Talk:Grace Jones

This subject has been covered [Forum:Who_was_Aunt_Grace%3F|elsewhere], but reviewing the state of this article, I think it's worth asking again: how is Aunt Grace related to Indy? The article explicitly states that no one can answer with any certainty, but I see four possibilities:
 * 1) She's Henry Jones, Sr.'s sister.
 * 2) She's Henry Jones, Sr.'s brother's wife.
 * 3) She's Anna Jones' sister.
 * 4) She's Anna Jones' brother's wife.

Now, there are other obscure possibilities&mdash;e.g. she's a dear family friend, and the term "aunt" is simply one of endearment; or she's a distant relative, called "aunt" because "third cousin once removed" is unwieldy. But in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, let's assume that one of the above is "true" (for lack of a better term when discussing a fictional universe).

So what do we know about Grace? Not much. As nitpickers (and I use the term fondly) have pointed out, there's not even any direct evidence that her last name is Jones. We do know her son's last name is Jones. Again, some far-fetched explanations have been suggested (e.g. Frank is a son by an earlier marriage), but again, the lack of evidence for any of these suggests that her last name is probably Jones too. (In this case, this type of reasoning has apparently won the day, at least for now.) This conclusion eliminates possibility #4 above&mdash;

"Unless Jones is Anna's married name and her maiden name!" I can hear you say. "We don't know Anna's maiden name!" True, but most people don't marry someone with the same last name, and there's no evidence Henry and Anna did. (Hopefully you're picking up a pattern here.) So let's eliminate #4.

We also know Grace has a Scottish accent. Anna is American, so (ignoring far-out speculation) that eliminates #3. And her husband has an American accent, so that eliminates #2. That means she's Henry Jones' sister...and yes, that means her maiden name is Jones, and she married someone with the same last name. But in this case, unlike with Henry and Anna, there's evidence that leads us to that unlikely conclusion.

(Note that this conclusion is not "fanon," as some have claimed. It's based entirely on the available evidence contained in official sources; the "fanon" term only applies when an imaginative fan inserts original elements into the canon.)

Some contributors here might argue that the reasoning above relies on too many assumptions, and that those fringe explanations are enough to invalidate the conclusion. But we must rely on assumptions, or else no article on the whole wiki withstands scrutiny. To say "Mutt is Indy's son," we must assume that Marion wasn't lying when she revealed that fact in KOTCS. To say even something as simple as "Indy wears a fedora," we must dismiss the fringe explanation that extra-dimensional beings are projecting a holographic image of a fedora around Indy's head every time we see him. You get the point. We have to rely on the evidence presented and some basic assumptions in order to say anything.

So, what do you folks think? Is it fair for the article to say that Grace is Henry's sister? --Icybro 01:59, 26 April 2009 (UTC)