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Post by doetwin on Mar 15, 2017 23:08:00 GMT -5
I understand that the Quagmire triplets were afraid of directly stating where they were captured in-case the message fell into the wrong hand, but what was Isadora from writing all four of her couplets on a single sheet and delivering all of them on the first night? The Baudelaires would have been able to rescue them on their first day in V.F.D.
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Post by Dante on Mar 16, 2017 3:18:52 GMT -5
The practicalities of the Quagmires' imprisonment in Fowl Fountain in TVV are somewhat unclear. Perhaps it was physically very difficult for her to smuggle out even the one couplet at a time, or she had to be very lucky for a crow to plant its leg in just the right place; alternatively, she might equally have feared that, if her couplets did fall into the wrong hands, that that might happen more easily if she sent them all at once and so they might simply be destroyed in one fell swoop, whereas spacing them out increased her chances. Really, though, those are all just ways of saying "because otherwise the plot would not work."
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Post by gliquey on Mar 21, 2017 12:32:22 GMT -5
It is a good question. The fact that the true message is concealed (she didn't just write "WE'RE TRAPPED IN FOWL FOUNTAIN") seems to me like sufficient consideration of what would happen if the message fell into the wrong hands, so dividing it into four pieces is redundant. And in fact, the acrostic doesn't make sense if you're missing just one of the couplets (even the Baudelaires couldn't work out the message when they had the first three but not the fourth), so I don't think it would make a difference whether one couplet was destroyed or all of them were - the message is not decipherable if just one piece of paper is not found. It would seem to me that far from increasing the chances of someone finding her message, spacing the couplets out decreased them quite substantially, as someone had to actively collect all four rather than just finding one.
Isadora did seem quite uncertain of where the messages would end up, so the most logical action I can think of would be to write out the full poem as many times as possible on different sheets of paper and attach all of them to crows (or as many as possible, if crows being in the right position is a rarity), maximising the chances that someone who will understand the hidden message will find at least one of them.
Physical limitations could be a possible solution to this problem, but it's hard to imagine a situation where it takes an entire day to write a couplet of poetry. I can just about see it happening though: suppose the Quagmires couldn't see anything inside the fountain, and Olaf came to visit them briefly once per day (to check they hadn't escaped); then Isadora would have only been able to write the couplets when Olaf opened the fountain to check on them, and she had to careful that Olaf did not spot her doing this, so two lines of poetry per day was as much as she dared write.
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