Line #5 Fridge/HumanxCommonwealth


1	!! FridgeLogic:
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3	* Why did the Tar-Aiym, if they were able to build a weapons platform capable of affecting other ''galaxies'', feel the need to develop and unleash an uncontrollable plague? Earlier exposition makes it sound like some kind of Franchise/ResidentEvil style lab accident, but seriously, the weapons platform from ''Flinx Transcendent'' could have wiped out the Hur'rikku in one or two shots!
4	** The Tar-Aiym were ambitious conquerors in their own right. Possibly they'd wanted to avoid destroying the Hur'rikku-occupied planets altogether, having had designs on that region of space for themselves. By the time they realized the plague had jumped species and was wiping out more than just its target race, it was already too late to burn the border zone's planets as a quarantine measure.
5	* The thranx were fighting the [=AAnn=] for generations before they encountered their first humans. Given that they already knew of one vertebrate race that had achieved interstellar travel, their level of astonishment about humans' having done the same seems a bit overstated: would hair vs. scales really seem like a significant difference, in light of all the other similarities between human and [=AAnn=] physiology? If someone's already met a talking ant, a talking beetle shouldn't cause as much of a shock, even though ants and beetles differ in many respects. And the notion that they'd specifically find humans' soft, flexible skin so very strange loses some credibility when you consider that thranx ''larvae'' are quite soft-skinned themselves: if anything, thranx adults could be expected to think of it as a 'babyish' trait, much like humans consider big eyes babyish.
6	** It seems like a babylike appearance would make it ''harder'' to recognise humans as equals. Consider humans discovering an alien species which have the faces of young children but the intellect and demeanour of adults, attached to, say, [[TentacledTerror the body of an octopus]] - having previously met a species of sapient snails is unlikely to matter.
7	* In ''Mid-Flinx'', when she's told that their captors are summoning a shuttle to take Flinx off-planet, Teal searches for a comprehensible translation for "shuttle", and comes up with "skyboat". Why would a Midworld native have the slightest clue what a "boat" is? She's probably never seen a body of standing water bigger than a bromeliad's captured puddle in her life, and even a ''Midworld'' bromeliad wouldn't be large enough to need a boat to navigate. If anything, you'd think her people would retain a concept of aircraft -- they see flying animals every day -- while forgetting watercraft completely.
8	* Just how incompetent is the Commonwealth's system of assessing new-found planets' habitability, if it completely overlooked how Tran-ky-ky undergoes periodic shifts from arctic to temperate climates? Sure, the probe that first investigated the place was examining its current glaciated conditions, but you'd think that extrapolating a planet's ''seasons'' (if any) would be a normal part of judging its habitability for humanx visitors or colonists. After all, even on a world where winter ''doesn't'' last for thousands of years, you'd think an estimate of just how cold or hot it's going to get at the year's extremes would be essential information to determine what sorts of supplies, clothes, and housing any would-be settlers would require to stay there for very long. Indeed, just deciding whether to send humans, thranx, or both to a given planet would hinge upon how frigid or sweltering conditions are liable to get.
9	* In ''The End Of The Matter'', Truzenzuzex and Bran Tse-Mallory claim that so far as they know, the long-extinct Hur'rikku weren't even a carbon-based species. But practically the ''only'' thing they know about the Hur'rikku is that the Tar-Aiym released a deadly, Blight-causing bacterium in an attempt to eradicate them. So why would they think that the Hur'rikku were non-carbon-based, if the Tar-Aiym expected a bacterium (which Bran and Tru ''know'' had depopulated hundreds of planets with carbon-based life) could affect the Hur'rikku...?
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11	!! FridgeBrilliance:
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13	* In the first novel set on Midworld, furcot dialogue is ''very'' limited and functional, and Ruumahum seems to see Muf's questions as a time-wasting nuisance. By the second, they're speaking in full sentences and having philosophical discussions of their own, in which Saalahan actively endeavors to teach the two youngsters. This inconsistency ''could'' be dismissed in several ways, both in-character (e.g. Born's Ruumahum could've just been very grumpy and terse) and out (e.g. Foster not wanting to reveal how smart furcots are too soon in the first story). But when you consider TheReveal at the end of ''Midworld'' about furcots' origins, it's more likely that [[spoiler: They-Who-Keep have been getting better at germinating ''smart'' furcots over generations, as they assimilate more human remains and improve their own botanical neural network]].
14	* There are actually some subtle hints that Abalamahalamatandra is actually [[spoiler: a four-part gestalt creature]] well before ''The End Of The Matter'' offers any clear information on what he really is. First, there's [[spoiler: how one of his hands slaps another for slapping Flinx]] when Ab and Flinx first meet. This seems like proof of Ab's insanity, but it could just be [[spoiler: a minor disagreement between those two quarter-body segments of him]]. Also, the one time Ab shows anything approximating real empathy for Flinx, it's [[spoiler: right after Pip wanders off with Balthezaar, leaving Flinx alone in his own head for the first time since childhood: a deprivation which Ab, being a fusion of ''four'' body-segments' minds, can probably comprehend better than any single-minded creature]].
15	* The events of ''The End of the Matter'' are the universe throwing a practice run at Flinx, [[spoiler: saving three planets from a black hole using a designed key, a warm-up to saving the universe from [[OutsideContextProblem the Great Evil]] using himself, a similarly designed element.]]
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17	!! FridgeHorror:
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Context Fridge / HumanxCommonwealth