I Never Got Any Letters: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|'''Shawn:''' I must have sent [Jack] like fifteen letters, and I never got a single thing back. So I knew that he didn't want to have anything to do with me. And he still doesn't.

 

When a character is angry that another character never answered any of his letters, only to discover that a third character had been intercepting them. This can work the other way, as well, with a character angry that he never ''got'' any letters from someone, and the same explanation.

* In the ''[[Quantum and Woody]]'' comic book, Woody eventually stumbles across the many letters with child support checks his father had sent; his mother was too proud to cash them or mention them, but not too proud to pawn his beloved guitar.

 

** [[Fridge Logic]] dictates that this didn't happen canonically; Harry was raised by the Dursleys for his own safety, and if his address was public, that would defeat the point. Then again, some if not all owls seem to deliver just fine with only a name and not an address...

* In ''[[How I Became Yours]]'', Mai intercepted all of Zuko's letters to Katara during the three-year [[Time Skip]], and also prevented him from learning about his and Katara's unborn son until the start of the story. [[Designated Villain|This is supposed to be seen as evil]], but Mai gives the [[Jerkass Has a Point|fairly compelling argument]] that she did so in order to prevent an international incident.

== [[Literature]] ==

* In ''[[Of Mice and Men]]'' Curley's Wife (she has no other name) thinks this happened when the man she had met at a dance hall who said he was from Hollywood and could put her in the movies never sent her any letters. She thinks her mother intercepted them.

* Used in the [[Nicholas Sparks]] novel ''[[The Notebook]]'' where Alli expected to hear from Noah after she moved away but her parents didn't want them to have contact with each other.

* In ''[[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time]]'', Christopher's mother is sending him letters, but his father claimed she was dead and hid them from him.

* In ''[[The Color Purple]]'', Nettie promises to write her sister Celie, but as time passes Celie doesn't receive any letters, so she assumes Nettie is dead. Later, she discovers that her abusive husband has been hiding the letters.

* An strange variation in [[Gabriel Garcia Marquez]]'s ''[[Chronicle of a Death Foretold]]'', when Angela Vicario begins to write compulsively to the [[Arranged Marriage|arranged husband]] who dumped her, after realizing she had fallen in love with him after all. She keeps writing a daily letter, for about seventeen years, without having any response and eventually without expecting one. When he finally comes back with her, he carries several thousands of unopened letters with him — he just couldn't get himself to read them.

* In the novel ''Grass and Sky'', Timmi is angry at her grandfather for never having answered her letters, until she finds ''his'' letters to ''her'' in his house, marked "Not Accepted at This Address". Her father had been sending them back because he disapproved of the grandfather's alcoholism.

* In ''[[Ender's Game]]'', its unknown whether it's standard-operating procedure to prevent letters from home to go through, but it's certainly one of the ways they isolate Ender. Eventually, a letter gets through from his loving sister Valentine, but Ender realizes that since she obviously had to write it under duress, it just means they have begun to use her to manipulate him as well.

* In the [[Agatha Christie]] novel ''Lord Edgeware Dies'', the actress Jane Wilkenson hires [[Hercule Poirot]] to convince her estranged husband, Lord Edgeware, to grant her a divorce. When Poirot meets with Lord Edgeware and passes on the request, Lord Edgeware says that he's perfectly willing to grant the divorce and wrote to his wife months ago to tell her so. She denies ever having gotten the letter, and what happened to it is an important clue in solving [[Foregone Conclusion|Lord Edgeware's murder]]. {{spoiler|Lady Edgeware is lying. She did get the letter but supressed it herself.}}

* This happens to Bridget in the ''[[Sister Hood of the Traveling Pants]]'' series. Her father has been keeping and hiding all the letters her grandmother has sent her over the years.

 

* Done on ''[[Titus]]'' when Papa Titus has been intercepting letters to Chris from his mother, who has been in a mental hospital. It's this admission that causes Titus to free his mother from the mental hospital... only to attack Titus yet again right after he gets out.

* Plays an integral part in the storyline of ''[[As Time Goes By]]''.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Information Desk]]

[[Category:Infauxmation Desk]]

[[Category:Mail, Post and Parcel Tropes]]