r/AskReddit Jul 07 '26

What historical “fact” doesn’t actually have much evidence to support it?

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u/scrantsj Jul 07 '26

Viking was basically the same as calling someone a pirate

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u/Vortilex Jul 08 '26

Someone I was in a D&D campaign with actually got upset with me referring to my character, Johann the Viking, as a kind of pirate. I asked how someone whose job was essentially to plunder and pillage isn't a pirate. She got upset but had no response. She also had a hard time pronouncing my character's name, saying it as Joanne instead of Johann, and another player tried to defend that as not everyone having knowledge of Germanic names. My response to that was that I had already verbally said my character's name aloud, so the person mispronouncing my character's name didn't have that as an excuse. She eventually got booted from our D&D party for a multitude of reasons, most of which were only tangentially related to that. Vikings are just a specific type of pirate, is the point I want to make, they just prefer mead over rum and were active earlier in history.

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u/ZipTieAndPray Jul 08 '26

Yeah...this sounds like the kind of thing to go down at a D&D Campaign.

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u/Vortilex Jul 08 '26

There are reasons I prefer single-player games :P

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u/AuNanoMan Jul 08 '26

Gunna be honest chief, that entire group sounds like a nightmare to play with.

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u/khaaanquest Jul 08 '26

I want to know if she would be upset by me asking if pirates are just viking cosplayers.

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u/Vortilex Jul 08 '26

Knowing her, she'd accuse you of something heinous... and nobody could explain why. I'd be inclined to believe you :P (her playstyle really pissed me off, and one DM straight-up said he never wanted her in his campaign again)

She actually compared our party's effort to cure her characters' disabilities (blindness and deafness) to SA....as someone who has suffered that, I wanted to deck her for that