Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20181229180615/@comment-26006155-20190114103015

Ambassador.

Since we're still talking about how flawed my methods are, let's look at something you said.

"The contradictions about the book are contradictions."

No. They're a vehicle for delivering clues.

When you come across a bit of evidence that seems inconsistent with previous understanding about the material, there are two possibilities: First, the item might be a real mistake by a rushed author who didn’t proofread carefully enough. Second, the inconsistency might have been deliberately inserted by the author to stick out like a sore thumb.. So the reader would then have to question what they knew, and how the world might be different from their understanding.

Take the Harry Potter books. The real reason they’re so successful is because J K Rowling is a *deadly* mystery writer. And while I did manage to figure out why Dumbledore trusts Snape before the last book, the overarching meta-mystery of the series, she still managed to sting me, over and over again, each book. I’d read something, and for 3 seconds I wouldn’t understand why it happened.. Then some obscure inconsistency hidden earlier in the book would jump out at me and smash me in the forehead like a sledgehammer, and I’d go “Of course! Why didn’t I see that!”

Take Scabbers the Rat, Ron’s former wizarding animal. Scabbers had been in the Weasley family for twelve years, and was very old. But I remember reading a part where Harry and his friends see a wizard pet shop in passing, with several rats, and someone remarks that the average life expectancy for such rats is 3 years.

When I read that, I figured it was a mistake. There’s no way that could be correct, because we already knew that Ron’s rat was 12 years old! Clearly Rowling had made a mistake.

Except that she hadn’t. Because Scabbers the Rat was actually the animagus Peter Pettigrew, aka Wormtail, which became a HUGE plot point since a servant of Voldemort had been spying on Harry the whole time!

And the key to realizing that Scabbers was more than he seemed, was in a tiny detail Rowling deliberately tucked in a small corner of a busy scene. An innocent feathertouch one would only notice if one was paranoidly analysing everything. The every-so-slightly glowing wick to a massive CHERRY BOMB.

Don’t forget Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mantra, that the little things matter. Mysteries are a game about finding hidden things, and the most valuable things will be the ones that are best hidden.

FNAF is the most complex, bedeviling mystery that I’ve ever seen. Yet the deeper I get into it, the more certain I’ve become that the “inconsistencies” in the books and games are NOT mistakes. They are, in fact, deliberately placed inconsistencies.. That hint at deeper mysteries.