Can You Show Me Where Abby Manipulates Owen

[jetboy]

I actually think she planned to manipulate Owen when she knew Thomas was getting useless, but then she really started to have feelings for Owen. She still manipulates him, but with feelings.. That's what I see, with all those smiled, thoughing walls, giggling and kisses, yet the circle from Thomas to Owen and such.. I think it's both!

Yes LMI is a more messy movie for sure, and because of that, doesnt seem to have the same goal. I really get the feeling at the end of LTROI that love conquers all, it doesnt matter the circumstances. If Abby doesnt tell Owen before he got on that train that "I really was using you at first but now I love you" then the love is incomplete, at least in our eyes. Maybe Abby was planning on telling him or has already told him but we dont know.

[drakkar]

Rubik's cube.
She's -way- into puzzles and games, but has never seen a Rubik's cube? This is set in the 80s. The cube emerged in 1974 and hit mass production in 1980.
I just don't buy she'd never seen one. Especially since Owen is so surprised/outraged that she doesn't know what one is. In fact, this is our first hint that she isn't normal.

Hi, and welcome! The story is originally set in 1981, and then I guess it makes sense. I was a student back then and remember it hit us winter 1980/81, a half year before LTROI starts. Then LMI changed the time tha story was set in (LTROI film also, but to a smaller extent IIRC) and suddenly it becomes a stretch. Anyway the cube showed us that Eli/Abby (why did they have to tamper with the name ?!) lived outside the society. He/she didnt pick up trends easily.

[sauvin]

Rubik's cube.
She's -way- into puzzles and games, but has never seen a Rubik's cube? This is set in the 80s. The cube emerged in 1974 and hit mass production in 1980.
I just don't buy she'd never seen one. Especially since Owen is so surprised/outraged that she doesn't know what one is. In fact, this is our first hint that she isn't normal.

Hi, and welcome! The story is originally set in 1981, and then I guess it makes sense. I was a student back then and remember it hit us winter 1980/81, a half year before LTROI starts. Then LMI changed the time tha story was set in (LTROI film also, but to a smaller extent IIRC) and suddenly it becomes a stretch. Anyway the cube showed us that Eli/Abby (why did they have to tamper with the name ?!) lived outside the society. He/she didnt pick up trends easily.

What I don't remember is a lot of advertising or other media blitzes promoting it. I was in my very early 20's when it first came out, and I don't remember knowing anything at all about it until it had already been out for a while.

No doubt all the cool kids knew about it within days of it hitting the toy stores. No doubt Montgomery Ward, Sears and K-Mart had them in their toy sections, but unless they got to be so ubiquitous as to gravitate towards the smaller bookstores in the tiny mall lost in a sea of cornfields in the next town over, I might not have known of their existence for quite a while, too.

But I wasn't a "cool kid", working two or three jobs and spending my spare time dabbling with computer programming and mathematics. If she didn't know about the Rubik's Cube within days of their release, then neither Eli nor Abby could be said to be one of the "really cool kids", either.

Cultural news, and new things to play with, drift very slowly towards people who spend all their time hiding or fleeing, and one doesn't suspect either girl is apt to find a potential snack sitting alone in apartment complex courthouses in the dead of winter manipulating them - all the cool kids have living rooms and bedrooms and other heated and comfortable indoors rooms to play with them.

And so the girl's unfamiliarity with the Rubik's Cube is a fairly good indicator of the degree of her alienation and isolation. She's not jacked in and hooked up, she's not connected and with it. Owen's reaction to the very idea that there's somebody his age who doesn't know what these cubes are is worth checking out: an astonished disbelief. This girl definitely had to be either out of it or from some faraway place where nobody knows anything.

I don't remember that this scene appears in the novel, although I do remember Oskar remarking that she sometimes said "old-fashioned" things that nobody ever says anymore. This points to isolation in much the same way, to the extent that Eli "recruits" Oskar into helping her not be so strange anymore.

Their first meeting was hardly encouraging: "Just so you know, I can't be friends with you", right out of the blue. Owen retorts "what makes you think I want to be friends with you, (idiot)?" and one really can't doubt in retrospect what he saw was just another kid he may wind up having to avoid. The second could very easily have gone the same way when the boy told the girl "you go away, I've lived her a lot longer than you", (this is my turf, and don't you forget it, you stuck-up snot-nosed little rat who can't be friends with me!).

The Rubik's Cube introduction may be an icebreaker in more than one way. With this frank admission of her social otherness, she's signaling to Owen or Oskar a kind of vulnerability. It's one thing to be ignorant, or even just be seen as ignorant; it's another entirely to actually admit it. It's a very tentative gesture of friendship very contrary to what she'd said on their first meeting, and maybe even a test: the boy can choose to share something honestly, or he can choose to rebuff her by calling her an idiot. By allowing him to choose to share something he obviously finds interesting, she's inviting him more closely into her personal space. This may be the first (subtle) indication he's more than just a "little piggy" or a "little girl" he's had in some relatively considerable time, and that he has something of potential value to share.

And so, I'm not too inclined to be upset if it's something of a "stretch" that the girl might not have known what a Rubik's Cube is. It certainly helped tell the story.