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Old 2010-06-07, 19:03   Link #10898
Oliver
Back off, I'm a scientist
 
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: In a badly written story.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Renall View Post
From the other side: "Beatrice" is stated to have a decided interest in writing fiction. And of course there's Featherinne.
Pretty much the only bodily character other than Featherinne who is shown to have written anything longer than a note is Maria. And that diary of hers surely does sound like fiction at times.

Maybe we should give the girl a bit more credit, what's to say she really did not write those bottle messages? The handwriting, which doesn't look like that of a nine year old child? Well, her speech in Ep1, in particular, and in many other instances, is definitely not the speech of a nine year old child either. It may be just my impression (read: it's very annoying to seriously count, so I'm relying on my memory for a preliminary assessment rather than actual numbers.) but Maria in full magic mode uses the longest words of any character other than Kinzo, and strings them into sentences on par with Kinzo's own in length and complexity.

George and Jessica explain that away by an alleged 'personality of a thousand year old witch' that exists within Maria as an imagined character, and Battler eats that up. They're missing one important consequence and Battler just drops it then and there, not following up on it.

Namely, you cannot improvise the portrayal of something that you cannot actually do. You can only fake that portrayal effectively if you're responding to a predefined script or otherwise directing the reactions of the other participants to reduce the possible solution space.

That is, either Maria has photographic memory good enough to hold a lot of canned speeches and others are playing along, or she really can generate them in place. Either would be beyond the capabilities of a normal nine year old child. That a novel-length description of Ep1 or Ep2 is beyond the capabilities of a nine year old, or that the writing does not match, should not, therefore, be an argument against Maria actually writing them.
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