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Post by prestorjohn on Mar 22, 2016 22:06:46 GMT -5
I decided to reread the ATWQ series from 1st to 4th, now that we have it in its entirety. My general and specific thoughts appear below. I'm looking for some feedback for your general thoughts and comments.
-It is very, very difficult to believe, given what we know about Hangfire and the kind of man he is, that he would abandon his own daughter in Killdeer Fields to venture off to Stain'd by the Sea to grow/breed/cultivate Bombinating Beasts (?1). It's unnecessary, he could have just brought her with him if he intended to involve her in his dangerous schemes anyway, and What Hangfire would have accomplished by 'kidnapping' Armstrong Feint is unclear too. If it was to test if Ellington would do the things he needed her to, he should have revealed himself to her eventually; but why bother forcing her, wouldn't she just help him as his daughter? If it was merely to enjoy duping his own daughter, this seems out of character for Hangfire. The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that he's ashamed of himself, of his daughter seeing him murder people, burn buildings, etcetera and/or wants to return to his much simpler life with Ellington once he's got his revenge against the town.
Yet Hangfire...
-Talks at length about the natural world in Ellington's presence in a way which would seem eerily familiar to an Ellington who does not know Hangfire's identity (?4).
-Recognizes the tune Snicket's humming that he, Snicket, heard Ellington humming, and calls out to her, 'Ellington?' (?2) Are we to imagine that Ellington was so comfortable in Hangfire's presence, in the presence of the man who kidnapped her father, that she was humming pleasantly?
-Seems to hole up wherever Ellington is at the time: they're at the mansion together (?1), in the abandoned store where he's growing Bombinating Beasts (?2), at the Wade Academy (?3), and then on the train, apparently even in the same compartment, since Snicket never hears Hangfire come in (?4).
-Keeps Ellington at a safe distance from the action. Yes, she has parts to play, but it's watching with binoculars (?1), ringing a bell (?3), not actually stealing honeydew melons or burning buildings down (?3).
And on another note, how does Ellington know about the secret second floor of the Black Cat Coffee shop? Members of the Inhumane Society get their mail there! We can't imagine that this location is available to anyone who lives in Stain'd by the Sea, or that the IS broadcasts its existence.
-How does Ellington know about the fully grown or almost fully grown Bombinating Beast in the fire well? She gives some kind of lame excuse like 'I would always hear that creature when I got close to finding my father,' whatever that means... It's also entirely possible that the reason the beast did not attack them was because Hangfire, using the statue, held it at bay, not because 'It's not old enough' (which implies a knowledge that someone is growing it anyway, which Ellington shouldn't have!) (?3).
I have little choice but to conclude from these thoughts the Ellington was both aware of Hangfire's identity from the very beginning and was working with him from the very beginning. Yet...
-Why did she show Snicket that Armstrong Feint was CC'd on an IS letter? What was the point of her disguising herself as Cleo Knight in the first place (unless to provide a cover story for the 'she ran away to the circus' line I guess, but then why be in costume when Snicket arrives at the hideout (?2)?
-Why tell Snicket such intimate details about Armstrong (he likes to drink wine before bed, he loves animals, the phonograph is his) such that he can identify Hangfire's real identity?
Those are just my thoughts, what do you guys think?
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Post by Dante on Mar 23, 2016 4:06:58 GMT -5
I think that there's a high likelihood that some of your problems will never be satisfactorily answered and that they exist as a side-effect of creating an interesting mystery. Nevertheless, I'll try and provide some possible answers to your ideas. I don't necessarily claim that they're provided for within or intended by the text, but to be honest, we've had to fix far worse with ASoUE, so I don't think it's worth complaining about rampant speculation here. -It is very, very difficult to believe, given what we know about Hangfire and the kind of man he is, that he would abandon his own daughter in Killdeer Fields to venture off to Stain'd by the Sea to grow/breed/cultivate Bombinating Beasts (?1). It's unnecessary, he could have just brought her with him if he intended to involve her in his dangerous schemes anyway, and What Hangfire would have accomplished by 'kidnapping' Armstrong Feint is unclear too. If it was to test if Ellington would do the things he needed her to, he should have revealed himself to her eventually; but why bother forcing her, wouldn't she just help him as his daughter? If it was merely to enjoy duping his own daughter, this seems out of character for Hangfire. The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that he's ashamed of himself, of his daughter seeing him murder people, burn buildings, etcetera and/or wants to return to his much simpler life with Ellington once he's got his revenge against the town. Some of the points I'll make here will relate to some of the points you raise below, but it's relevant to bring them up in the same place. I think that some of the assumptions you've made are not necessarily correct or perfect, but I'll come to those later. Everything we know about the initial set-up of Armstrong Feint's departure from home - and you're right, we can't know if any of it's true, we can only take Ellington's word for it, but for the same reason we can't know if any of it's false - suggests that Armstrong never intended Ellington to follow him to Stain'd-by-the-Sea, and that he only lured her there as a last resort; furthermore, once in Stain'd-by-the-Sea, he did everything he could to keep her well out of the way. Ellington relates in ?1 that, when her father vanished, she got a phone call from Hangfire pretty much immediately telling her that she'd never see her father again. I think we can take at face value that this indicates that Hangfire never expected to see her again, didn't intend her to pursue him, and wanted her to just get on with her life without him. You can call that a misjudgement on his part if you like, but it didn't provide her with any information that would help her with tracking down her father - he was just gone, like that, no clues except that some really dangerous guy called Hangfire was involved. Now, we don't have any information to suggest that Ellington was a particularly strong or research-minded girl before. She didn't read; her father still read her bedtime stories. They lived alone together and he did most of the spadework. I think Hangfire made the assumption that, if you tell a child like that that she'll never see her father again, it would be out of character for her to rise to the challenge. But rise to the challenge is what she did. According to Ellington, she then spent months (inferred from Moxie's telegram, by the way) on her father's trail, talking to everyone he'd ever worked with, journeying around, interviewing people. She did not just sit at home and get on with her life; she went out into the world on her own and potentially got herself into danger. And what was the result? Her father, in person, phoned her up and told her to come to Stain'd-by-the-Sea, and that he'd be set free if she gave Hangfire the Bombinating Beast. But does he give her any plan or means to steal the statue? No; instead, Hangfire sets up a completely different and more thorough plan to obtain the statue that doesn't involve Ellington at all. Conclusion: He wanted Ellington somewhere he could keep an eye on her but wouldn't actually have to involve himself with her. The latter point is proven by the fact that, despite Ellington having the Bombinating Beast, Hangfire spends the rest of the series avoiding her. She's the one following him around. So, yes, I think that your theory that Armstrong Feint was ashamed of what he was going to do is probably the correct one, that he knew that involving Ellington would only endanger her, and that he never intended her to have any part in what was going on. Abandoning his daughter out of the blue might seem a bit out-of-character for a caring man like him, but ?4 presents to me pretty clearly a picture of a man who is not of entirely sound mind, which might also be why he misjudged her so badliy. I think probably that ship had sailed by that point. The clue of the phonogram was a piece of carelessness which would probably always have suggested to her that there was a connection between her father and Hangfire, and if he wanted that statue, he would probably have had to reveal his true identity to her eventually. I think he just put it off as long as possible, but probably regarded the identification as inevitable by the time of ?4. The very fact that he had ended up in the same room as Ellington by that point in the series was already far tighter a spot than he'd ever been in before. That cry of "Ellington?" was such a giveaway that I doubt it was entirely voluntary. He associated that tune with Ellington and nobody else, and was so surprised at having apparently been tracked right to his lair by her that he couldn't help himself. It wasn't a rationally thought-out exclamation. Also, let's bear in mind that Snicket felt comfortable enough to hum this tune in the heart of Hangfire's lair, too; if one person felt this way, why not another? The fact of somebody choosing to hum this tune in the centre of such a dangerous place is a canonical one, so whether or not it made sense for it to happen is something of a moot point. Ellington was never in the Sallis mansion, they were never in the abandoned store at the same time, they never set eyes on each other in Wade Academy, and he probably wasn't about to let his daughter get thrown into prison for arson and other assorted crimes. As you point out below: Hangfire keeps Ellington at arm's length wherever possible. He wants to know where she is and what she's doing but he doesn't want her doing anything dangerous, and he certainly doesn't want her coming into contact with him. Any reasonably curious individual is likely to find out about the attic post office; indeed, I would dispute the idea that it is "secret." It's really, really easy to find - and more to the point, we don't know that it's just members of the Inhumane Society who get their post there; certainly the books never indicate as such. The postal service know about the place, of course, and since it's openly accessible to anyone who just walks into Black Cat Coffee, and accessing it isn't exactly a subtle process, I'm inclined to think that it's simply an ordinary postal collection point that's been co-opted by people who don't want their deliveries to be scrutinised too closely. And besides... Ellington does like her coffee. If she already liked coffee before Armstrong Feint left home, it was inevitable that she'd make her way to the Black Cat; if it wasn't a taste she'd acquired yet, it was still one of the few places in Stain'd-by-the-Sea where you could get free food and drink unobserved. I agree that there are questions to be raised about how Ellington knew so much about the creatures, but please bear in mind that Hangfire didn't have the statue at the time. Ellington lied; she never let it out of her bag. If Hangfire had grabbed the statue, he wouldn't simply have returned it to Ellington sometime before her arrest in ?3 or after her release in ?4. It's a climactic moment in ?4 when Hangfire finally gets his hands on the statue, and it's clear from his behaviour that this was his first time in possession of it. As to the issue of Ellington's knowledge of the creatures' life cycle... Well, it's implied that Hangfire may have initially picked up his information about the creatures from a copy of Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea, and I'd wager that there's a pretty strong chance he first read that at home as Armstrong Feint; Ellington's not a big reader, but she could have picked up some information about the creatures then. Alternatively, she could have been working on observation and educated guesses, which also strikes me as a possibility. Disagreeing with your premises, that Ellington both knew and was working with Hangfire from the very beginning - a theory which raises many more problems than it answers and requires us to simply disregard as a lie a great deal of what we learn from her over the course of the series - then these details are easy to explain away. I'll add, though, that I think there's a strong likelihood that she suspected Hangfire's true identity but was in complete denial about it.
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Post by lorelai on Mar 24, 2016 20:05:55 GMT -5
I agree with Dante's answers/speculations/assumptions/insert-word-of-choice. Ellington strikes me as being very big picture oriented--saying she's looking for her father in ?1 instead of the statue that will lead her to seeing her father--and due to her sheltered upbringing is a tad self-centered in a very natural way. I'm not saying she's spoiled, but a lot of her answers to things like the little bombinating beast are yes, logical guesses, but given dismissively (or lamely) because compared to her goal of finding Armstrong, she has no desire to dig deeper into these odd mysteries that keep cropping up around her, with the exception of Lemony. This is also why you have moments like her insisting her father would never do anything terrible in ?2, ignoring that Lemony says Hangfire is forcing brilliant people to do terrible things--she ignores the entire statement because it doesn't fit with her view of her father as a gentle person, which can also be part of a very forced denial. Once she realizes pretending to be Cleo isn't helping anyone, and I do think we can take her reasons and Moxie's summary of them at face value, that's the end of that.
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Post by prestorjohn on Mar 27, 2016 0:03:33 GMT -5
Dante, thank you for your thoughtful feedback, and I do think that you raised some interesting points I hadn't considered. However, I'd like to respond to some of your points and see what you think.
-Whether she's aware of Hangfire's identity or not, I would argue that she's in regular, repeated contact with him from the very beginning of the series.
-First, as to the Black Cat Coffee. True, it does seem that other people get their mail there, and thus the location must be known to a number of Stain'd's citizens. However, in ?1 after recovering the Bombinating Beast beast at the Black Cat Coffee where Ellington had mailed it, Snicket then returned a brief period of time later to have coffee with Ellington. As he enters he remarks, 'Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that most of the mail was now gone from the big room at the top of the stairs. I should have paid attention.' (221). To me, this implies that Ellingtonby either (1 removed the mail herself to keep Snicket from seeing it, which is rather unlikely, or (2 she informed Hangfire that the statue has been stolen from the Black Cat Coffee, at which he removed the mail. I would still argue the Ellington let something slip by telling Snicket about the location.
-Second,in ?2 Ellington mentioned leaving a message for Hangfire, but claims he never responded. How did she know where to contact him? Where did she contact him? At Ink Inc, at the Wade Academy? It can't be a pay phone, it has to be somewhere she could leave a message or someone would answer and write one down. Either way, she knows much more than she's letting on. Same goes for the Beast she shows Snicket out one night. What would be the point of showing him anyway? To me, she's just trying to scare him off at Hangfire's command. Look what you have to deal with if you stay in town, why don't you just leave now? When Snicket doesn't respond, Hangfire escalates the threat by having Stew beat him up, but not kill him.
-Third, as to them never being in the abandoned aquarium together. I'm going off of the image in ?2, in which a male figure which is clearly intended to be Hangfire on page 141 is peering out at Snicket disguised as Ellington disguised as Cleo. Since Ellington was just in the hideout, they were in the hideout together. To me, this makes her 'I just have a feeling my father's been here' statement in that same chapter even more suspicious. Was Hangfire locked up in that room the whole time where she couldn't see him?
-Fourth, as to Hangfire never getting the Bombinating Beast until the very end of the series. Again, I'm going off of an image here, but in ?1 on page 223 as Ellington runs off with the statue a dark figure can be seen among the trees, clearly intended to be Hangfire. He had no use for the statue until the Beast had grown big enough, on his own blood as you pointed out, to attack the town. He trusts Ellington implicitly as his daughter, so he leaves it in her possession.
I would argue that Ellington was waiting in the cabin so as to provide backup for Hangfire posing as a butler in the Sallis mansion. Once Snicket and Theodora started down the hawser, the only way out would have been dropping from the hawser,and Hangfire knew that. So he positioned Ellington in the exact location where she would be able to pick off whoever was brave enough to let go, and have a second chance at the Statue. And indeed she got it. I will concede that she may not have known Hangfire was her father at that point. But I find her story that she'd waited there for days trying to get an opportunity to break into Moxie's lighthouse rather ridiculous.
-Fifth, a scene which I'm still trying to wrap my head around inclines me towards the Ellington knows Hangfire is Armstrong Feint Theory, but if not that, then at the very least that they're cooperating willingly. On the train in ?4, over coffee Ellington tells Snicket she feels like this is their last time together. A moment later, Hangfire enters and shoots a poison dart into her neck. She's supposed to be dead, but she's just faking it. What exactly was supposed to happen after that? By that I mean, what was the point of the whole charade? This is how Hangfire intended to get Ellington safely off scene. Perhaps after ravaging the town with the beasts he would then vanish himself and Armstrong Feint would reappear, who knows, but at the very least, this weighs in the direction of my theory that Ellington is a willing accomplice.
-And finally, sixth, something I hadn't pointed out before that's a call back to ASOUE. In ?3 as Snicket and Theodora enter the Department of Education, Hangfire comes out in disguise and asks them if they have a light. He asks both of them in fact, and then asks Snicket why he isn't in school. What is he getting at? He's trying to find out if they have matches on them, as indeed they do, because they're VFD members who are required to carry them. Later at the Wade Academy Ellington contrives a situation where Lemony has to take off his socks, revealing his tattoo. By the end of ?3, Stew states openly that Hangfire hates VFD members. Snicket wonders how he knew this. The logical answer is that Ellington told him.
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Post by Dante on Mar 28, 2016 5:04:15 GMT -5
-Whether she's aware of Hangfire's identity or not, I would argue that she's in regular, repeated contact with him from the very beginning of the series. I'd dispute regular and repeated. Very occasional and contextual, maybe. But we'll get to that. I'll admit that it's a little unclear what Snicnket's getting at when he points out that the post had vanished from the attic, but here's the thing: Ellington fully expected the Bombinating Beast, in the parcel she posted it in, to be up there in that attic. If she had tipped someone in the Inhumane Society off to go and collect all their mail, she wouldn't have had to visit the attic herself later with the intention of collecting the Bombinating Beast package. She'd have just told Hangfire or whoever that the Bombinating Beast was also there and that they should pick it up, and she'd never have been back there. And if her contact told her that the Bombinating Beast had already been taken by someone else by the time they got there to collect the mail, Ellington still wouldn't have had any reason to go back. Therefore, logically, she didn't tip off the Inhumane Society. More likely, it's an indicator that members of the Inhumane Society are watching Black Cat Coffee, and once they figured out that Snicket had wised to the attic delivery point, they started making more frequent collections of their own mail there, in case he picked up something important. We know that Armstrong Feint (or rather, Hangfire pretending not to be Armstrong Feint pretending to be Armstrnog Feint) told Ellington to go to Stain'd-by-the-Sea and get the Bombinating Beast. It's reasonable to assume that some kind of exchange point or place to leave a message was arranged then and there, or else how would either side contact each other if Ellington succeeded? So I don't think this counts as knowing much more than she let on; under any interpretation, they'd have to have arranged some means of contacting each other... a one-way means. If Ellington and Hangfire were working closely together, he would have no reason not to take the Bombinating Beast right off her the moment it was safe to do so; after all, what if it was stolen from her again, what if she lost it? And that did indeed happen for a period in ?2; Snicket takes possession of the Bombinating Beast for a time after the aquarium incident, and he could have done anything with it that he liked. The only explanation for Hangfire not retrieving the Bombinating Beast immediately is that he had no way of dealing with Ellington or answering her request for him to free her father. Two reasons. One is because it's genuinely important and part of the mystery. If you have a friend who's investigating a mysterious criminal conspiracy in town, you definitely want him to know that his enemies have a mysterious monster hidden in a pond - and if he's not the sort of person who's going to take a statement like that seriously, you have to show him. But the other reason is that, in this case, you're probably part-right. By the time Ellington gets to Wade Academy, things have changed. She is working with the Inhumane Society, if in a peripheral capacity, as she sees it as her best chance of getting to Hangfire. She also personally likes Snicket. Scaring him off would actually be a natural thing for her to try to do, as that both protects him and gets him out of the way. It was worth a try. I'm afraid you've misread this one. Firstly, a slight correction, this image is actually on page 161. Secondly: That's Nurse Dander on the top floor, Snicket himself peering out of the door on the middle storey, and Ellington disguised as Snicket leaving at the bottom. Hangfire's nowhere on the scene. The canonicity of the various hidden Hangfires throughout the illustrations in ATWQ is debateable. With that said, I don't think it defeats any interpretations if Hangfire was simply hiding nearby and watching. Of course he was hiding nearby and watching. He needed to know what was going to happen to his daughter and what was going to happen to the statue. As I discussed earlier, he could totally have walked over and gotten it right then, and whoever he is and whatever his daughter knows, if the two were working together he had no motive not to; the statue would be far safer with him than it would be with Ellington, and indeed Ellington would be far safer with him than she would be on her own. Hangfire had to have a motive to keep Ellington at arm's length from himself and his organisation. Notably, also, Ellington's plan in ?2 makes absoliutely no sense if she's best buddies with Hangfire and can go and say hi to him whenever she wants. Her entire role in the plot of ?2 depends on her tricking a member of the Inhumane Society in order to get close to Hangfire, and we actually hear this played out in scenes where neither she nor said I.S. member know that anyone else is listening. I think there's a chance that Ellington had been directed to Handkerchief Heights for this very reason, actually, but if this had been an essential part of the plan and she was in on it, the process of then getting the Bombinating Beast to him would have been very different. Let's bear in mind that Hangfire was posing as the Sallis family butler and he's the one who called the police in. If he was working with Ellington, he could simply have gone along with the Mitchums to Handkerchief Heights and retrieved his "property" then and there. Why didn't he? The plot of ?1 could have ended in Chapter Seven if only Hangfire had been willing to meet Ellington face-to-face. ?4 is a different matter; I agree that Hangfire and Ellington had arranged this scene in advance - but only very shortly in advance. Hangfire didn't have any choice by this time except to co-operate with Ellington; they were both aboard a train that was going straight to the city with no further stops, and she was in a prison car and likely headed straight to jail, with the Bombinating Beast. If Hangfire hadn't intervened in person, both his daughter and the statue would be gone. So yes, I actually agree with you, at this point Ellington is indeed a willing accomplice - but it doesn't mean that she knows Hangfire's true identity. It just means that both of them are at the end of the road, no alternatives left. I'm not sure I follow your point about the matches. Hangfire was either accounting for his presence on the scene with an innocent question, or checking to see if Snicket and Theodora recognise his face after having previously met him in the guise of the Sallis butler. I'm not convinced that V.F.D. members are obliged to carry about boxes of matches, either, at this point or any other in their history, and if they did have matches, it would hardly prove their affiliation with the organisation - which Hangfire knows about anyway, as he's the one who arranged to bring a volunteer investigator to town and met them in that capacity in the first book! Also, isn't the more logical answer that Hangfire told Stew about V.F.D. and his feelings towards volunteers? Or even Sharon Haines? Somebody confirmed to be directly working with Hangfire, for instance. Here's a point that you didn't mention, though: When Snicket does first reveal his tattoo, Ellington knows immediately what it means. How does she know? For that matter, how does Hangfire know about V.F.D.? You can make up any answer you like, such as being filled in by Sharon Haines or Stew Mitchum, but the one I prefer is that Armstrong is an ex-volunteer who let his daughter in on a few secrets before his time as Hangfire.
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Post by M David Steel on May 4, 2016 18:39:07 GMT -5
In Shouldn't you be in school, Lemony considers asking Ellington a question and when I re read the series it made me wonder if he was going to ask the dreaded "do you think they could possibly be the same person?" but decided to ask a different question instead.
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Post by Dante on May 5, 2016 2:22:17 GMT -5
That sounds like a pretty interesting reading. What page is that on, exactly?
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Post by M David Steel on May 5, 2016 6:32:15 GMT -5
it's on page 178/179 and gives me the impression of something that was just too bad to even ask ellington
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Post by Dante on May 5, 2016 6:46:17 GMT -5
Looking at that part again, then yes, I think there's a good chance you're right.
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Post by lorelai on May 6, 2016 4:35:52 GMT -5
So do I. Lemony may even be trying to either discard or reconcile himself to the idea on page 323, when he's thinking about a naturalist.
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Post by M David Steel on May 14, 2016 9:23:49 GMT -5
he had the idea since the second book. When he goes to colophon clinic and is going up the stairs, he hums that tune which Ellington says her father used to sing to her and Hangfire calls out "Ellington? is that you?" that is pretty interesting looking back, although I never thought anything of it the first time around
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Post by Dante on May 14, 2016 11:30:01 GMT -5
ATWQ is a good series to reread after you've finished all of the books, to see just how many clues were planted far in advance.
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eescorpius
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Post by eescorpius on May 15, 2016 9:05:52 GMT -5
I have recent reread all 13 books of ASOUE. Things make a lot more sense now that I have read them continuously. I don't have much of a good long term memory so I always forget about things.
I am contemplating is I should reread ATWQ also, though I am not a big fan of rereading. But I feel like reading ASOUE + ATWQ all continuously will probably help me piece everything together even more.
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Post by Dante on May 15, 2016 11:57:16 GMT -5
I think ATWQ is probably more rewarding to reread overall - though I too will admit to not often finding rereading too tempting a prospect, as my memory of the books tends to be pretty good, so the experience risks being a little predictable.
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eescorpius
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Post by eescorpius on May 15, 2016 17:50:44 GMT -5
Rereading ASOUE was great because it was quite a long time ago since I started TBB. I have never reread it before. Whereas ATWQ had just finished and a lot of details are still fresh in my mind...I wonder if it would be too predictable.
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