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This is kind of a tangent off your post, but Como Agua Para Chocolate always reminds me of how it taught me the amount of information we can lack from cultural context. When I took Spanish in college, the movie version of that was one of the works we could get from the library to practice our Spanish. And I knew what the title literally meant, but completely misunderstood the meaning behind the words. I had no idea that sometimes people will make hot chocolate by combining boiling water and chocolate (since here in the US we use powder and it's kinda 50/50 on whether we use milk or water for the liquid). So as best as I could figure, the title was referring to the feeling when you eat a lot of chocolate at once and it makes you really thirsty. A glass of water is super refreshing at times like that. So even though I knew the literal meaning of the words, cultural context meant I took away a very different interpretation than what the author intended. Communication is a funny thing sometimes.
Your old interpretation made me laugh out loud. There is some backing for that reading in the text. It's been while for since I read it, but I think one of the main characters kills herself by eating a box of candles.
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