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Post by Dante on Oct 15, 2014 3:56:24 GMT -5
Shortly before the publication of "Who Could That Be at This Hour?", Lemony Snicket let slip the following detail about the future of the series in an interview: BW: I am a fan of Moxie Mallahan in this book because she is a reporter like me. Do you have a favorite character in the book, aside from yourself of course? LS: I like that you would assume [laughs] that my favorite character would be myself. It isn't. I think my favorite character is laced with a certain amount of regret and bitterness because out of all the people chronicled in the book there's one of them who is murdered. Not in the volume that is shortly to be published, but in one of the other volumes. I think of that character, and then I get upset about the fact that they're murdered. BW: So one of these people in this book, one is going to die in the future? LS: Well, all of us are going to die in the future. But one of them is murdered over the course of the four book series. The crime-a-book nature of ATWQ, along with the fact that the only character murdered yet in the series is Colonel Colophon, whom we never meet, permits us to deduce that the key crime of ?4 will be murder, and that the character who will be murdered is, as implied by the context of the interview, a character who appears in the first book. That's not necessarily 100% the correct interpretation... but it's the most common assumption, and makes for the best poll. In the poll above, I have listed every character who appears in the first book and who could possibly be murdered, excluding characters who do not strictly speaking appear, those being Mrs. Mallahan, Mr. Bellerophon, and Armstrong Feint, and excluding characters whose murder would cause a time paradox, those being Lemony Snicket, Kit Snicket, and Hector. To be honest, I'm pretty sure it won't be Gifford or Ghede either, but they fit the criteria, so they stay. So. This is your opportunity to lay your claim to the character who will be murdered in ?4. Please cast your vote, and explain your reasons in the thread below. You can only vote once, but in your post you can of course rate the chances of anyone you like. Once the victim is officially revealed, I will lock the poll, but that probably won't happen until next February at the earliest. The prize for getting it right will be a smug sense of self-satisfaction.
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Post by Isadora Is a Door on Oct 15, 2014 4:32:12 GMT -5
qwerty. i haven't read all of ?3 yet, so i won't particiapte any more of this thread till after
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Post by M David Steel on Oct 15, 2014 16:36:26 GMT -5
well, lemony said he didn't want to lead Moxie into danger but maybe he ends up doing just that
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Post by B. on Oct 15, 2014 17:05:51 GMT -5
none of the above, its armstrong feint obviously
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Post by Dante on Oct 16, 2014 3:53:12 GMT -5
Well, arguably that is an option. I'm just a little cautious about implementing it according to my interpretation of the killing criteria. The poll results are interesting; I wish whoever had voted for Ellington Feint would explain their reasoning! Intriguing choice.
As for my own pick - I think that the presently-leading option has become a much stronger contender, but in the spirit of diversity, I've voted for my earlier pick, who I still think stands a stronger chance after receiving more character development in ?3: Prosper Lost. Prosper Lost, you say? Why would anyone want to murder him? Well, that would be the mystery... After all, we probably know who the murderer is. Or do we?
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Post by s on Oct 30, 2014 16:33:32 GMT -5
"there's one of them who is murdered" -- i guess we have to believe it's the intended target who dies? and not the case of say, an inadvertently fired harpoon gun, or a misdirected one. hrm.
re: the case for ellington, perhaps a tortured (armstrong) hangfire, once ellington has decided that she cannot go along with his sinister plan any longer, realizes she knows too much and that there is no other option? that seems awfully cruel, but then, so would any murder have to be.
many of the others just don't seem like important and/or sympathetic enough characters to be the murder victim, although obvs there's a whole book for them to gain importance in
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Post by gliquey on Oct 31, 2014 4:59:07 GMT -5
although obvs there's a whole book for them to gain importance in But the crime has always been before the book begins, and Theodora and Snicket are sent to investigate it right at the start. They could gain importance throughout the book, the same way we didn't know about Cleo Knight before she was kidnapped, but if they've been murdered they're not going to appear in person. Then again, the reported crime before the start of the book hasn't always happened. The statue wasn't actually stolen in ?1. There just has to be a supposed case of murder for Theodora to investigate, and an actual murder at some point in the book. So on second thoughts, I suppose a character could gain importance in the book, and then be murdered. I know Lemony Snicket can't actually die (even if there were two L.S.', the books are written in first person and we have the "Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult" passage), but I think it'd be interesting if Theodora was sent to investigate his "death" at the start of the book, though.
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Post by Dante on Oct 31, 2014 7:43:21 GMT -5
I'm increasingly coming around to the theory that it likely will be poor Theodora - but that's not who I voted for. (It's more interesting if the poll results are diverse, after all.) Prior to ?3, and for a time during ?3, I had a different character in mind, someone I selected specifically as I believed there was the potential for them to be murdered but also, more importantly, that their murder should be mysterious, which is to say unexpected. That person is Prosper Lost. I should also mention that he becomes a slightly more developed and sympathetic character during ?3, which would also be expected if he were being set up for murder. But Prosper Lost is largely an irrelevant, submissive character, one to whom little attention is paid - and herein lies exactly why I thought it could be him: His death would be a genuine mystery. Why would anyone want to murder him at all? It would imply actual secrets to be revealed if it were a character like Prosper who died rather than someone obviously important like Theodora or Qwerty. Prosper's is also a very old family within Stain'd-by-the-Sea, after all - so he would be in the perfect position to be in possession of secrets about the town which Hangfire did not want others to learn.
With that said, though, I think we should probably expect the murder to be unexpected in other ways. After all, at this point in the series, we have our pattern: A crime occurs, Hangfire dunnit. In the traditional whodunnit form of the murder mystery, such a narrative is potentially lacklustre, as we already know the murderer and can make a pretty reasonable guess of his motives. So it may be that we should be prepared not just for an unexpected victim, but an unexpected culprit.
Edit: On a different note, re-examining Handler's quote in the first post, he implies - but not clearly nor certainly - that the murder victim is his favourite character.
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Post by gliquey on Oct 31, 2014 11:26:30 GMT -5
Edit: On a different note, re-examining Handler's quote in the first post, he implies - but not clearly nor certainly - that the murder victim is his favourite character. I think the phrasing of Snicket's answer was certainly a bit strange. I'm not sure about the context of the interview or whether Handler had carefully considered revealing what he did. Although if you take what he said literally, it means that the murder victim appears in ?1, I would reject this definition as that's just implied phrasing and maybe Handler wasn't expecting the question, or prepared to give that response. However, there's no character appearing only in later books that I would like to be murdered, so it might not matter either way. Pushing it to be a character who hasn't even appeared yet seems a bit too much, since it's Snicket's favourite character. I think that the problem with predicting events in fiction before they happen is that the writers can change what you want to happen by developments. You might originally like a couple in a TV show, but later want them to break up if the writers show that their relationship has negative consequences or that one of the partners is unhappy. Even with someone dying, there's still chance to find out more about them afterwards: learning that Prosper Lost was holding a secret is a good example. So I think the victim could be just about anyone - with the exception of Gifford and Ghede (and probably Sally Murphy). Handler knew there was going to be a character killed from the beginning and I'd expect at least a bit of character development (see: Theodora, Prosper and even Stew) in the first 3 books before they died. But ?4 could bring in new reasons for characters to be killed, and change opinions on whose death(s) would be most interesting. I think Handler could certainly make the deaths of Theodora, Qwerty, Prosper, Hangfire, Mr. Mallahan, Mimi and Harvey (I'd expect them to be both killed) or Ellington (resolves Beatrice-related issues) work, and I can think of reasons for killing any of those people. It's perhaps a bit of a stretch to kill Stew (does Hangfire really find him that annoying?), Moxie or Pip and Squeak, although there may be valid reasons for their deaths, because killing one of Snicket's close associates (Ellington being something harder to categorize) seems a bit too cruel to me. Yes. I wouldn't expect Snicket to kill anyone, in the same way the Baudelaires never pushed Olaf overboard, but that brings up the important issue of what will happen to Hangfire. He can't escape completely, because that's too inconclusive (barring a future series...). He can't simply go to jail, because that's not a permanent solution (Olaf escaped jail in 10 minutes). There have been suggestions of him being a character (presumably an antagonist) from ASOUE, and I like the idea, but it seems more like a radical plot twist for the sake of surprise than a rational plot development. So he's probably got to die. There's accidental death and there's murder. I think I prefer murder: it's just a question of who would murder Hangfire, or for that matter, which character(s) would murder anyone.
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Post by Dante on Nov 1, 2014 4:06:27 GMT -5
I think the phrasing of Snicket's answer was certainly a bit strange. I'm not sure about the context of the interview or whether Handler had carefully considered revealing what he did. Although if you take what he said literally, it means that the murder victim appears in ?1, I would reject this definition as that's just implied phrasing and maybe Handler wasn't expecting the question, or prepared to give that response. To be clear, I interpreted it as a ?1 character as - well, peripherally, it's dramatically satisfying that the character murdered be someone we've been familiar with for the whole series. But more specifically I'm relying on this bit: BW: I am a fan of Moxie Mallahan in this book because she is a reporter like me. Do you have a favorite character in the book, aside from yourself of course? LS: I like that you would assume [laughs] that my favorite character would be myself. It isn't. I think my favorite character is laced with a certain amount of regret and bitterness because out of all the people chronicled in the book there's one of them who is murdered. Not in the volume that is shortly to be published, but in one of the other volumes. I think of that character, and then I get upset about the fact that they're murdered. BW: So one of these people in this book, one is going to die in the future? LS: Well, all of us are going to die in the future. But one of them is murdered over the course of the four book series. Throughout the quote they're talking very specifically about ?1, and Handler picks up on that. The reporter's favourite character in ?1 is Moxie, she asks Snicket who his favourite character is in ?1, he replies that of all the people in ?1 there's one who is murdered. So while the interpretation of the quote is far from straightforward then I'm pretty sure I'm right.
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Post by Tryina Denouement on Nov 2, 2014 5:57:53 GMT -5
I believe that it's Theodora, due to the fact that I think S stands for Sunny.
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Post by Dante on Nov 3, 2014 3:33:20 GMT -5
I won't switch my vote, but I'm suddenly giving a lot more thought to Sally Murphy as a potential murder victim. Handler is keeping her in mind by making sure she has been mentioned in three of the four books so far (yes, I'm including File Under, though I'm pretty sure she wasn't mentioned in ?2), she's been involved with several of Hangfire's plans, and, perhaps most importantly: Hangfire has already tried to murder her. I just don't know if Snicket would feel all that sad about it, though.
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Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Nov 11, 2014 6:53:23 GMT -5
Latest LSL Q&A entry:
Hm... doesn't really sound like she meets a grisly end.
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Post by Dante on Nov 11, 2014 10:53:01 GMT -5
I agree, actually. Handler didn't have to answer that question at all, but not only did he, he gave a pretty positive reflection on departing from Theodora, as well as an implication that she's still around! He could just have been disguising his intentions, but then this answer would start to look a bit like a flat-out lie, and like I said, he didn't have to answer it. Hmm.
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Post by gliquey on Nov 11, 2014 13:07:29 GMT -5
I agree, actually. Handler didn't have to answer that question at all, but not only did he, he gave a pretty positive reflection on departing from Theodora, as well as an implication that she's still around! He could just have been disguising his intentions, but then this answer would start to look a bit like a flat-out lie, and like I said, he didn't have to answer it. Hmm. I wouldn't describe it as a "flat-out lie", but if S. does die, it seems very insensitive of Lemony to say that. I can imagine him being slightly indifferent if Theodora was killed, but even the Baudelaires stood quietly by Olaf's grave. I certainly doubt Handler would write that, though, if he knew Theodora ended up dying during the course of the books, so this does massively reduce the possibility that Theodora is the murder victim. I didn't think Theodora was likely to have been Snicket's favourite character anyway and that would certainly conflict with "My favorite part was recalling I no longer have a chaperone". But the most obvious hint is "look her up" - I think that means she is still around.
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