Noodle Incident/Literature: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|"Look at this neat little packet of manuscript; it is paginated, you see, and I have indulged in the civil coquetry of a ribbon of red tape. It has almost a legal air, hasn't it? Run your eye over it, Austin. It is an account of the entertainment Mrs. Beaumont provided for her choicer guests. The man who wrote this escaped with his life, but I do not think he will live many years. The doctors tell him he must have sustained some severe shock to the nerves."

Austin took the manuscript, but never read it. Opening the neat pages at haphazard his eye was caught by a word and a phrase that followed it; and, sick at heart, with white lips and a cold sweat pouring like water from his temples, he flung the paper down.}}

* [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld]]'' books have quite a few:

** They occasionally refer to the unlucky Mr. Hong, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances after opening The Three Jolly Luck Takeaway Fish Bar on the site of an old fish-god temple on Dagon Street during a full moon (some references also state that said full moon was on the Winter Solstice; thankfully, that's where the chain of unfortunate coincidences end--there's no "after a delivery of a rare kind of squid" to make it worse). No one knows quite what happened, but it wasn't pleasant: one of the references mentions that he left behind "one kidney and [[Alien Geometries|half an earhole]]". Note that Dagon is the name of a Philistine fish god, and is also a malevolent deity in the [[Cosmic Horror|Lovecraft mythos...]]

** And on a similar note, the last king of Ankh-Morpork, Lorenzo the Kind, was said to be "very fond of children", and had various "devices" in his dungeons. The fact that he was apparently so bad even the notoriously corrupt and apathetic people of Ankh-Morpork wanted him dead speaks volumes.

*** This same "Incident" may also be the one that led to the grounding of the senior faculty's High Table. Prior to this, it had hovered in mid-air during meals.

{{quote|'''Vetinari''': It's going to be like that business in Djelibeybi again, Al.

'''Colon''': Oh, dear.

'''Vetinari''': I don't know if they ever got that man down off the flagpole.

'''Colon''': Oh, ''most'' of 'im, they did. }}

*** When the Librarian activated the organ's afterburner (why Johnson thought an organ needed an afterburner is probably a [[Noodle Incident]] in its own right) with the Organ Interlock lever in the shower activated, nitrous oxide flowed into the shower, creating nitric acid. Ridcully was showering in acid rain.

** [[All There in the Manual|Supplemental material]] about Unseen University describes their school holidays and traditions, including one at which it's customary for the wizards to inflict "a plunking" on any red-haired men they come across. Not only is it never stated what "a plunking" actually ''is'', but an unspecified incident is mentioned that led the University to exempt Captain Carrot Ironfounderson from this treatment. (This particular [[Noodle Incident]] apparently required a ladder to retrieve three student wizards from the eaves nearby.)

*** Easy enough to explain. Whatever "plunking" is annoyed a man "[[Top-Heavy Guy|six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders]]". Given that even ''trolls'' fear his punch, the student wizards were likely "helped" up there courtesy of Carrot as a lesson to not disappoint him again.

{{quote|Many a crime had been solved because of things that had fallen on [Colon and Nobby], tried to kill them, tripped one of them, been found floating in their lunch, and in one case had tried to lay its eggs up Nobby's nose.}}

* Lee Child's [[Jack Reacher]] novel ''61 Hours'' [[Playing with a Trope|plays with it]] by showing what happens when someone determined enough to keep trying actually starts to weedle the details out.

* As students of the ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' canon know well, Dr. Watson liberally sprinkles various Noodle Incidents in his narratives of Holmes's cases, making it [[Older Than Radio]]. Sherlockians have long been tantalized by references to such matters as "the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship ''Friesland'', which so nearly cost us both our lives," the case of Wilson the notorious canary-trainer, the repulsive story of the red leech, the story of "the Giant Rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not yet prepared," and "the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa"; for some reason, Dr. Watson never got around to writing these adventures up for publication. These references have been a fertile ground for amateur Sherlockian [[Fanfic]] and professional [[Sherlock Holmes]] pastiches alike for years.

* In the third book of ''[[The Bartimaeus Trilogy]],'' ''Ptolemy's Gate'', the djinni Bartimaeus mentions twice the Case of the Anarchist and the Oyster that he helped his master Nathaniel solve. Upon bringing it up, Nathaniel winces and tells Bartimaeus to please not talk about it. This is possibly also a [[Rule of Three]] situation, since the Anarchist and the Oyster is the third of three such situations, the first two being the plots of the two previous books.

* ''[[The Neverending Story (novel)|The Neverending Story]]'' is littered with these; you can't go more than a half-dozen pages before the author mentions that such-and-such a character did x, y, or z, then adds, "But that's another story and shall be told another time." It became a plot point later on -- Bastian nearly couldn't leave Fantastica because he had to finish all those stories. Also, this may fit in well with the novel's overall Aesop (and the meaning behind the title), that everyone within a story has a story of his own, and those who explore them will find ''every'' story to be a true Neverending Story.

** Also a nice twist and version with Grindelwald. When in first book we hear that "Dumbledore... is famous for his victory over the dark wizard Grindelwald", we imagine it being a simple story -- that no one could beat Grindelwald, until young Dumbledore duelled the Dark wizard to the death and killed him. In the last book it is revealed that the story is [[Ho Yay|much]] [[Downer Ending|more]] [[Heroic BSOD|complicated]]...

** Aberforth Dumbledore's incident involving using illegal charms on a goat counts as this, seeing as what the charm was is never mentioned, and that Aberforth generally likes goats, enough for one to serve as his patronus, anyway.

*** Some people have guessed [[But You Screw One Goat!|what the]] [[Noodle Incident|"illegal charms"]] referred to either on their own in their gutter-minded imaginations or they guessed from a conversation between J. K. Rowling and a Harry Potter fan who asked about this particular [[Noodle Incident]]. J. K. Rowling started off by asking the fan's age and some people theorize that if the fan was not eight years old, J. K. Rowling would have said explicitly that the "illegal charms" were of the [[But You Screw One Goat!]] variety, judging by the fit of hysterical laughter she had when discussing it and the fact that she felt it necessary to ask the age of the fan.

*** The poisonous duck might be a [[Historical In-Joke]] reference to [[wikipedia:Platypus|the Platypus]], a bizarre hodgepodge animal that was considered a hoax when it was discovered. It has a duck bill, beaver tail and is poisonous.

*** On a similar note: on the way to Harry's hearing, a man at the Ministry mentions that they had found something that "We thought it was a bog-standard chicken until it started breathing fire..." This is never explained.

*** {{spoiler|Putting on [[Artifact of Doom|Marvolo Gaunt's cursed ring]], which would have killed him if Snape hadn't helped him.}}

*** There's also a bit from Goblet of Fire, after the second Defense Against the Dark Arts class, where Ron asked Harry "Did you hear him telling Seamus what he did to that witch who shouted 'Boo' behind him on April Fools' Day?" with no further explanation made, ever.

*** Which isn't to say that JKR doesn't know. She mentioned in an interview that it is [[High Octance Nightmare Fuel]] (she told her publisher, and he felt like vomiting afterwards) and that it may well be published an a possible ''Harry Potter Encyclopedia''.

** And speaking of Voldemort, it is mentioned that when he was a child, he took two other children from the orphanage into the cave that Dumbledore and Harry go into later to retrieve {{spoiler|what turns out not to be}} one of Voldemort's Horcruxes and did something in their presence that traumatized them into silence, but the specific details are never divulged in-story.

* In ''[[Maniac Magee]]'', the entire 12th year of Maniac's life is completely unaccounted-for in the urban legend's lore.

* In L. Jagi Lamplighter's ''[[Prospero's Daughter|Prospero Lost]]'', Mab ends up hanging in the closet at the Christmas feast. He tells Miranda he doesn't want to explain.

* [[Roger Zelazny]] creates a Noodle Incident in a sort-of inverted way in ''This Immortal'', when his narrator gives the story behind a song his wife is humming, about a wrestler who challenged the gods and was shortly thereafter killed by someone we quickly realize ''was'' the narrator, centuries before ... and then he adds, "Besides, that's not the way it really happened."

* One actually happens during the events of one [[Wheel of Time]] book. While Elayne is attempting to divine the purpose of several ''ter'angreal'', she tries waving Fire into one of them. The next thing she knows is waking up in her bed, with her traveling companions wearing highly amused grins and refusing to tell her what happened after she tried channeling.

Snips flipped the document over. “Oh.”

”I hear Jake ‘The Beak’ Montgomery still shrieks like a little girl when he hears a quack.” }}