Artistic License

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This trope is occasionally lampshaded in the scripts. A line in the script for "Some assembly required" written by Ty King describing a medical drawing reads, "it's of a woman's body, with muscles, joints, all kinds of equations and science type stuff (English major much?) scribbled all over it". Joss Whedon's script for "Graduation day, part one" has the stage directions "swabbing blood off the tip and putting it on a slide. That sounds real sciencey! Did I mention I was an English major?"

Invoked in-universe by Elizabeth in The New Retcons to try to explain why she and her husband (both light haired) produced a dark haired baby. Unfortunately for her, Anthony paid attention in biology, and that coupled with the baby's darker skin tone tipped him off that the baby's not his. Doctor Who has many, many, many examples shown over the years. Some of these can be handwaved in one of three ways: 1) The TARDIS doesn't give a literal translation of the Doctor's biobabble, it instead renders something the companions can understand, even if it's wrong. 2) The alien physiology/technology in question works differently from our understanding. 3) The Doctor makes it up 'cause it sounds cool. Artistic license often provokes controversy by offending those who resent the reinterpretation of cherished beliefs or previous works. Artists often respond to these criticisms by pointing out that their work was not intended to be a verbatim portrayal of something previous and should be judged only on artistic merit. Artistic license is a generally accepted practice, particularly when the result is widely acclaimed. William Shakespeare's historical plays, for example, are gross distortions of historical fact but are nevertheless lauded as outstanding literary works. When Tetsuo from Yuureitou is unable to use testosterone for several weeks, his voice starts reverting to a more feminine pitch. In real life going off testosterone doesn't do that to trans men. It might affect other parts of your body, however, your voice changes are permanent.In The Darker Knight Batman's Batarang hits "Too-Face" in non-vital organs... like his liver and intestines. Consummation Counterfeit: A woman pretends she's just lost her virginity by faking a bloodstain on the bed sheets, even though in real life, most women don't bleed upon losing their virginity, and women bleed down there once a month regardless of sexual status. May not be Artistic License on the author's part, depending on where and when the work is set. It was once common to use bloodstained sheets as a sign a woman had lost her virginity, so this was a thing that real women actually did: despite how silly it is. Balloon Belly: In real life, gaining weight because of food happens due to the body storing fat from it, which cannot happen immediately after eating. If someone eats so much that their actual stomach visibly expands them, this would probably make them throw up. Critical voices are sometimes raised when artistic license is applied to cinematic and other depictions of real historical events. While slight manipulation for dramatic effect of chronology and character traits are generally accepted, some critics feel that depictions that present a significantly altered reality are irresponsible, particularly because many viewers and readers do not know the actual events and may thus take the dramatized depiction to be true to reality. Examples of films and television series criticized for excessive use of dramatic license include Disney's Pocahontas, Oliver Stone's Alexander, the HBO series Rome and Showtime's The Tudors.

Scientists use a paralyzing agent to make spiders fall out of a tree in the film. Despite falling more than a hundred feet, the spiders survive. In the real world, that fall would have killed each and every spider; their bodies simply could not handle that much force.The plot hinges on creating a clone from blood samples to harvest the completely separate lifeform hiding out in the original Ripley's chest. Red blood cells don't even contain DNA (though, white blood cells do contain DNA, so that might explain it). The premise of the movie (and the book). If the amber-preserved blood was any more than 1 million years old, the DNA would have been irrecoverably decomposed, no matter what it was preserved in. Cloning extinct species from before 1 million years ago is impossible. Also, if the DNA were available, we have absolutely no idea how to turn that DNA into a viable dinosaur egg in the same way just having a cake recipe can't conjure a cake into existence. You'd need complete information about how the oviducts of that particular species operated even to get started, and we don't even have any fossils of dinosaur oviducts, let alone a clue as to their gestational duration, average internal temperature, etc, as well as the fact no compatible germ cells could possibly exist for animals extinct for over 65 million years. Arachnids breathe through their skin, and there simply isn't enough oxygen in the modern world's atmosphere for them to get any bigger.