History Headscratchers / ArtemisFowl

** Prejudice takes a long time to get over in human societies; how much more so amongst the fairies, whose longer lifepsans mean that it's been many fewer generations since Taillte. As with certain groups of humans today in some parts of the world, they are taught from the cradle that Mud Men are vicious, evil, etc, that their current situation is entirely due to Mud Man oppression, and never have any positive contact with the "oppressors" to change that bias, if they interact at all. Of those fairies who do interact with humans, they're usually either LEP agents who do nothing but mind-wipes, or else rogues like Mulch or Turnball. Notwithstanding the latter group, Holly's probably the first fairy in centuries to actually make friends with a human.

** Becomes a ChekovsGun.

*** Humans occupy almost every corner of world, to wipe us out they would have to biobomb half the land, even if they didn't care about the planet, this would presumably severly sap their magic powers. If they could refine the biobomb (how do you refine radiation anyway?) they would have used it in the first book. They can't conquer us permantly ala Goa'uld, since we'll eventually reverse engineer the tech, overcome the magic, and then the population difference will come into play, too much of a 'shadow goverment' will vastly increase risks of detection. Possibly, some kind of bioplague would work, but civilisation would crumble, and we could start chucking around the nukes.
*** Plus the fairies are ''cowards''. while their technology and magic might more than a match for todays armies the People simply don't have the stomach for outright war. Butler notes this in the 3rd book.

* What, exactly, was Eoin trying to achieve with the Holly/Artemis relationship in Time Paradox? He gave all the logical reasons why not (except, strangely, the age difference), but they ended the book rather in lust when they started it as just friends.
*** If I remember correctly, the time stream turned them into a pair of horny teenagers, so hormones were definitely in the play. The ending seemed ambiguous.
** Related: am I the only one sensing an AuthorsSavingThrow here? Note how Minerva wasn't even ''mentioned'' in Time Paradox. And even though I ship Holly/Artemis, I genuinely liked Minerva.
*** Yeah, I'd say the lack of Minerva was AuthorsSavingThrow, but I hope she gets RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap as just a friend next book. Seriously, Arty needs help, and he doesn't even think about asking somebody as smart as he is? I'm still perplexed by what was intended by the A/H, especially since as far as I can tell anti-shippers are going "see, they're ''wrong'' for each other, Colfer says so" and shippers are going "It's canon now, b* tches" and very few people have changed their mind one way or the other about the rightness of the pairing.
*** For that matter, Minerva could conceivably be RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap as a love interest, given that she's had three years to mature while hanging out with Butler. She could easily have grown into something a little more palatable.
*** Maybe she got mindwiped. Artemis didn't in the first book becaues he won, not in the second book because they had a deal (and he saved fairy civilisation from Koboi) and did get wiped in the third book. He cheats it and saves the fairies again in the fourth book and they decide to leave it. Minerva gave them a lot of trouble and they decided to wipe her.
*** Actually, Word of God says that Minerva has a love interest already, and won't be hooking up with Artemis any time soon.
** May I just say that the idea of a relationship between a 15-year old boy and a...how old is Holly? 80? year old fairy squicks the hell out of me?
*** This is probably the hundredth time someone's said this, but remember that fairies live longer than humans, so technically, an 80 year old fairy is pretty young. She seems like a twenty-five-year-old to me.
*** In the first chapter of The Atlantis Complex, released as a teaser, we finally get a description of Vinyaya. Apparently she's 400 years old, and "barely" middle aged. Additionally, Holly was employed and clearly legally adult at the point she deaged to in TTP, which was ''during'' puberty (apparently equivalent in age to Artemis, therefore 14 or 15), so the fact she's an adult now doesn't even necessitate an equivalent age that's over 18. I had been thinking of her as, like, 20, now I think it's plausible she's the equivalent of ''17''. For women at least, 17 is past puberty, and the differences between the same woman at 14 and 17 are clear, but not extreme.
** Doesn't squick me, but I still ship Artemis/Minerva, and occasionally even Artemis/Juliet.
*** It's a ''very weird'' situation, since Artemis is younger than Holly but almost mentally older than her - either way it's squicky.
*** Yes, you may. I was very surprised the author chose to take it that way, because of the ages. The species thing doesn't bother me at all, though it does bother some of the characters (Mulch was already on record as saying he doesn't date outside his species, and was squicked about the kiss). I figure it's probably less weird than Tolkien elves, what with Tolkien's elves being monogamous for ever, while presumably a Colfer elf could meet someone else while still young instead of pining themselves to death after the death of a human spouse.
*** Of course, given that Artemis has magic now, it may well be that he's gained a longer lifespan along with it. For example, it's implied that, although his healing may have made Butler physically older, it also infused him with enough life to keep him going long enough to outlive quite a few people.
*** Naw, he lost the magic.
*** Two related things that bug me: First, the author seems to be playing around with the fairies' aging. (This also may affect the Why Don't Fairies have Ancestors All Over the Place discussion at the top of the page) In The Time Paradox, she loses eighteen years (since her mother's death) while going back in time eight years to just before the first book. If the was eighty in the first book, and looked 70 when she returned from the future, why would she need to tell Root that not only did the holocom make her look younger but made her look ten years old? That should have either meant she looked like a toddler, or fairies don't age very quickly after the first decade and that ten years wouldn't matter. Anyway, this royally screws up how weird the [[PortmanteauCoupleName HArtemis]] ship is, since their aging may or may not be affected by the eye/magic switch in the fifth book and all the time travel in the sixth. (Artemis pretty much verifies this, mentioning that with all the healing magic pumped through him in the course of the series, he's probably half fairy by now. Giving more ammo to the shippers.)
*** I'm not sure I follow you. The most precise mention of Holly's de-aging I recall is her thought her face is missing a few decades wear and tear, and she later adds that she's about the equivalent of Artemis's age. The comment about 'looking ten years old on the monitor' (which I took to mean the monitor at her end) is in the context of explaining why the panel says she's in Africa when she's supposedly calling from Hamburg. I have just re-read the scene, and she doesn't say a thing to excuse looking younger, and Root doesn't appear to notice, even though he notices a lot else that's odd about the scene. As far as I recall, they return exactly to their proper physical ages when they return to the present, and I don't see any reason to believe it would effect their rate of aging. The healing might, true, but we don't ''know'' that it will.
*** Maybe Eoin just has a thing for [[InterspeciesRomance Interspecies]] Paedophilia.
*** As well as the age difference, there's also their respective heights. In the first book Holly is described as 1 metre tall, or 3 feet 2 inches. Artemis is described elsewhere as 'slight' but not 'actually a midget', so he's probably at least 2 feet taller than her, or an additional two-thirds of her height. And he's not even fully grown. Logistics squick, if you think too hard about it
*** Holly's within the 'normal' height range for a human with Dwarfism, and they frequently have relationships with average-size people. I believe the world's shortest man is 74cm tall, and had an average-sized girlfriend last I heard.
*** The [[MayDecemberRomance May-December Romance]] doesn't squick me, but the interspecies dating would. I mean, there probably isn't much of a premise for it given that the fairies were relocated to the Earth's core a LONG time ago, and very few of them get topside to interact with humans, let alone have actual conversations with them. Isn't it true that Artemis is one of the only people to ever translate the book (he may actually be the first)? I can't even begin to wonder what their kids might look like. Let alone the stigma of something like that going on Holly's reputation.
*** I think you mean MayflyDecemberRomance. The code along the bottom of one of the books strongly implies that there is fairy ancestry in the human population, and in the first book we're told implying a fairy has human ancestry is a grievous insult, which together imply that we did interbreed occasionally once (and that hybrids are fertile with both parent populations). All those Changeling myths came from ''somewhere''. Fairies only started hiding their existence rather than just their homes fairly recently, and it's implied Humans and The People got on reasonably well during the days of Frond. Not that I think she would be thought well of either, because she'd be thought of as sleeping with the enemy. As for what the children would look like, probably like short (low human average range, high Elf range) bi-racial people with slightly but not inexplicably pointy ears.
*** What about their ability to wield magic?
*** They'd have it. As Artemis observes, humans have the ability to wield magic, trapped in some long dormant part of the brain. What they lack is a way of accessing it without a jumpstart, as Artemis himself received when he stole magic from the Demon-Fairy-Human Nexus as they traveled through time.
*** Holly could easily be the human equivalent of 18 at 60 and not be much older when she's 80. Healing undoes damage, it doesn't slow growth (because that;s natural and may well be accelerated by magic the same way eating lots does) and would extend a fairy's ''adult'' life.
** I think the Holly/Artemis thing is adorable. It's been the FanPreferredCouple since book one. Whatever age differences are made up by Artemis' mental maturity and elf:human year ratios. By this point in the Atlantis Complex, it'd be pretty hard to argue that Artemis/Holly was not completely canon, at least from Artemis' side.

** The way i see it, Opal didn't start the time-traveling thing. From her perspective, she had already lost the lemur. She went forward in time in order to get the situation under her control again. I'd explain better, but [[TimeyWimeyBall time is confusing as hell.]]

** SequelHook.
** Woohoo!
*** Except that she sent herself back at the end of Time Paradox. Which is why she disappeared by the time the retrieval team arrived.
*** She could have teleported to another location. She could bust herself out that way, though. Maybe she can't gather enough magic without her animals or could only summon up enough for one teleport at a time. Or she wants to just avert the thing to save herself a lot of grief ('it cost me a year of wonderful life') and if she gets herself involved it would created a time paradox.
*** I see it more as no matter how Past Opal shows up again in the future (haven't read seven but she could be in the 8th, since she's been in every even numbered book) by the end she will be subdued, mind-wiped and sent back to her proper place in time. After all, the events of book 6 show that N*1's time travel creates a StableTimeLoop. The chase for the lemur is not jarring because everyone who shouldn't know things too soon are conveniently mind-wiped, setting up the events of book 1. And nothing is wrong with her being sent back just seconds after she jumped into the residual time portal because, of course, this is time travel. (And obviously, not having a mention of Past Opal still in the past would weaken the powerful MindScrew waiting at the penultimate climax). It seems Past Opal won't be sent back by her own power, since 1) she would need to get the equivalent of silky safika lemur brain juice to power her animal doped super magic, and 2) she doesn't have her memories of being in the future and that point of losing the lemur convinces her magic isn't all it's cracked up to be and her plans for conquest switch to using science.

** [[DarcDiscordia I]] always figured that faeries view eating meat as a necessity, given biological requirements, and do their best to limit the killing of animals to what's necessary for food. Mulch apologized to the spider because he killed it by accident, and felt guilty about killing the rabbit because rather than using it for food or something else necessary, he's just doing it to get away from his captors.

*** I believe what everyone is forgetting about this is that it seems to mostly be a onesides Chinese Whispers or Red Menace, most of the problem lies in simple everyday propaganda spread from each person to each new generation. with the fact that none of the fairy race actually deals with the humans much your looking at no actual proof given to them that we arent more than what we were painted to be. with the blatant laws regarding any form of interaction with us how could they possibly believe anything different when all their lives they have eithr had proof of how terrible we are in front of them or just been told so with no way to prove or disprove that notion. if one cant come up with evidence to the contrary odds are they will take what was told at face value. questioning what we are told isnt inherently the nature of each species, people only question once they see an issue with a blief. until then they hold onto the point they were given with an almost religius zeal.

* Am I the only one bothered by the fact that Opal's use of the pituitary gland hasn't yet been used for some FoeYay? I mean, I get the fact that Artemis/Holly shippers would [[DieForOurShip probably rather die than see this]], but come ''on''! It'd be perfect! Hell, when I first heard about Minerva in advertisements I was pretty sure one of the plot points was going to be the reveal that she WAS Opal, a little more grown up and human looking. I mean, let's face it... Like Minerva, Opal is pretty and Artemis's intellectual equal... and unlike Minerva, she's got the experience with fairy technology to render her a legitimate threat instead of a hopeless side show.
** Honestly, I don't think Opal would stoop to such a thing, and post-pituitary Opal hasn't had a plot yet anyway, if she ever does, given the [[spoiler:"not ''again''"]] reaction of fandom to [[spoiler: past!Opal being TTP's big bad.]]
** True. She's almost becoming Dr. Wily at this point, isn't she? Though it appears Colfer has a pattern: Every even-numbered book gets Opal for a villain, while every odd-numbered book gets an original villain. So that means we'll see it come book 8. And honestly, it's not that I wanted to see anything come of it, it was more irritation that the concept didn't get touched on. I mean, come on. The setup is there. The pituitary gland is practically [[ChekhovsGun Chekhov's Body Part]] and it's not yet been used.
** Because she might still look like a human 10 year old after only having it for a year?

*** [[CompletelyMissingThePoint He-he, TLC]]

** As [[Tropers/KamenRiderOokalf I]] recall, the narration mentioned that Opal used her super-charged magic to suppress the sickness. As for Holly, well, it's still Artemis' home, so the older Artemis may have given her an implied invitation by bringing her through the tunnel with him. No idea about the Brills, though.

* Why does Artemis' characterization seem to be heading more and more toward {{Flanderization}} with each passing book? For this troper (and other readers), Artemis' sudden onset of puberty in ''The Lost Colony'' where he's noticing how ''hot'' some women are came off a failed attempt at humour, and ''The Time Paradox'' read more like well-written fanfiction than a book in the series -- CharacterDevelopment shifting into {{Flanderization}}. My first thought upon reading the summary for ''The Atlantis Complex'' was that Artemis being afflicted by an Atlantis Complex felt more like an [[AuthorsSavingThrow Author's Saving Throw]] and a cop-out than anything else, but I'll reserve judgement until actually reading the book.
** It actually is important to the plot, but sometimes it feels like there was no real reason for it.

* In ''The Time Paradox'', Artemis must rescue a rare lemur (last of its species) from [[spoiler:his younger self]]. The lemur was the last because the rest of its rare species was eradicated in an accident when [[spoiler:Opal Koboi attempted to gather them]]. The FridgeLogic moment comes when you wonder why Artemis [[spoiler:chooses to time-travel back to save the last lemur from himself, which pits him against his only known intellectual match and one of the most dangerous bodyguards in the world]], rather than [[spoiler:time-travel a bit further to save the other lemurs from the jungle fire, where he will be unopposed and be able to save many more specimen.]]
** This was discussed above. He was holding the ItsPersonal [[IdiotBall Ball]].
** That, and they couldn't go back in time to something neither of them experienced.

* Why are all the readers sympathetic towards Turnball Root? I can understand the characters being sympathetic--they don't know what the reader knows--but how is the audience? He used ''mind control'' to force an innocent woman to live with him for the rest of her life, depriving her of her base freedom, her chance at a happy life (happiness through magic doesn't count), and any sapient company besides his own and his lackeys. That isn't love! That's a StalkerWithACrush that actually got the girl! That's DomesticAbuse! It's controlling behavior of the highest degree! That doesn't make him sympathetic, it makes him a monster! (The things he does to all those people, Vishby, the prisoners, Artemis, Holly, Vinyaya... [[MoralEventHorizon none of it helps his case.]]) This troper didn't have one iota of sympathy for him and actually relished his death at the end, and she could count all the characters that have inspired those feelings in her on one hand. She doesn't understand why that isn't how everyone else feels.
** It's probably the fact that he was crazy. And a lot of people can sympathize with genially crazy people, especially when we can see inside their heads. But he was a complete bastard, of course, so this troper doesn't have an ounce of sympathy for him too.
** On top of that, it ''is'' possible to feel sorry for a character without liking them or approving of their actions. I, personally, have sympathy for him without actually sympathizing with him, if that makes any sense. Plus, I imagine that many readers either conciously or unconciously compare him to Opal, the closest thing the series has to an overarching BigBad. ''Anyone'' would seem sympathetic compared to ''her''.

*** Thankyou! That was bothering me, but I couldn't figure out how to word it.

** I think the Holly/Artemis thing is adorable. It's been the FanPreferredCouple since book one. Whatever age differences are made up by Artemis' mental maturity and elf:human year ratios. By this point in the Atlantis Complex, it'd be pretty hard to argue that Artemis/Holly was not completely canon, at least from Artemis' side.

* Exactly how is LEPrecon a reconnaissance organization? They sound like an ordinary police force to me. Is the "recon" connection just to make a joke work?

* In the first book, Artemis, Butler, and Juliet ''[[FridgeHorror drink champagne mixed with sleeping pills]],'' which you'd think a "genius" like Arty would realize is a big medical no-no. I mean, just take a look at HeathLedger.

*** Maybe Eoin just has a thing for [[InterspeciesRomance Interspecies]] {{Shotacon}}.

*** When have it been impied that fairy magic is more powerful? The Sprite in first book was probably just lying as a last resort to scare him. Opal Koboi was only been able to get her super-charge magic was only because she was taking the fairy-equivalent of magic steriods. And when is it mention that energy bolts is a magical power, as its not use by the LEP or anyone at all. Also there is only ONE island of demons. humans have spread across the ENTIRE GLOBE. Time-Travel is shown as incredibly dangerous, and not always successful, and Mass Mesmerization wont work because you not everyone will be looking at a screen, and given on how a mesmerized person is portrayed in the book, can be easily recognized.

*** Mulch still had the tiny spark of magic unnecessary to speak in tongues. TLC stated this when he spoke in French to Beau Paradizo. He may have spent most of it as time went by, but learned "Humanese" for survival as an exile. Most criminals without magic seem to; the dwarf Butler went up against in TAC understood some words, and Turnball didn't have a problem talking to Lenor.