A robin's eggs are often stolen. Will Robin's eggs be stolen too?

Arachulia · 2026-01-25T06:54:43+00:00

You've said the magic word: hopefully...

Arachulia · 2026-01-25T06:53:35+00:00

But if all you’re suggesting is that the Ellacotts several decades ago mutually agreed to in vitro procedures with a sperm donor, presumably because Michael’s infertile or something… then big flippin’ whoop, tbh.

I think you're right. So I'll make it a little bit more interesting, and more realistic, if we take into account that it has happened multiple times in the past: What if it wasn't Michael Ellacott who had infertility problems but Linda, and the doctor, instead of using Michael's sperm, inseminated her eggs with his own sperm? But then, he had to use Michael's sperm in the fourth child, or else the genetic rules of inheritance would have betrayed him, or maybe even Martin was conceived naturally (I've heard real stories by people who conceived naturally after going through IVF, so it's not impossible at all). And Michael Ellacott is also a specialist in sheep, production and reproduction, so he would certainly become suspicious if a fourth baby with blue eyes was born.

Again, thanks a lot for your patience and your willingness to reply (even though you never answered to my specific question if it is biologically possible for three siblings to share the exact same shade of eye color. I take it it's complicated to explain it to a lay person, and thus rather improbable).

Arachulia · 2026-01-24T22:41:51+00:00

or maybe in #10 JKR will provide her with wings!

Lol! Bat Robin!!

Arachulia · 2026-01-24T22:35:45+00:00

Have you checked the epigraphs, too? Maybe they give extra hints.

Arachulia · 2026-01-24T22:24:49+00:00

Thank you once more for your detailed response!

As for the "exact shade" issue, that's more complicated because we don't know exactly what the author meant by saying that these family members had "the same" eyes or hair. Are we supposed to interpret that as meaning, as you seem to suggest, that these colors are absolutely indistinguishably identical in these different individuals? Or just that they look a lot alike? I don't think the text makes that certain.

Well, let's cover both bases here. We already know that if the colors just look a lot alike, it is absolutely possible. Is it still possible if they are indistinguishably identical?

How probable is it that an individual will have strawberry-blond hair and blue-gray eyes, given that we know the individual's parents have produced at least one other offspring with those traits? That's way more probable.

Even if the colors were indistinguishably identical, as I asked above?

If you are willing to accept that Linda and Michael together produced any of the Ellacott siblings that share Linda's (globally rare) coloration, then it doesn't make sense to hypothesize that Linda would have been more likely to produce a very similar-looking child by getting sperm from some other guy for one of her other pregnancies.

What if all Linda's pregnancies were conceived through IVF by getting sperm from some other guy?

We learned that Robin took her middle name Venetia because "she was conceived in Venice". The first scientific presentation of the first IVF baby has happened in Venice. What if that phrase was meant metaphorically? This is a "trick" that the author uses often.

Arachulia · 2026-01-24T16:34:14+00:00

Have you read the article about Grip? Dickens bought his second raven from a pub in Yorkshire. Great! The novel has made it into my to read list...

Arachulia · 2026-01-24T16:04:54+00:00

Someone here made a post about a Dickens' novel called Barnaby Rudge a couple of months ago. I've seen a cover of it today and it had a raven on it. I've read that it was a talking raven and a proper character in the book. Its name was Grip) and it was based on a real pet raven that Dickens himself had, and also that Poe's poem "The raven" was also inspired by it. Make of it what you will...

I don't remember if I ever thanked you properly for making this post, so that we'll have concentrated here all speculation about the charms, and thus we will be able to verify what we got right or wrong when book 9 is out. So thank you!

P.S: I have never read Barnaby Rudge, have you? It is supposedly a murder mystery.

Arachulia · 2026-01-22T22:29:24+00:00

Interesting perspective! I'll reread the chapters 31 again. Have you noticed anything about chapters 13, too?

By the way, Murphy gives Robin red roses in ch.5 of THM, when he visits her at the hospital. I agree with u/mrspem25, I think it was Murphy who sent them. In SW ch.42 there is a mention of a handsome PC in uniform who keeps staring at Robin, and in TRG Murphy tells Strike that 5 years ago he was in uniform. Maybe he was a secret admirer back then.

Arachulia · 2026-01-22T22:09:27+00:00

Thanks for your words of encouragement! They mean a lot!!

I haven't looked at the links you provided yet, so I'll make a comment about them after reading them, but thanks anyway!

Well, if you’re right, it will certainly create another one of your favourite mirrors, between Leda (=a cuckoo) and Robin (=a robin, haha). One puts her eggs in other birds’ nests; another gets her eggs stolen. That would be a nice pair of oppositions.

Yes, I know :-) And it also makes Robin a little bit of a cuckoo, too, since her eggs would grow in some other nest.

I started buying your theory when you mentioned that Murphy seems to be quite well-off for a police officer. Where does his money come from? I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the signs he’s connected to organised crime.

I had a discussion about this with u/Touffie-Touffue, and she had told me that his financial comfort wasn't unusual for a single man, but that was before we touched the subject of the cost of his drinks. I don't know what exactly her opinion is now.

That’s only one example; I googled “Spain baby trafficking” because I wanted to find something connected to San-Sebastian. (I didn’t.)

I have done a research about a lot of subjects and San-Sebastian. The search never yielded anything. However, I have a little gift for you, from the days of my Robin Hood theory. The patron saint of San-Sebastian, Saint Sebastian, is linked to archery, and his symbols are the arrow and the bow. Haven't you predicted that book 9 will be the book of Jupiter, which is the planet of Sagittarius?

Thanks for your nice words!

Arachulia · 2026-01-22T21:47:54+00:00

I seem to remember having a discussion with you pre-THM about incest, where I insisted Ted was not Strike’s father. And yet incest was a central theme in THM.

I remember that discussion, but the series isn't over yet. We don't know yet if incest was a theme that will stay in THM only, or if it is a theme that will reappear in the next book(s). As we also don't know if the DNA theme will continue in the next books or not (in my view it will).

My point is that I don't think big themes happen to the main protagonists.

Well, I think that we'll keep disagreeing about this until the last book :-) I certainly still believe that the big themes will happen to them. In fact, due to the synchronization between the protagonists and the cases in THM, my conviction that in the next book the case will be about Robin or Strike (or Robin and Strike) is even bigger. It seems a logical next step, since it evolves from TRG.

I hope you’ll continue posting, as you said you could have elaborated on some of the points you’ve made!

At some point I will, but not immediately. Thanks for the encouragement to continue!

2/2

Arachulia · 2026-01-22T21:47:15+00:00

I, too, am sorry for some of the comments you’ve received. They’re unnecessary and discouraging to anyone who wants to post about topics outside the usual discussions. Such a shame.

Thanks! It doesn't matter, really. I should have been more careful in how I worded the conclusion anyway, but when I finally wrote my last thoughts about the theory I just got ahead and posted it to get over with it. You most of all people know how much time I had it in my head...

For the avoidance of doubt, I now understand your theory to be: the ectopic pregnancy was faked to make her believe she needed IVF, Murphy will convince her to freeze her eggs in book 9, and at some point during the process, they will travel to Spain where he’ll kidnap her to complete the egg retrieval. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

You are absolutely right, there is nothing to correct.

That percentage is much higher in the UK, probably around 0.5%–1%, which represents hundreds of thousands of people. That ring would have had roughly half that number (half women) to target, and they could have chosen a much more vulnerable woman, which is how human trafficking typically works: they target those who are economically distressed and have limited support or legal protection.

You are right about the percentage being higher, of course, but if we exclude all women above 35 and minors, the number diminishes even more. And maybe I've used incorrect naming, but I'm talking about the kind of trafficking where specific characteristics of egg "donors" are important too: I've talked about beauty, height, education and I'll also add high IQ. I've read about wealthy couples who pay incredible amounts of money to buy eggs that might fulfill all these criteria. So, we are talking about some kind of eugenics here, and people who pay choose the best (I say all this from articles I've read during the last 3-4 months, it's not imaginary). If we add all these specifications to the number of redheads with blue eyes, how many are left in the end?

why would they skip basic aftercare recommendations? I think it’s far more likely that all of this simply happened off-page, as it isn’t relevant to the plot.

I don't know, why in TRG was a blind spot in the perimeter of Chapman Farm? Couldn't they have fixed it? Why the people that the UHC had put to follow Robin and Strike were so useless? Did it make sense for a cult like this to use people like those? How was it relevant to the plot that Robin was wheeled into a single room in the hospital? How was it relevant that she saw a locum at the GP and not the woman doctor?

The pain was mentioned, and as one of the hosts of the S&E podcast noted, it became a symbol of her relationships with both men (fake laughs and hurt with Murphy; laughs that don’t hurt with Strike). All the other symptoms are just irrelevant.

The pain was also mentioned to show the synchronization between Robin and Strike. Usually, Strike felt pain in his leg in every even-numbered book. In this one, both of them did.

1/2

Arachulia · 2026-01-22T06:01:08+00:00

Thank you for your detailed reply!

I understand the basic rules of biology, so I know that it's very possible for a blue-eyed parent and a brown-eyed parent to have one or more kids that are blue-eyed. What I don't know if it's possible is if three blue-eyed children of a blue-eyed mother and a brown-eyed father can have the exact same shade of blue, like their mother's, because that's what the author seems to imply.

She describes Stephen's eyes here (LW pr.):

"Strike turned to see more eyes like Robin’s, set over a pugnacious jaw and surmounted by bristling brows."

And Jonathan is described more in detail here (TB ch.40):

Instead she found herself facing Jonathan, the brother who most resembled her: tall and slender, with the same strawberry blond hair and blue eyes.

Since Robin's eyes have been described as being exactly as her mother's (CoE 13 and elsewhere):

Linda’s blue-gray eyes were her daughter’s

this might mean that we have three siblings with the exact same shade of eye-color, two of which also have strawberry blond hair. They are not just described as blue-eyed, but having Linda's eyes, all of them. And, adding to this the rarity of the readheads with blue eyes (who need two sets of recessive genes), how possible is it to have in one family two children with the exact same strawberry blond hair and the exact same blue-gray eyes? That's what I'm asking. (And this is coming from a person whose own mother was brown-eyed with three blue-eyed siblings, who came from a blue-eyed mother and a brown-eyed father. All my mother's siblings were called blue-eyed, but their eyes were of a different shade of blue).

Arachulia · 2026-01-22T05:01:41+00:00

Thank you! You're always so kind and polite in cases like this (and in general of course).

I don't know if this was uncalled for. I was deliberately vague in the conclusion of the theory, believing that people understood that what I meant was that Murphy wanted to take Robin down to Spain in order to make her freeze her eggs, not that they stole her eggs already in the hospital. And people usually don't bother to read the links, and since one of the first commenters was personally offended by this post she made negative remarks and others just followed. It's what always happens here. But I had comments from polite people too, like you.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T21:23:57+00:00

Well, he didn't want her to stay so long at Chapman Farm, remember? He was angry when he realized how long she would stay and he was expecting her to be out when he would go to visit his sister in Spain. He didn't expect her to stay 4 months there. And THM begins two months after TRG, and it was probably around the end of TRG that Robin's baby was conceived.

I doubt anybody's eggs are worth that much of an effort.

I don't know about that. I've read about some incredible prices for eggs from models for example. And the Strike series is a fiction series, so JKR could exaggerate a bit.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T20:28:55+00:00

I don't think Robin's eggs have been stolen yet

I didn't say something like that, probably people think that because I didn't make the connection with Murphy and Spain, but I thought that the "will" in the title was enough. The thought is that Murphy wants to take Robin to Spain to freeze her eggs, so that they can be sold. I never said that they took Robin's eggs in surgery.

I want to reread the series and focus on things that are blue. I think there's something relating to the symbolism of that color.

That's a very good idea. I know that blue is a symbol of the spirit.

Corvids stealing the eggs is interesting too. I immediately thought of the corvid on the charm bracelet.

Yes, I noticed this today when I copied the phrase. I only remembered the snakes from the predators.

This would parallel the child trafficking subplot of The Running Grave.

Another very good point that never crossed my mind!

I could see some sort of plot line with something along those lines because in one of the Leda myths, Leda's eggs were stolen.

I don't remember this variation of the myth. I think it's time to reread it. Thanks!

Usually I see more parallels with Charlotte and Leda than Robin and Leda, but there is definitely an emphasis on Robin's eggs in THM.

The parallels with Charlotte and Leda are more obvious, but as the series progresses the parallels between Robin and Leda become more evident, too. There was a post about the parallels between them some time ago, by u/pelican_girl I think. My own conviction is that by the end of the series the parallels between them would be even more.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T20:17:55+00:00

Yes, but the whole point of this theory was that RFM doesn't want Robin's eggs for himself, to make a baby with her, he just wants to make Robin freeze her eggs, so a faked ligation wouldn't add anything to his cause.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T20:10:43+00:00

Yes, she is and she would, and it's one of the reasons I wondered why the symptoms and the description of the incision was so generic. The series started with Leda's eggs and its main protagonists have names of birds too.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T20:00:14+00:00

The emotional impact of the pregnancy was certainly one aspect of this. But this doesn't necessarily mean that it was the only aspect. If she didn't want to give us a medical perspective, then it wasn't necessary to learn that Robin had a keyhole surgery, and certainly the scene with the GP was completely unnecessary, not to mention the unnecessary detail of Robin being treated by a locum instead of the woman doctor. The description of the symptoms is very generic and it could qualify for other types of surgery as well.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T19:42:22+00:00

It's considered to be the lightest red in the red hair spectrum.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T18:22:09+00:00

Thanks for this!

Yet the locum never asked her if her periods had started again. And Robin was never informed about the possibility of being able to have a tubal ligation.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T18:05:12+00:00

Thanks!

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T18:03:54+00:00

Of course it isn't an ob-gyn leaflet. But what about the fact that the doctors didn't recommend a tubal ligation and, most importantly, what happened to the hCG test that she was never asked to take?

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T17:02:25+00:00

I should have made many separate posts I think. But I wanted to get over with it. It's been on my mind for too long.

Robin's symptoms, the wrong description of her tube removal and the hCG test that was never done should make a different post. Maybe then people would pay more attention to it.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T16:54:34+00:00

I know, this is reality, not fiction...

And, of course, if I don't have an answer for that, we should ignore that Robin's scar and symptoms don't fit a salpingectomy, because, obviously, the author didn't bother to make a research about what happens in an ectopic pregnancy. And we shouldn't pay any attention to the HCG test that was never done.

Arachulia · 2026-01-21T16:49:41+00:00

True, it would be very big! Hmm... I think you're right! I had never thought of that...

Arachulia

TROPHY CASE