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YMMV / The Hunting of the Snark

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  • Alternate Character Interpretation: In the final chapter, the Baker's last words are "It's a Boo-". Some scholars and analysts believe he was trying to say, not "Boojum", but "Boots", and that he wasn't spirited away by some monster of legend, but murdered by one of his crewmates, the one you never hear about and who never appears in illustrations. Others have guessed that the Boots is actually the "maker of Bonnets and hoods", making the crew number nine not ten.
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: Modern viewers are often confused as to what a bathing machine (something mentioned briefly in the Alice books) is, seeing as they haven't been used since locker rooms became common.
  • Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Pretty much built in.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the ways given to recognize a Snark is that it has No Sense of Humor, but the term "snark" has itself come to mean a sarcastic, humorous quip, of just the sort the Snark would detest.
  • Ho Yay: Quite a bit, but most prominently the Butcher and Beaver, who end up brought together by the threat of the Jub Jub and a demonstration of the Rule of Three.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The boojum, a type of snark (or a creature that resembles a snark) that causes someone to completely vanish from existence. And if that weren't enough, here's a picture of what it could have looked like!
    • The final illustration ostensibly shows the Bellman ringing his bell to mourn the Baker's passing, but the shadows in the lower-left reveal some sort of claw or beak grabbing someone's hand, while the branches of the tree form the Baker's horrified face. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
    • The Bandersnatch, which attacks the Banker and drives him insane in the process. The next time we see him, his face and hands have gone black (and his waistcoat white), and he's no longer capable of speaking coherently, just shouting and mumbling while flailing about and grimacing. He's clearly trying to tell the rest of the crew something, but the Bellman just abandons him at that point, leaving him to die alone on the Bandersnatch's island.
  • Values Dissonance: A touch with the illustration of the Banker since he's given a pair of bones to show that he basically turned into a minstrel show interlocutor. Also the Broker is something of a Jewish caricature.


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