Fridge Brilliance
- This might be obvious, I'm not sure. But: Moby-Dick, while he's most likely just a big whale and not a malevolent force, is still badass and unstoppable, and most characters are aware that going after him is suicide even though they kill huge whales for a living constantly. The fact that he's a WHITE whale may explain this: in nature, albino animals are much easier to see and therefore usually eaten very quickly as babies. Moby would have been a swimming target and had to defend himself every day to an insane degree, sort of like a boy named Sue. If Moby-Dick grew up constantly threatened by predators he would HAVE to be the ass-kickingest whale around or he would have been munched on by some shark or shanked by some whaler as a baby whale. So no wonder he has no problem sinking whaling ships- he's the most experienced fighter in the whale world!
- Except that in the book Moby Dick isn't albino. He just looks white because he's covered in so many scars. And only the upper part of his head is actually white, so he's probably referred to as the white whale because that's normally all sailors would see of him.
- Well, he is directly referred to as an albino ("And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?") but even without that, he is clearly not just white due to scar tissue:
- Except that in the book Moby Dick isn't albino. He just looks white because he's covered in so many scars. And only the upper part of his head is actually white, so he's probably referred to as the white whale because that's normally all sailors would see of him.
Obviously, he's mostly white even if he's not a true albino (the whale that inspired him, Mocha Dick, apparently was an albino, though)... So the point still stands.
Fridge Horror
- Starbuck calls Ahab's obsession with Moby-Dick madness, because a whale is merely an animal incapable of malice. As he puts it, "a dumb brute, that simply smote thee from blindest instinct." However, as Science Marches On, we now know that cetaceans are quite intelligent, possessing language, memory, and problem-solving ability. It's entirely plausible that Moby-Dick knows damn well who Ahab is and what he did to him, and might just be toying with him out of pure spite.