The Detectives' Cases

[Qara-Xuan Zenith]

I was thinking about how other than the Okogwu/Verhaeren murders (possible Moriarty connections) and Poirot's newest case (Sweeney Todd), their cases seem pretty unrelated from the main narrative of the ARG.

Trying to find connections, I further realized that other than the cases which caused the two of them to meet (Okogwu/Verhaeren murders and the masquerade ball at the Plaza) and the Sweeney Todd case, all their cases had to do with altered documents and allocation of finances:

Holmes found that Maureen O'Shea's coworker altered the company's documents to make it look like it was she, not he, who had been embezzling the funds.
Poirot found that Cavaignac's wife destroyed his new will and orchestrated his murder to prevent him leaving all his money to his illegitimate son.
Holmes found that Rupert Bingley took out the clause in his father's will that prevented Jane from controlling his funds, before murdering his father.

I'm not sure if I'm reaching here, but this seems to indicate a trend (or possibly even a hint about something in a different area of the ARG?). We got to experience altered documents a couple of other times, too-- Holmes' mangled invitation is one, as well as the hacking of first Tara Coulson's blog and then the WTF site by the Cabal.

I'm... not sure where I'm going with this. But I think it might be significant (the documents part more than the financial aspect, which is probably more just tied up with motives).

[narrativedilettante]

Maybe they are learning what they need to know in order to each investigate their Mysterious Employer (who may or may not be the same person for both of them).

[Scarab]

I think possibly you may have stumbled onto a Meta thing here, more than anything.

All of the characters, but especially those two mentioned Poirot and Holmes, are famous for appearing in literature - words on paper are what they're used to. They're also chronologically from an era where written words were the primary method of communication.

But in the age of the internet... the idea of codes, messages and disguised dialogues can be construed in many more ways. The mee=re INCLUSION of the Find/Replace command completely changes legal document cases. I think simply, that writing is one of the easiest ways to present a problem to somebody and draw them in - write down your problem, scribble out a code or a clue, and people are drawn to the words on the page, and to a mystery to be solved. Plus you don't have to actually be present to set out the mystery and you don't have to get many real people invovled at all: this is also convenient if you're say, the kind of person who wants to stay HIDDEN from the people you're dropping messages to.

So while I think there's a bit of metastory going on with all these written notes and altered documents, and maybe this is a hint for events later on in some way I casn't currently figure out, I think it's more likely that this is just a convenient way of throwing them into a mystery they can understamd;

[The Wild West Pyro]

I wonder if there are any tropes related to the cases involving documents....