I've heard Jasper talking about a technique of his for getting around plot difficulties - he just draws attention to them, says "oh, that's strange" and moves on. In fact, he even explains the technique in TWOLP. However, I'd not noticed just how effective it is until my reread of FAS:

All three Thursdays are the same age and appear physically identical. There is no reason why this should be the case - a feature of book characters is that they don't age outside the realms of their books (see Yorrick Kaine) and hence Thursday1-4 should be late thirties, and Thursday5 apparently somewhere in her fourties (although I seem to remember reference to The Great Samuel Peyps Fiasco being mentioned as something that had already happened in the course of SR...) But of course, if the three appeared at their appropriate different ages the whole character impersonation thing simply wouldn't work...so Jasper just says on introduction of the fictional Thursdays "Strangely enough, they appeared exactly the same age as me..." and BAM - at least for me on my first read through, I don't question it and the whole thing works! That's a surprisingly effective technique...

Well spotted! I had some trouble with the 3 Thursdays plot for an entirely different reason - I kept imagining Thursday5 as a little blonde teenager for some reason.

You'll also notice that Thursday5 gets tongue-twisted at the end, when reading the first paragraph of TEA. However, we all know from TWOLP that this does not happen to fictional characters. Is Thursday5 a real Thursday from a parallel universe? A refugee from an early draft of Millon de Floss's Thursday biography? Or did Jasper just screw up?

Hmmm…that's a good point. I had forgotten that fictional characters don't get tongue-tied. But perhaps it's a narrative thing--after all, there's nothing stopping a fictional character from stumbling over words when the narrative or the character demands it. They just don't get tongue-tied for no reason at all, like we Outlanders do. So maybe Thursday5 is allowed to mess up because it's in her character to get flustered in that kind of situation.

The nice thing about Jasper's books is that there are so many strange things and so many rules that get broken that it's incredibly easy to smooth over plot holes, and doesn't even require work on his part!

Thursday1-4 reminds me of Trinity from The Matrix. But that's quite intentional, right?

But those bloopholes don't make the stories any worse. Though they do make more work for Thursday.

Although, isn't Thursday now too old for action-packed thrill rides?

----

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. -Mel Brooks

How come there wasn't a little Thursday, from the Eyre Affair? Or was her child-self not in the Nextian version..

What about the SuperReader while Thursday was in Pinnochio? Thursday talked briefly about it but there was no elaboration.

According to the Special Features of First Among Sequels Jasper wrote the Pinnochio chapter 2004 so it is possible that he just forgot about it.
I think that the superreader was either casted or created by Goliath to check if the probes arrived where they should. The drawback of this theory is that this would mean that Goliaths fiction-exploration has proceeded far beyond that what was revealed in the book.

...mirabile dictu...
-Vergil



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2009 08:02PM by Sangus.

found another plot hole!
in TWOLP, chapter 12, thursday asks what a textual sieve is and ms havisham replies "i don't know - it's never fully explained"

Why is that a plothole? Isn't it a joke/setup?

My gosh.
Does anyone but me remember the plotsmith that Thursday met in the Well of Lost Plots, who brought up his plan to hide plot holes by drawing attention to them? I don't remember which book it was in, but I remember it.
... So, I either can't remember the book, or I'm beginning to write my own TN scenes... oh dear.
With the SuperReader- I'll bet a pair of underwear that it'll be in the next book...
Don't ask why a panda has underwear.

Hi Maira, look at the very first post of this thread: Leonard makes the same point.

And I am going straight back to Nextian to ask about the underwear.........

that's not a bug, it's a feature, more specifically, a running gag.