Vote for the murderer

**A show sells the feeling of authorship and the feeling is the product.** The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the musical Rupert Holmes built out of the novel Charles Dickens left unfinished at his death in 1870. It premiered at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park on 21 August 1985, moved to Broadway in December, and won five Tonys including Best Musical. When Dickens's plot runs out, the cast asks the audience to vote: who killed Drood, who the disguised Dick Datchery is, and which two characters the show will reward with each other. The director's own framing is in the records - "the last 40 minutes will be up for grabs every night", 1,200 possible endings, "it won't be rigged in any way". The freedom had a border, and the border is the interesting half. A production that cannot guarantee a shape cannot guarantee an ending, so the industry hedges: the reference account records that some smaller companies fix the results to keep the number of performable endings manageable, and that some houses refuse to count votes for the obvious culprit so the reveal keeps its twist. The vote is tallied by applause and by seating area while the actors wait. **The audience is deciding inside a band the production has already guaranteed, and the decision is scored as a vote rather than as an experiment.** Drood tells the audience the fiction's ending is theirs, and everything that makes that true - the tallying, the hedging, the rehearsed alternatives - happens where they are not. Three years later the same device ran on a telephone line, which is the relation to the comics entry this page points at: the manufactured consequence is identical, the room is different. **What the audience got to do felt like control over the characters, and the vote was the machine that made the feeling.**

Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.

Manipulation. One-sided attachment engineered for somebody else's benefit. Paid intimacy, parasocial persuasion, sasaeng, grief extraction, the streak. The lane that pays the bills and the lane that causes the most harm, frequently at the same time.