Right, this may be me stating the obvious and feeling clever for working it out, but anyway.

You've got, in the Nextian diegesis, the real world, and the multi faceted bookworld.

Amongst the bookworld, there'll be horror novels. A fair number of those horror novels feature a person, or set of persons, trying to escape/ battle some dangerous unspeakable evil, which is often, at least within the context of the book, the incarnation of pure evil.

Now, in the nextian universe, characters can happily travel from bookworld to the real world and vice-versa. So what is to say that these unimaginable evils from horror novels don't come across, and Ta-da, Supreme Evil Beings.

It's mentioned in LIAGB that book travellers rarely go into horror novels, as they can be unsafe, so it is possible that these creatures do not realise that they are outside of their books, hence their solid belief that they are the very embodiment of pure ick.

Thoughts? Holes? Ideas?



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Turn the silliness to eleven!

Doesn't something (presumably undesirable) happen to chararcters if they are out of bookworld for too long? I can't quite remember what happens to captured SEBs but I think they were just imprisoned somewhere indefinately.

Also wouldn't people notice if the villains were vanishing from horror books - especially as replacements may not want/be able to replace them.

A slightly vague and possibly non-existant hole, but I did my best.

R

That's an interesting theory...even if it is pretty random. :)

Here's what I have to say: Ok, they might have talked about this in the books, but I'd think that it would be hard for the book characters to get into the Outland, just like it's pretty difficult for an Outlander to get into bookworld.

Not that that is extremely relevant...but I don't think people just hop in and out of their books all the time. Of course, the SEBs might be...special?

I don't know. Ignore this crazy randomness.

I don't know if it's all that difficult. We've seen a sufficient number od fictional charcters active in the Outland (Kaine, Heathcliff, Havisham, The Red Queen, Toad) - indeed maybe actually more fictionauts in the Outland than Outlanders in the bookworld (I'm not going to go and count just now, I don't have the books handy) - to indicate that it may be easier to go from fiction to the Outland.

But that said, in a world where time travel is commonplace, and croquet is a full contact sport I can see no reason why the undead aren't simply the undead and just come back from beyond the grave.

a hole. sortof.
it states in TWOLP that a character can only survive outside of his/her/it's book for a max of two months. and to do this the character would need to apply to the C of G to get permission to transfer.and somehow i doubt they would allow beings of suck evil willingly into the outland. although some other currently unknown villain could be illegally trading in a black market of SEB's....hmm.

I agree with groverboy: Thursday's Outland is far weird enough on its own. Only a very small portion of it's weirdness comes out of other books.



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Metaphors be with you!

i second that actually. its much more simple, albeit less interesting, to say that in thursdays outland its quite easy just to say that the undead, dead, and....that other kind of dead, are just that, than to think the SEB's are ficitonal characters......although platapusses and seahorses made it over and escaped, this could also be true with other things.

yes

"He's only mostly dead..."
(random Princess Bride reference of the day!)



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Metaphors be with you!