History Headscratchers / Tintin

* Isn't it somewhat out of character for Tintin (who, at least in later albums, seemed to be something of a TechnicalPacifist) to own a handgun? Yes, he does use guns in the comics, but only occassionally and usually he either has a good reason to be carrying them (such as in Prisoners of the Sun, where he's making his way through jungle/mountain terrain populated by dangerous animals) or he takes them off of people who are trying to kill him in the first place. Him actually owning a gun seems incongruious with his goody-good image, even if it does indicate him to be somewhat GenreSavvy. Admittedly, Movie-Tintin just might be more pragmatic than Comic-Tintin and even when he does use guns in the movie, he never actualy shoots any living people with them, but still.

** It can be explained through FanWank : Haddock is a sailor and probaly knows several languages. Tintin is a polyglot genius (he probably speaks chinese, arab, spanish, english, etc...). In Temple of the Sun, it's just TranslationConvention. Everybody actually speaks spanish.

** I've always wondered this. I assumed Tintin left him bound and gagged to be killed by the fire from the pipeline, but that seems unlikely.

** I'd hazard a guess that they're going to feature the plot (or part of the plot) of ''The Shooting Star'' which featured the research ship ''Aurora'', complete with seaplane, but they also plan for Haddock to get the ''Karaboudjan'' back.

*** It's not so much the apartment itself that's the problem. Tintin's own AmateurSleuth and GentlemanAdventurer tendancies mean that a lot of people would end up shot on his door-step no matter where he lived.

* Isn't it somewhat out of character for Tintin (who, at least in later albums, seemed to be something of a TechnicalPacifist)to own a handgun? Yes, he does use guns in the comics, but only occassionally and usually he either has a good reason to be carrying them (such as in Prisoners of the Sun, where he's making his way through jungle/mountain terrain populated by dangerous animals) or he takes them off of people who are trying to kill him in the first place. Him actually owning a gun seems incongruious with his goody-good image, even if it does indicate him to be somewhat GenreSavvy. Admittedly, Movie-Tintin just might be more pragmatic than Comic-Tintin and even when he does use guns in the movie, he never actualy shoots any living people with them, but still.

* Isn't it somewhat out of character for Tintin (who, at least in later albums, seemed to be something of a TechnicalPacifist)to own a handgun? Yes, he does use guns in the comics, but only occassionally and usually he either has a good reason to be carrying them (such as in Prisoners of the Sun, where he's making his way through jungle/mountain terrain populated by dangerous animals) or he takes them off of people who are trying to kill him in the first place. Him actually owning a gun seems incongruious with his goody-good image, even if it does indicate him to be somewhat GenreSavvy. Admittedly, Movie-Tintin just might be more pragmatic than Comic-Titin and even when he does use guns in the movie, he never actualy shoots any living people with them, but still.

*** I think the idea is that the captain should be the last person onboard, because he is responsible for everyone else on the ship, so he should make sure everyone else gets out of the sinking ship safely. But Hadoque's entire crew had already been slaughtered, and obviously he felt no such obligations to the pirates who killed them.

** Not if you're Francesco Schettino.

* Isn't the captain supposed to go down with the ship?

* So Barnaby Dawes marked out the letters to the ''Karaboudjan'' in blood. How did Tintin know what order to put the letters in?

* That one guy uses the newspaper to spell out "Karaboudjan". (Quite convenient that there was a newspaper nearby and that it had all the letters in the proper order). Tintin remarks "Karaboudjan, that's an American word!". In what way is that word even ''vaguely'' American?

* Remember that one guy who was shot on TinTin's doorstep? Thompson and Thompson say he was working for Interpol, but they don't know what he was working on. How is that possible? Didn't the guy fill out some paperwork or something before he began the case?

* Along with the small fortune in gold, Haddock leaves a note which provides a clue as to the coordinates of the ship when it sank. Um...why would he do that? The ship is at the bottom of the ocean. There's no way to recover it unless you have a submarine, and I ''seriously'' doubt that a 17th-century sea captain anticipated the eventual development of submarines.

* Let me get this straight: Haddock is sailing with a load of treasure, but pirates attack. Eventually he blows up his own ship, grabs a bit of the gold for himself, and somehow gets to shore (picked up by another ship? I don't know). He fathers 3 sons (or had fathered them already.) Then he creates 3 replicas of his ship, writes 3 cryptic scrolls, hides the scrolls in the ships and sets it up so that the three scrolls held together will reveal the coordinates of...his house. And in the basement of the house, he has hidden the treasure. He tells his 3 sons cryptic things about this treasure, so their descendents can eventually recover it. Um....''why did Haddock bother with all this?''. Why even hide the treasure at all? He already had it, why not just spend it? And if he didn't want to spend it, why did he need all the creepy clues? Why didn't he just ''tell'' his sons "Hey, there's some treasure in the basement"? It seems like he invented the most roundabout way possible of doing things, just so Tintin could have an adventure.

** Tintin, after the first few albums anyway, doesn't take place in any specific country. Hergé based Tintins hometown on Brussell, but added a major habour, according to some based on a photo he saw of the Copenhagen habour. Marlinspike is about half of a château in France. The world of Tintin is like a thirties fairytale-version of western and northern europe. Well, except germany. Mainly Belgium, with bits of France, England and Scandinavia.

*** They don't want to lose it? Does it take so much time and effort to just pick it up and put it on a table that is near? RuleOfFunny has its limits, and this one, (though YourMileageMayVary, I am forced to say) strains too much on my WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief.