DOORS: Tina's sense of daddies

That is one of the funnier and puzzling bits (I could've sworn Roy Lackey was complaining about Tina's Daddy knowledge as being a weird bending/blending of the worlds where there should be no blending, but looking over the messages I can't seem to find it). What I find especially interesting is that Tina almost seems to be talking in terms of heavenly fathers. She also did that riff on the Christian God that made Roy distracted, and her talk of Daddies seems to me to be continuing in the same vein. So when she insists that Green's daddy loves him, it seems as though she is saying that everybody's (dead) daddy is looking down from heaven and/or the north pole, and all (dead) daddies love their children (who they never see in the flesh). That is: in Otherworld, all children are the product of a personal human sacrifice; the culture may have come up with a way to include the father ghost into the family unit through inclusion at holidays (birthday's at least). It gives an eerie hint of a sort of immediate ancestor worship, I think, and finds strange echoes with Christmas Santa Claus, etc. This thread is not validated when Tina calls Klamm "Pappa." (Thanks to Roy for reminding us of that additional twist.) But I think her action does feed into the "Santa Claus" aspect, especially with regard to the desk. Klamm readily fills in Green on his behind the scenes activities (the strange man in Green's apartment, etc.). The surprise arrival of the desk is supposedly due to the woman changing heart and/or the presence of the "mail root" talisman -- we automatically discount Tina's promise "I'll tell Daddy [you want the desk as a present]," and yet, what if she =did= tell Daddy Klamm? This turns out to be the most non-fantastical explanation of all. FWIW I've started reading WILL, and the author's introduction has a small TAD payoff already: talk of soldiers who can stand up to interrogation, which is very much like North's written confession when he explains that he killed Applewood because he knew he would break under interrogation. =mantis=

Roy said: "Given the necessarily limited amount of memory available in a mechanical doll, I don't think it would be expended on a person the child could never know." - which I would agree with.

This is an interesting suggestion, but looking at it again, I still can't see it anything about that conversation to suggest it. Tina asks if he sent his dad a birthday present. It's all very matter-of-fact and literal-sounding.

"You're a jealous god, like the one they talk about." That one? I wondered about that too.

Fanny talks about "Yule". Does anyone from the Other world refer to "Christmas"? Tina does, when the desk arrives. Our world has robot kits and self-flying aeroplanes, Christmas, a jealous god, and Daddies with whom one can exchange birthday presents. These all suggest that Tina is from here, not There. If that's true, is it significant? It could simply be to reconcile Tina's abilities, needed for the story, with the technology levels in the two worlds. A high-tech Otherworld would give a different kind of story again.

She does say that - nd it does arrive! Not for his "next birthday", of course, and there's a note signed by Mrs Foster, complete with a poem by Kipling. It's very much the kind of letter Mrs Foster would write, not Klamm. And how would Tina communicate with him? But a fascinating idea all the same, and too striking to brush off as a common coincidence. I really don't know what to think about that. Spectacled Bear.