Headscratchers / Elf

• Why was Jovie attracted to Buddy? He's really weird and socially awkward.
  • Jovie seemed to enjoy Buddy's carefree attitude once she realized it was genuine. She was a lot more like Buddy than she initially let on.
  • Basically, it's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, except with the genders reversed.
  • Jovie also is a bit awkward, it's just that anybody seems normal while Buddy is nearby... which is probably a reason why she liked him.
• So Gimbels is still operating roughly 15 years after it closed in Real Life?
  • This is a world where Santa is real, so it clearly wasn't the real world.
• Miles Finch physically threatened Buddy, held him in a chokehold, and made a move that would've broken his arm if the movie wasn't going for a PG rating. Shouldn't he have been reported to the authorities, and then arrested for assault?
  • Maybe one of the Greenway Press people did just that, and the movie simply didn't show it.
  • Filing a police report might be problematic for the Greenway folks, seeing as they were planning to write stories that cribbed all of Miles Finch's ideas without his consent.
  • In addition, they may have been reluctant to do so since Buddy was making seemingly derogatory remarks, and Miles could feasibly claim that he was provoked.
    • Aggravated assault is still assault when it's not in self-defense!
    • You're overthinking this. It's not like they saw what seemed like a random, senseless act of violence and then ignored it. While Miles attacking Buddy may not be legally justifiable, he did it for an understandable reason and all of the staff there would be able to vouch for that. You aren't going to tattle on someone if you feel that they didn't act unreasonably and aren't a significant danger to themselves or others. All things considered, Buddy could just as easily be arrested for harassment due to barging in on an important meeting and pestering Miles with perceived jabs at his size.
    • Plus, not only is Miles wealthy and could probably pay the best lawyers to fight the charges, Walter, the one who probably is in the best condition to file charges as the head of the office, was at the moment at his Rage Breaking Point with Buddy for his Innocently Insensitive antics costing him a break in his business when he desperately needed it and angrily told him to get out of his life. Even when he reconciled with Buddy later on, the fact that he discovered that Santa, and by extension all of Buddy's stories, was real probably meant that Miles wasn't the most pressing issue on his mind afterward. None of his subordinates also did so likely because they were afraid of going against their boss or earning Miles' ire .
• It's heavily implied that Buddy has eaten nothing but sweets for most of his life, so how is he not dead? With elves, it's understandable that they could handle so much sugar since they're magical, but Buddy is a HUMAN.
  • It's also heavily implied that some Elf magic has rubbed off on him. Besides Buddy's dietary habits, he seems quite resistant to harm, has perfect aim, apparently can work tirelessly all day and night with only less than an hour of sleep, and his clothes never stain.
• Why didn’t Santa go with Buddy to New York? He is apparently a lot more familiar with the place than Buddy is. Even if he has a busy job, I don’t see why he couldn’t take a day off to fly his sleigh there, act as a guide to Buddy, then fly back to the North Pole. Buddy was basically a stranger in a foreign land and being in a foreign country you know very little about without a guide can actually be dangerous. A lot of the trouble Buddy gets in could have been avoided if Santa or somebody else who knows New York better went with him. Buddy was also lucky he even made it to New York.
  • He’s too busy preparing for Christmas!
• What exactly defines "Christmas spirit"? Is it simply belief in Santa or are more criteria required?
  • Christmas spirit is the unironic enjoyment of all things Christmassy, as opposed to just "getting it over with".
• It is said that many people do not believe in Santa Claus and that their parents put presents out on Christmas Eve. That makes sense with children, teens, and young adults still living with their parents, but what do the parents believe? You’d think the parents at least would know better because they would find presents they knew they didn't buy. If the parents don’t believe in Santa, shouldn’t they be questioning the unexplained appearance of these presents?
  • Maybe the mom assumed the dad bought the presents without her knowing, and vice versa.
• Publishing companies do not remotely work like this. Any press large enough to have offices in Midtown Manhattan would be releasing dozens if not hundreds of books in any given fiscal year, and something like "The Puppy and the Pigeon" is unlikely to be a flagship title. A book with two blank pages would be caught by the layout or proofreading department at some point, and if it somehow went to press anyway, they would be the ones blamed, not anyone in a corner office. The very idea of plagiarizing a writer's notebook (and Miles seems like the litigious type) would be a massive financial risk even if someone had no ethical qualms about it whatsoever.
• Buddy being a Cloudcuckoolander can be rationalized by growing up at the North Pole. Yet everyone else at the North Pole seems relatively normal. What's with that?
  • Buddy is a human man in his late 30s, forced into a lifestyle that is almost completely incompatible with human physiology (see above re. all-sugar diet and 40 minutes of sleep per night) and considered to be much younger than he really is going off elf developmental timelines. That definitely messed with his head and his development, making him odd by both human and elf standards.
  • The other elves seemingly treated him like he was disabled, though they tried to be kind about it because they knew it wasn't his fault he was born a human instead of an elf.
• Buddy naively walked into the women's locker room while Jovie was in the shower (attracted by her singing). Later, when she asks him why he walked in while she was naked in the shower, Buddy says that he didn't know she was naked. But how could he not assume she was when she was in the shower? Did he not know that humans normally shower naked? To add to that, Buddy himself was seen in the shower in an early scene and he at least appeared to be naked (although he was wearing his hat).
  • He probably meant he didn't realize she was in the shower when he first went in to listen to her.
• Why didn't Deborah hang up when Walter requested such? Is Buddy dancing really that big of a deal that she interrupts him as he's dealing with an important call?
  • It's possible that the head of the mail department was complaining about Buddy distracting the employees from their jobs and he found out that Walter was the one who sent him there.
• Before Buddy went to New York, Santa gave him a few tips about the outside world. Why didn't he say anything about the difference between elves and short humans? All he had to tell him was "If you see any short people, they're not elves. Especially if they don't have pointy ears."
  • Either he assumed Buddy would catch onto this himself easily enough to avoid any trouble, he didn’t think Buddy’s mistake would lead to anything as serious as physical assault, or he just didn’t think to mention it like just he didn’t mention a lot of potentially helpful information.
• When preparing Gimbels for what he believed to be the real Santa's arrival, Buddy shows incredible craftsmanship (in both detail AND speed), putting together an incredible decorative display (with a from-scratch LEGO recreation of the Empire State Building and the Mola Lisa recreated on an ETCH-A-SKETCH no less!). Furthermore, he builds an adorable rocking horse overnight and is shown to be able to pack a stack of at least 50 snowballs in less than 10 seconds. While some of this can be explained by elf magic rubbing off on him, how was he unable to put these incredible craftsman skills to work while making toys at the North Pole? He's got the speed and nimble fingers for it, yet he's shown to have great difficulty with toymaking.
  • Keep in mind he's still human, and while some elf magic rubbed off on him, it probably wasn't as fast as what the elves were doing. Remember, his quota was 1,000 Etch-A-Sketches and he only finished 85, and while that's something no other human can do, it's nothing to how fast an elf can make.
• How could the elves have possibly known baby Buddy was from an orphanage? And not just any orphanage - "the orphanage." If we suspend our disbelief, the implication is that there's a single orphanage out there. Just the one.
  • That orphanage could have been the last stop and Santa might visit places in the same order every year. If Buddy's orphanage wasn't the last stop, Santa would have found him before arriving at the Pole.
• Whatever happened to Mr. Greenway after Greenway Press was shut down for good?
  • Seeing that ever since Buddy and Walter have now started their own publishing company, it's hard to think or decide how and what Greenway will react to, whether he's gonna threaten to sue them as revenge or praise their actions and congratulate them instead, if not the closest to a chance of redeeming himself and possibly apologizing for his ironhanded management from earlier, never mind being the overall reason Walter was on the naughty list in the first place.

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