such as "recently" or "when I was in high school". We don't know what counts as "recently" and we sure don't know when the querent was in high school.
Other oft missed information include the nature of the work (was it animated?), or where it was encountered (different countries have different TV shows and different books).

This happens so often, that we've compiled a list of these points and even specific ones for anime, western comics, video games, and even fan fiction.

These lists are also meant to jog your memory and to encourage to include even the most minute of insignificant-seeming details, such as the colour of the cover. Even questions that provide a lot of details already, often get a link to one of those lists to help and encourage the querent.


So you weren't grilled harshly, you were asked the same thing we ask of most requests for identification.

3

As a side note to SQB's answer, it's not unusual for the comment questions to be kind of leading questions to a suspected answer (or at least I'm very prone to that). Sometimes, I'll read a detail and think "Well, I know something with that detail, but I'm not sure about these other bits..." so I'll ask questions that hint at other details associated with the suspected answer. This is sometimes because I don't feel it's a strong enough match to make an answer, but I don't want to provide an "answer" in the comments (since those don't show up in site searches), sometimes because I don't actually remember the name of the work yet, and sometimes because I just don't have time to write something up.

But yeah, outside of that, it's details that weren't stated, or which are unclear, most of the time, or attempting to elicit further information. For example, the question of why you know he's a loan shark might make you think to add "I know he was a loan shark because he was collecting on a debt owed by the protagonist for his mother's hospital bills after she was hit by a car", which introduces two more plot points that might be relevant. It gets us past "just the facts" and into why people are doing things, which is a major part of the plot.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .