Line #5 Fridge/LittleHouseOnThePrairie


1	[[folder: The Books]]
2	!!FridgeHorror:
3	* Ben Woodworth's father (who was depot agent at the train station) came out to De Smet to take the "prairie cure" for his tuberculosis; the climate was thought to be good for consumptives, and the books say that it ''seemed'' to have cured it. There was no actual cure for tuberculosis until 1949, so who knows how many people he unknowingly infected.
4	** Historical Footnote: Part of the reason the prairie cure "worked" was because it took patients out of crowded cities and polluted city air and sent them to the wide, lonesome prairies, where not only were there fewer irritants to cause coughing (which both deteriorated the lungs and spread the disease), but the nearest neighbors might be miles away, giving them very few people to infect. Once the lungs healed and the coughing was under control, the disease went into remission. The patient would remain TB positive, but the conditions for spreading it were greatly reduced, which was the best anyone could hope for at the time. While Mr. Woodworth appears to have remained on the prairie after his "cure," thousands of other people who took the prairie cure returned home once their TB seemed gone...meaning they probably came out of remission and began infecting people again.
5	!!FridgeLogic:
6	* Almanzo tells Laura that his sister, who's been the schoolteacher for several months, often spoke of her. Eliza Jane Wilder ''hated'' Laura, believing her to be the one instigating all the bad behavior in the other children, so odds were she wasn't saying anything terribly complimentary. So what does Almanzo go and do? Start courting her, even if Laura [[FailedASpotCheck didn't figure it out]] right away. It leaves one wondering just what Eliza Jane actually said, and how much it might have contributed to her brother's decision to court Laura, who was at the time only fifteen.
7	** FridgeBrilliance: Sibling rivalry. ''Farmer Boy'' shows that Almanzo and Eliza Jane didn't really get along, and the years probably didn't improve on that much. He could have started meeting Laura just to antagonize Eliza Jane, and then genuinely fell in love with Laura.
8	** Considering that Almanzo's comment comes after a whole string of incidents including the seat-rocking episode described on the [[Awesome/LittleHouseOnThePrairie Crowning Moment of Awesome]] tab. If she described the events and not just her feelings, he may have been able to see through Eliza Jane's dislike enough to be impressed by Laura's sheer audacity.
9	*** If that's true, it's a meta SugarWiki/FunnyMoments ''and'' SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments.
10	[[/folder]]
11
12	[[folder:The TV Series]]
13	!!FridgeBrilliance:
14	* In ''The Last Farewell'', the townspeople leave but one building intact- their church. Their ''body''. Yet, even though they deliberately left the church intact because they couldn't bring themselves to demolish it, it ''still'' got damaged in the explosive bedlam and all too accurately and symbolically represented how the townspeople had become a damaged, wounded body of Christ that still stood firm.
15	* It's possible the reason Reverend Alden got so much more upset than anyone else at the fact the townspeople decided to destroy Walnut Grove is because its founder, Lars Hanson, had died. He was there for its founding and outlived its creator, and hoped its citizens would be peace-loving men and women of Christ. Yet, here they were wiping out his dream and his legacy from the earth in an utterly hellish manner, thus the evidence he existed there and made a mark on the world, and he couldn't do a thing to stop them. When Alden said, "Today... we bury a friend", he really meant they were saying goodbye to Lars once and for all, something that never happened on the show proper beyond a thrown-in post-production epilogue because his actor died without warning.
16	* A small detail, but if you look at some of Laura's dresses from the middle of the series--notably the pink one and the dark green one, you'll realize they had been Mary's earlier. This would have actually been true to the times, as clothes would have been handed down from one child to the next, as long as they were in good condition. (A few years into the show's run, the pair of matching blue Sunday-best dresses that Caroline made in Season 1's "Country Girls" are still around, but Laura has grown into Mary's and Carrie has inherited Laura's.)
17	* A few seasons apart, Mary and Laura both show the same Achilles heels on their first teaching jobs: expecting the job to mainly consist of coaxing intuitively-known information and skills out of their students, and resorting to SuddenlyShouting if they encounter interpersonal conflict in the classroom. They may have picked up these identical foibles from some consistent deficiency in the Walnut Grove school's curriculum that has not yet been identified by the school board; after all, the town was founded within a generation of the Ingalls' arrival, so the school has not been operating for long enough to produce many new teachers among whom to notice common trends. True to the historical reality, both Mary and Laura's qualifications to teach consist merely of having demonstrated knowledge of the material themselves, rather than them having particularly undergone any training on HOW to teach.
18	!!FridgeHorror:
19	* Do NOT get Laura angry with you. Cases in point? She refuses to pray for her brother. He drops dead. Then ''her'' son drops dead years later. She complains about having to take care of Jack (their dog). He drops dead. She gets into a romantic rivalry with her sister, Mary, over a neighborhood boy. The neighbor boy prefers Mary. Mary goes blind. Laura has a violent, tearful meltdown after a land baron threatens to turn Walnut Grove into a company town and steal their property out from under them. Laura takes it out on her own house, which she got from a widow as a gift. Everyone else takes a page from her meltdown and decides to destroy the buildings Nathan Lassiter covets so badly. ''The entire freaking town gets blown up.''
20	* Ben Woodworth's father came to North Dakota to take the "prairie cure" for his tuberculosis, and seems to have recovered. There wouldn't be an ''actual'' cure until the 1950's, and tuberculosis is extremely contagious, so who knows how many people he managed to infect without realizing it.
21	* Joe Kagan's fight against Charles proves almost fatal, due to his declining condition after years of fighting. Thankfully, he survives and Charles decides to help him recover and gives him the reward to make sure he has a way of providing for himself. Thing is, Charles was replacing Jonathan Garvey, who was much heavier and stronger than him and had injured his hand shortly before the fight. Imagine what would have happened to Kagan had he fought Jonathan...
22	* When Alice Garvey and Adam Kendall, Jr. are killed in the fire that destroys the first blind school, it was because Albert and a friend were messing around with a smoking pipe and forgot it in a pile of flammable cloth while trying to avoid punishment. Shortly afterward, Albert goes into a tailspin of grief and runs away to his estranged birth father's residence out of desperation to avoid his guilt toward his friends and adoptive family, only to find a freshly-dug grave. Near the end of the series, Albert himself is revealed to have leukemia and is just now showing signs of succumbing to it after spending his life up till then unharmed. Perhaps divine punishment saw fit to claim the years from Albert and his father that Alice and Adam Jr. never got to live. Albert's dad had to pay for Alice's years, and he didn't have enough left in him, so he died. But Albert had to pay the price for an infant's life who never even made it to his first birthday, and had an entire life ahead of him, maybe sixty, seventy, eighty, or even ninety years and so on. All those years were ripped from Albert's lifespan and a cancer-causing force of death came on him. In other words, destiny decided to ensure both surviving Quinns died for the lives senselessly lost in the fire as penance and repayment for lost years and potential.
23	* Laura got a big and beautiful house near the end of the series as a gift from a dying widow, who told her not to let hers and her late husband William's dream die out. In "The Last Farewell". Rather than let Nathan Lassiter take it over, she breaks out all the downstairs windows, then she and her husband fill it full of dynamite and Almanzo blows it to smithereens. That woman probably spun like a cyclotron in her grave. (Unless Laura felt that it would be better to eliminate the house than let seedy company workers invade it as boarders against the wishes of the widow- in which case, she performed a MercyKill.)
24	[[/folder]]

Context Fridge / LittleHouseOnThePrairie