Sorry if anything like that has already been discussed anywhere else but I've been wondering about Landen's uneradication in Something Rotten. Surely once he's got himself uneradicated he's been "always already here" - and if so I think it very unlikely that Thursday would have abandoned him to hide away in the Book World. Either she wouldn't have left at all, or she would have taken the poor man into Caversham Heights with her... Does anyone :
1/ understand my point ?
2/agree ?

I think he said that she'd disappeared for two years, but I do see the paradox.

Thursday was unaffected by his uneradication. It seems odd, but she wasn't affected by his eradication in the first place (it comments how odd this is in LIAGB) so it makes sense[1].

As it says in WOLP "Hello, I'm a bloophole, try not to think about it"

[1]For a given value of "sense"



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Turn the silliness to eleven!

Does anything make sense? I agree that it seems wrong but if you look at it, Thursday also shouldn't have known he was eradicated. She seems to be unaffected by Landen's coming and goings....

because she'd be in the same situation/location whether he was there or not - that's when she's staying at her mum's right?



******
When shall we three meet again...

I would have thought the whole Chronoguard connection whereby Thursday is immune from any happenings in the timestream around her by her family shielding her. Therefore she notices chronoguard changes to the timestream wher nobody else, even if her family doesn't.

Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe it's, like, quantum time: Both streams of events happened at the same time, and are therefore both equally valid. But if, say, Thursday went back in time to visit herself during those two years, her observation would cause one sequence of events to be favored and the other eliminated.

Some crazy hipster named Schrodinger once did this with a cat, but, due to some charges placed on him by PETA, his theory isn't fully accepted in the science community yet.

Next week: More science fun when we explain how planes fly! (Answer: Luck and praying, mostly. And a lot of little nylon strings connected to satellites. All that "Bernoulli" crap is just something the flight attendants made up to help you calm down.)

~IJ

In TN2 it's clear that Thursday must be allowed to remember Landen, otherwise Goliath cannot try to blackmail her into freeing Jack S from "The Raven".

I'm seem to recall that Thursday's dad at one point describes how paradoxes behave even weirder than we expect them to.

I think this is fairly moot - if you can accept that it's possible to kidnap a fictional character, then SURELY you can accept a few slight niggles in the timestream...



__________________________________________________________

"We are born alone, and we die alone. In between, how about a drink?"
~ Mr. Nutty

When Landen was eradicated, two timestreams diverged: in one, Landen died in the car crash when he was 2, Thursday is the only one who remembers him, and Thursday goes to live in the WOLP.

Meanwhile, in the other timestream Landen was never eradicated, and he doesn't understand why Thursday suddenly left for the Well without him.

Conveniently, each of them only exists in the "real world" in one of the two timestreams during that time. Imagine how confusing it would be if Thursday had stayed in Swindon while Landen was eradicated, and then had to deal with two different versions of what she had been up to for the past two years!

(All of the other characters are relatively uneffected by the eradication, so their lives are identical in both streams. Except for Billden -- perhaps it's wise for JFf not to try to deal with that one, it would be a little messy.)

To put it another way, during the two years Landen was eradicated the "real world" was unchanged, but Thursday's consiousness was shunted into an alternate universe in which Landen died in childhood. When he was uneradicated, she returned to her original world and had some explaining to do.



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Metaphors be with you!

Sounds about right.

:backs off slowly...:



__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Eradication is very tricky. Just look at "Dad" Next, he was eradicated but managed to keep running around. And as long as you're wondering which timeline should be correctly followed, remember the jiggling back and forth between them before Landon's uneradication finally took hold.
One final point to only prove that it has to be accepted at face value. Thursday's Dad ran forward and back checking the time lines. Every time he managed to save a historical figure and put him back, Thursday never noticed changes in the timeline. What I'm trying to point out is that the whole system is horribly convoluted, and only the chronoguard have minds twisted enough from the linear to figure it all out.

...By the way, when was the forum's background changed to blue?



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Um? Game?

Unbound Element wrote:


>
> ...By the way, when was the forum's background changed to blue?
>
>

It's always been blue in this timestream.
[welcome back from your eradication]

and if it wasn't blue, what do you remember it to be?

MartinBentley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Does anything make sense? I agree that it seems
> wrong but if you look at it, Thursday also
> shouldn't have known he was eradicated. She seems
> to be unaffected by Landen's coming and goings....


What about that other woman who returned to the Eradications Anonymous meetings? She obviously remembers her husband was eradicated, but no one else does...

I think I answered Martin's question in an earlier post:

I wrote:
"During the two years Landen was eradicated the "real world" was unchanged, but Thursday's consiousness was shunted into an alternate universe in which Landen died in childhood. When he was uneradicated, she returned to her original world and had some explaining to do."

I think that what Goliath is actually doing when they threaten someone with a loved one's eradication is threatening to send them into an alternate timestream in which that person is dead. When Thurs returns to her original timestream, Landen has of course been there the whole time.

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Metaphors be with you!