I feel the need to balance out the kpop and non kpop stuff on this blog
Percy
“I suppose I’ll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies.”
Annabeth
“They didn’t understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”
Jason
“Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.”
Piper
“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
Leo
“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”
Hazel
“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.”
Frank
“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.”
Reyna
“I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”
Nico
“It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.”
Rachel
“Taking one’s chances is like taking a bath, because sometimes you end up feeling comfortable and warm, and sometimes there is something terrible lurking around that you cannot see until it is too late and you can do nothing else but scream and cling to a plastic duck.”
if all goes as planned, this upcoming weekend I’m gonna be getting a tattoo inspired by a series of unfortunate events
Haven’t uploaded in a while so here’s a random wip of a drawing I’m working on :) anyone excited for the new series of unfortunate events on netflix???….. i know I am XD
The Powerhouse bookstore hosted a virtual book launch for POISON FOR BREAKFAST, Lemony Snicket’s brand-new book that is out now.
In case you missed it, you can watch a recording of the book launch above, in which Mr. Snicket’s official representative is interviewed by author Myla Goldberg, and answers questions sent in by fans (including yours truly at 41:20!). Mr. Handler talks about children’s natural inquisitiveness, bewilderment, the illustrations in PFB, and more.
After a long gestation period (first news of the title go back to 2018), we finally have an official cover for Lemony Snicket’s upcoming POISON FOR BREAKFAST, and what we hope to be a final release date: August 31, 2021.
Here are the four synopses for the novel so far:
Is Lemony Snicket toast?
Unfortunately, this book opens with some very bad news: Lemony Snicket has been poisoned. He’ll have to work quickly to get to the bottom of a sinister plot, or this adventure may be his last. But this is Lemony Snicket, so be prepared for an investigation like no other – one that will take readers on a bewitching journey through breakfast ingredients and philosophy, existential questions and observations about writing, death and the preparation of a good egg. Hopefully this witty, inspiring tour-de-force won’t prove fatal. —-
Lemony Snicket must investigate his own possible murder by poison after receiving a suspicious note following breakfast. —-
Has Lemony Snicket been poisoned? A standalone novel for all ages – a contemporary fable in the great tradition of The Little Prince and Sophie’s World – by one of the twenty-first century’s most beloved authors.
For more than twenty years, Lemony Snicket has been one of the most famous narrators in contemporary middle-grade fiction, leading millions of readers through a mysterious literary world of bewildering questions and unfortunate events. Now, with this latest book – a love letter to readers and reading, and a meditation on the vagaries of real life – longtime fans and new readers alike have an opportunity to experience Snicket’s distinctive voice in a new way. This true story – as true as Lemony Snicket himself – begins with a puzzling note under his door: “You had poison for breakfast.” Following a winding trail of clues to solve the mystery of his own demise, Snicket takes us on a thought-provoking tour of his predilections: the proper way to prepare an egg, a perplexing idea called “tzimtzum,” the sublime pleasure of swimming in open water, and much else. Poison for Breakfast is a classic-in-the-making that – in the great tradition of modern fables like The Little Prince and The Phantom Tollbooth – will delight readers of all ages. —-
Has Lemony Snicket been poisoned? A standalone novel for all ages – a contemporary fable in the great tradition of The Little Prince and Sophie’s World – by one of the twenty-first century’s most beloved authors.
The greatest mystery of Lemony Snicket’s life may be his own death.
Lemony Snicket begins his morning the same way every day: with a breakfast of tea with honey, a piece of toast with cheese, one sliced pear, and an egg perfectly prepared. But one morning, after finishing his meal, he finds a note on a slip of paper under his door: You had poison for breakfast. With that, one of the most famous narrators in contemporary middle-grade fiction (and chronicler of other people’s mysteries) finds himself in a race against the clock to solve the mystery of his own demise. Along the way, he takes readers on a delightful journey of philosophy, literature, art, love, life, death and other bewildering subjects. Appropriate for young readers, formerly young readers, and adults who are young at heart, Poison for Breakfast is a classic in the making, an entertaining but profoundly moving book that will stir the hearts of young and old alike.
Dec 8, 2021 - Daniel Handler vists the Kansas City Public Library to discuss the newest Lemony Snicket book, Poison for Breakfast. Prior to the discussion, you can see Mr. Handler doing hijinks at the library’s North-East and Plaza Branches. Starts 1 minute in. At 18 minutes in, Daniel talks about coming from the Jewish tradition of carrying one’s history of pain and suffering with you, as well as the importance of humor. “There’s something funny about endless misery, and there’s something miserable about endless fun.”
Further talking points: the role of reading (20:40); Daniel’s method of writing (24min); on responding to one’s environment (37min), like during this pandemic, and being invited to Oxford University; on tzimtzum and making space (42min); on libraries as refuge for the homeless (1h1m); on censorship of literature (1h6m).
I just released a new game called Orphans! It’s a ttrpg inspired by the works of Edward Gorey, Lemony Snicket, and Trenton Lee Stewart. It’s all about precocious children, the villains plotting against them, and the useless adults who aren’t helping.
“Every few steps, they could see, somebody had placed more candles, so the staircase looked like nothing more than curves of flickering lights, growing dimmer as the staircase went farther and farther up, until they could see nothing at all.”
violet invented a built-in typewriter for taxi where instead of typing on the keys you rotate the wheel to different positions and back to type out a letter. it’s a birthday gift to lemony.
If writers drove as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.
In honor of Pride month (at least here in the US, I don’t know if other countries hold Pride the same month as us), I think it’s important to note the awesome LGBT diversity that either has been written into A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler (who is bisexual himself) or ascribed to the series by so many people in this wonderful fandom.
Even before the Netflix series came out, Sir and Charles’s relationship was always heavily coded as gay. For one, even in 2000 when The Miserable Mill first came out, partner was already a term that had gained widespread popularity in same-sex relationships when the closest substitute for marriage for them was a civil partnership. The two of them also seem to have an awful lot of involvement in each other’s personal lives for business pairs, and Charles seemed to serve no actual role in the company except to stand alongside Sir. The biggest rainbow flag, however, was definitely in The Penultimate Peril when the two of them are sharing a hotel room with a single bed, Charles is in nothing but a bathrobe encouraging Sir to undress, and Sir utters the phrase “I just love the smell of hot wood”. I mean… it doesn’t get much clearer than that. Also the fact that the Netflix series made it canon without making any sort of deal of it whatsoever is just icing on top of the cake.
Next on the list is definitely Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender. Although in the book series, the character was less perceived by the children as nonbinary but overweight and confusing, the books still avoided using gendered pronouns. The Netflix series capitalizes on the increased attention to Count Olaf’s troupe and the VFD in general to show the Henchperson as canonically nonbinary, and very confident in their gender. They appear in both traditionally masculine and feminine clothes at fairly equal rates and yet their gender presentation or identity is never mocked once in the series and is respected by even the most despicable of villains. It is easy to throw LGBT characters in books or tv shows just for emotional fodder and to fall dangerously close to the “kill your gays” trope by making all LGBT characters discriminated against and marginalized, but showing an openly nonbinary character being accepted for who they are (which is admittedly a fairly awful person, they are in Olaf’s troupe) regardless of their gender is an amazing message to send to nonbinary children, teens and adults that they are not destined to be discriminated against and that we are quickly moving into a time when nonbinary identities are respected and understood.
And there are even more little references throughout the books and the series, Larry Your-Waiter having two mothers for example, that I honestly do not have the energy to go through completely and fully explain, that I hope you will just take my word for.
Then there are the openings made available in pretty much any series to interpret any of the characters as LGBT, and the ideas of a transgender-Isadora or lesbian-Jacqueline, or less commonly but my personal favorite, bisexual-Lemony-and-Olaf-as-bitter-first-loves-that-have-never-gotten-over-their-resentment-for-each-other-because-that-honestly-is-just-how-dramatic-both-of-them-are-as-people, have been pervasive in the community since the beginning. And I think it’s awesome that the series has not just permitted that, but encouraged it by openly showing LGBT characters whose sexualities and genders are actually discussed on screen or in book (looking at you, Harry Potter).
As an LGBT kid it was mindblowing to have what was even more a taboo topic then than it is now broached in a children’s novel, and as an LGBT adult it has been no different.
There are a lot of reasons I was drawn to A Series of Unfortunate Events as a kid, and if I wanted to try and analyze them all I would have to write an entire anthology of books about the series and me and psychology and by the end of the day I would be very tired and you all would be very bored, so I’m not going to do that, but when I think about the series and probably the main reason why I’ve stuck with the series so long as a kid and now as a quasi-adult, what stands out to me is the beautiful way that Daniel Handler writes, portrays and deals with abuse.
There are a lot of messages that the series conveys across its thirteen volumes and even more in the companion pieces Handler has authored, but almost all of them come back to deal with abuse in some way, particularly child abuse. Even beyond just roundabout lessons that can be applied to child abuse, it actually depicts and deals with child abuse, a topic that is virtually nonexistent in middle grade literature even now as we start to become more aware of the topic. Children with harrowing backgrounds are common in the genre, but the difference between the Baudelaires and Harry Potter is that Snicket makes it very clear that what is happening to the Baudelaires is abuse and is wrong, whereas the Harry Potter series dismisses Harry being forced to live under the stairs as simply mean guardians and an abusive school teacher as a romantic pining for his lost love (don’t get me started on Snape discourse). A Series of Unfortunate Events tells children up front that abuse does happen and that that is what it is - abuse.
It showcases dozens of different varieties of abuse, physical, emotional, neglect, and it even hints at sexual with Olaf’s predatory behavior towards Violet. It shows different kinds of abusers, Mr. Poe, who does it out of genuine ignorance and an unwillingness to learn, and Count Olaf, who does it out of cruelty.
More than showing child abuse, it shows how people react to child abuse, either through internalizing it and believing that they are deserving of their fate, withdrawing from other people, or becoming distrusting of any and all adults to the point that they might miss out on people who could have possibly saved them if they had just trusted them. A Series of Unfortunate Events presents trauma in an accurate, non-sugar coated way to the audience that most needs to hear it.
As a seven year-old kid living with abusive parents, at the time I didn’t know why I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events so much, but I knew I loved it in a way I had never loved or related to a book before, and more than a decade later it still has a dramatic impact on my life. I was a cynic from a young age, and there’s something just draining about reading story after story of quick fixes and happy endings and stories where things go right when your life never seems to go right. I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events because the things that were happening to the Baudelaires, even though they took place in a fictional universe, were real. Handler never tried to pretend that life was great because it isn’t and if you’re a kid who has been taught by literature over and over that life is supposed to be great all the time and it’s great for everyone except you, that messes you up. A Series of Unfortunate Events told me it was okay to be messed up, and it told me that other people are messed up too, and the world is just as imperfect for everyone else as it was for me.
Esme Gigi Genevive Squalor would be a wonderful name for a chicken, not only because Esme’s personality perfectly embodies the sophisticated and self-absorbed air that all chickens have despite their extreme lack of intelligence, but also because the initials of Esme’s name spell out the word EGGS.
I scroll through the ASOUE tag on Tumblr at least once a day and when I do I see dozens upon dozens of posts of people asking for season 3 of the Netflix adaptation of ASOUE to answer all their questions. Specifically, I see people asking about whether we’ll find out what’s in the sugar bowl or why the Duchess of Winnipeg gave Lemony Snicket the ring in the first place or whether Count Olaf actually did kill the Baudelaire parents, the list goes on.
But as I read these posts and I reread the books I have to say… I don’t want to find out the answers to everything. And I really hope the Netflix series doesn’t answer them all. Because that’s probably the greatest lesson of all in the stories: that life doesn’t have all the answers and is often incomplete and unfulfilling.
As the Baudelaire children have their grand adventures and seek escape from Count Olaf and his troupe of horrors, they are plagued with dozens of questions that seem to follow them throughout the story: Why does Count Olaf do this? What does the eye mean? What does VFD stand for? Why did their parents lie to them about all this? What is in the sugar bowl?
And for the most part, their questions are answered. It is a story after all and stories have to have some sort of resolution. But as our questions are answered even more questions appear. Even with the resolution of A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Beatrice Letters and The Unauthorized Autobiography, we still do not know much of anything about the VFD or have answers to most of the in-series questions left unresolved at the end of The End.
But that’s the way life is. Life doesn’t answer all your questions in a neat little bundle at the end. Life isn’t beholden to the same conventions as literature - because as much as we’d prefer it not to be so, life isn’t a story it’s an ongoing journey paved by the questions we ask and receive along the way. And much like a dissatisfying answer to a long-held question, it ends when it ends, whether we’ve resolved all of our sub-plots or not. A Series of Unfortunate Events purposefully doesn’t answer all of the questions by the end of the series because life never answers all the questions and if the Netflix series were to attempt to change that - to fix it - as I’ve seen people suggest, then I think that would do a great disservice to the thematic integrity of the series and the lessons Handler has taught through this book in general.
One thing that A Series of Unfortunate Events does really well is that it establishes very early on to a quite young audience that sometimes people don’t mean it personally when they hurt you, but that doesn’t excuse their behavior.
Take Mr. Poe for instance: in every single encounter the Baudelaire orphans have with him, he messes everything up. He consistently puts the children in dangerous situations just because it’s convenient for him, he never listens to what the children actually have to say, and he refuses to be held accountable for his own mistakes, thereby dooming himself to make them over and over again.
If you divide it up evenly, Mr. Poe is just as responsible for the children’s ill fate as Count Olaf because for every single book in which he’s involved, and up through The Carnivorous Carnival in the Netflix series, he is capable of righting the situation and saving the children and he still decides to save his own behind rather than helping the children who are in dire need of an adult figure they can trust. Desmond Tutu famously said that “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”.
And yet, Handler draws a distinctive line between Mr. Poe and Count Olaf in the series because one truly is worse than the other. Mr. Poe doesn’t mean to harm the children, and genuinely does care about their wellbeing, even if he is awful at doing so. He is always appalled when Count Olaf is actually revealed at the end and he does want the children to be safe. Count Olaf on the other hand actually hates the children and means to cause them harm.
The series draws the same distinction between Charles and Sir in that regard and Jerome and Esme, as well. It makes the point that people hurt each other and do harm in the world for all sorts of reasons and very rarely is it personal - that we shouldn’t take it personally when people are bad because adults are fallible too and sometimes they make mistakes without thinking. But even more so, the series makes the point that unintentionality does not excuse the harm that they do. Just because someone doesn’t hate you and that someone didn’t mean to harm you doesn’t mean you are obligated to forgive them or be understanding of their position. So often in this world people make excuses for their behavior, saying they didn’t mean to do something or they didn’t understand the effect it would have or they just weren’t listening and we’re expected to accept their apology and move on because we’re told intent means everything.
But the thing is, intent isn’t everything. Intent is only half the battle and our actions always have consequences, regardless of whether we like those consequences or not. Ignorance is not an excuse for inaction because it is our responsibility in the world as citizens of the world to be conscious of the effect our choices could have on others. The Baudelaire orphans never forgive Mr. Poe, and in The Penultimate Peril when Mr. Poe approaches them and offers them help and offers to take them to their next home, they refuse his help and their refuse his apology because his intentions in that instance don’t matter because he created great harm in the world and just because he didn’t foresee it doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have. This follows the same vein as excusing someone’s behavior because it was rooted in deep trauma or mental illness or justified revenge - the reason why someone did something wrong doesn’t matter, they still did something wrong and they need to face up to their crimes.
It was an important message then, but I think it’s an even more important one now in the political climate that we live in. There are so many people in this world right now who want to cause harm: neo-Nazis, the alt-right, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, and we have an administration that actively takes delight in causing harm to oppressed people as long as it stands to benefit them in some financial way. They know they are hurting people and they continue to do so anyways so long as it makes them more comfortable. These are the Count Olafs of the world.
But then there are the ignorant people that support Trump and his administration, that do racist things like calling the cops on black people just because they look “suspicious”, or use their religion as an excuse to justify discrimination, and simply regurgitate everything they’ve been told by others just as ignorant as them about the way the world ought to work, and those are the people who pave the way for the Count Olafs of the world. It is easier to excuse their bad behavior because they really don’t mean for what they do to cause harm - most of the time they genuinely think they’re doing the right thing - but their actions have just as big of consequences as the actions of the Count Olafs. The children never would have ended up in Count Olaf’s clutches time and time again if Mr. Poe hadn’t put them there. The Count Olafs are worse, and it’s important to recognize the difference between intended harm and unintended harm, but we have to hold the Mr. Poes of the world accountable too, because ignorance is just as much a choice as malice.
I’ve always loved the poem that Count Olaf recites to Kit just before he dies in The End, and by love of course, I mean I bawl my eyes out every single time I read it. He only reads the last stanza aloud, but here is the poem in its entirety:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
- Philip Larkin
Obviously, we can understand why Handler didn’t want to include explicit profanity in a book written for middle grade children, but I really do love the fact that the first two stanzas are left unsaid and the reader, if interested actually has to go and research them and find them out for themself, because that is one of the points of the poem and one of the points of the series - that people don’t tell you the whole story and that things are always much more complicated than they seem - even things that seem like black and white morality are always so much more complicated.
Yes, your parents mess you up and ruin you, just like the Baudelaires find out in The Penultimate Peril and The End that their parents were not perfect and possibly even are the reason why all this horror has been happening to them, but the story is more complicated than that and the Baudelaires (and the readers) are left for themselves whether or not they want to leave it be - just read the last verse - or they want to explore for themselves and maybe not like what they find.
Ever since The Austere Academy, the Baudelaires have been told that the VFD was a noble organization and filled with volunteers that will help them, but the noble side of the VFD also produced lots of people who did horrible things: the Baudelaire parents, Jerome Squalor, Lemony and Kit Snicket. The VFD taught them to follow blindly and so they blindly followed and they accepted authority at its face value and as a result they became corrupted by those in power.
Ultimately, this poem is about the cycle of abuse and misery in this world. “Man hands misery onto man”, we inherit our trauma from each other and we create our own demons out of the demons that have been fed to us, and we tell ourselves that we won’t do the same, but we indubitably will. To be human is to be messed up, and the kindest thing you can do in life is to not bring any more people into the world.
But particularly interesting to me is Count Olaf’s recitation of the poem. Because in the passage, he’s not reciting it to to the Baudelaires, he’s reciting it to Kit, as she gives birth on a coastal shelf. On a personal, theoretical level, I have always used this as evidence that Beatrice II was Count Olaf’s biological daughter, but also it acts as a symbol of Count Olaf’s journey - he is an awful, awful man who has hurt the children put into his care time and time again and probably messed them up on some psychological level for the rest of their lives, but he too was messed up and turned out by the world by the people who raised and shaped him, and ultimately the root of evil goes back much further than we’d like to think. We’d like to think that Count Olaf is just a cruel, uncaring man who acts the way he does out of cold-blood, but the world doesn’t work that way and he’s trying to tell Kit that he is the way he is because of his history, that he was jaded by the world young and he never managed to escape, and that he’s not actually a bad man. But even as he recites the poem, he laughs, because he recognizes his complicity in everything - he has handed down his misery as well and he has brought a child into the world against all warning. It is him recognizing his crimes and his irony, something the Baudelaires and Kit never thought he would do.
It also serves a larger purpose in that Count Olaf has always been described as unintelligent and dismissive of intellect and reading and the orphans have always maintained that if a person is well-read they must be a good person and that reading is what makes people good. Because Count Olaf is not good, and yet he is able to recite an obscure poem - written by a librarian, no less - in the blink of an eye. Throughout the entirety of The End, Count Olaf has defied his stereotype by proving to be intelligent and capable of empathy and eschewing everything we thought we knew about him. Things are always more complicated than they seem and go back further than you’d like to think, and the world itself is a messed up place - a conundrum of esoterica, if you will - and defies any pithy explanation you might try and force upon it.
I’m forever torn between keep reading the books ( From TSS to The End ) and be prepared or leave them for after I’ve seen the episodes like I did with the rest of the books.
If I imagine something or someone and the series changes that, I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed in the series and that’s not what I want at all. But I’m also extremely curious, what do I do?!
I would definitely reread the books. The Netflix series has done a very good job of adhering to the books and not leaving anything out, and getting the refresher on the books will help you get more of the tiny references and expansion of things in the books that the Netflix series makes. Also because the series is canonically just Snicket’s understanding of the events based on his research, so if you don’t like how the book or TV show portrays something, you can just pretend that Snicket was wrong or misguided about that particular event.
The End, the final book in the ASOUE series deviates substantially from the twelve previous books in the series because it doesn’t follow the traditional narrative that the other books adhere to at all. In the other books it always goes something like the orphans wind up in a new place, they meet someone they think can be an ally to them and then that person winds up either dying or being ineffectual or compromised in some sort of way by the arrival of Count Olaf and the orphans are forced to flee from danger, hoping along the way that eventually when all this is said and done they can find some nice quiet place to live, where they aren’t constantly in danger.
In The End, by contrast, they arrive with Count Olaf to a new location with people who are quick to eliminate Olaf as a danger for them and attempt to bring them into their peaceful happy lives. In actuality, the story could have ended there. They had no real reason to go against the rules of the island or question the authority of Ishmael, and none of the islanders or Ishmael were rude to them at all. The only reason they returned to Count Olaf and rebelled against the island is because they thought it was boring. After twelve books of adventure after adventure, trying to escape danger time and time again, the Baudelaire orphans realize that they actually don’t know how to exist in safety.
Which seems to defeat the entire point of the Baudelaire’s quest for safety in the other twelve books, but I think it’s an important point about what happens after the worst has already happened. The Baudelaires have reached safety after so long, but they’re so used to not being safe that they don’t even know how to be comfortable in a safe environment. They’ve wanted this for so long but once it finally came they realized that they were never prepared for it.
This is a common trope in the lives of people who have survived insurmountable trauma. They spend the duration of their trauma clinging to this hope of a better life outside of it and imagining a perfect world where they are safe all the time, but then when they escape they realize that they’ve become so used to their trauma world that the regular world seems completely foreign to them. Furthermore, once they’ve physically escaped their trauma they’re left with the second, more daunting task of emotionally escaping it and moving on.
The End isn’t an escape from danger in the traditional sense, but more a look into what we do once we have escaped danger and how danger eventually escapes us. Most books end when the danger has been resolved, the plot has been fulfilled and everything has been worked out. But ASOUE shows that even after the danger has been resolved, everything will never be worked out completely. Life isn’t a book with a simple exposition, climax and resolution, it is a series of unfortunate events and even after we’ve conquered our demons we still have to live knowing what happened to us and where and when and that antagonist is a much harder one to defeat.
One of the things the ASOUE series does particularly well is that it subverts the narrative that is all too often perpetrated in children’s literature (and adult literature, let’s be honest), that karma is a real operating force in the world and that we all are fated to have good or bad things happen to us depending on how well we act in the world. ASOUE shows that that is not at all true. Sometimes good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people - but it’s all random happenstance, and not some cosmic destiny for good people to be rewarded and bad people to be punished.
At the beginning of the series we get these three lovely, perfect children who as far as we know have done nothing wrong and are incredibly polite and kind even in the face of evil. Even though Snicket warns the audience that nothing good will happen to the orphans, kids know that good people always have happy endings so it’s brushed off as a depressing narrator who is simply describing the trials and tribulations that the Baudelaire orphans will face throughout the book. But when we get to the end and the orphans have solved the mystery, escaped from their captor and have proven themselves worthy of respect and a happy ending, they are defeated again through random happenstance and left more or less where they started. They have done nothing to deserve evil, but evil has been forced on them anyways.
One of the problems with perpetuating the idea that karma is an active force in the world is that if good people are always rewarded and bad people are always punished, then good people who consistently do good thing with no payoff are left feeling like they’re bad people because apparently if they were actually good they would receive some kind of retribution. But the world doesn’t work that way. Sometimes bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people and that’s just the way the world is.
A Series of Unfortunate Events does an incredibly good job of explaining the concept of a random universe - where things just happen and nothing really matters in the long run because everything will just turn out how it turns out regardless. It’s an absurdist (like happier nihilism) take on the world, and I find it interesting that such an obscure and defeatist philosophy is able to be introduced so easily to children as young as I was when I read the series. But then again, one of the things ASOUE does best is not being condescending to children and engaging with them about the real world - recognizing that they are smart, functioning beings capable of understanding the world - and teaching them such a hard lesson about life so early on without making it overly depressing is something that I rarely see talked about in praise of ASOUE, and something that I think is worthy of commendation.
So I’ve always had this theory that after the Baudelaire parents killed Count Olaf’s parents they stole his fortune (why else would a count be so poor?) and that’s why he’s so obsessed with stealing the Baudelaire fortune, because he thinks it’s rightfully his and they took it from him. I’ve heard of several other people who have essentially this same theory and a lot of those people believe it’s the point that Count Olaf turned bad. If you include the Netflix series as canon (which I do), then you know that Count Olaf wasn’t always bad and once was “noble”. The question then becomes, when did he turn bad?
But ultimately I don’t think Count Olaf did turn bad. I don’t think he turned bad for the simple reason that I don’t think Daniel Handler (or me for that matter) believes that people can “turn bad”. People just do bad things and all that makes up who we are is our actions in this world. Olaf used his grief and anger as an excuse for vile behavior in the name of revenge and used his tragic past as justification to act cruel to people who hadn’t actually harmed him. The Baudelaire orphans weren’t responsible for their parents’ misdoings - they were just there and Olaf took his revenge out on him.
That’s why I love Olaf’s “redemption arc” so much - because it doesn’t actually redeem him. There’s a lot of debate and internal conflict in The Penultimate Peril and The End about whether the Baudelaire orphans and Count Olaf are the same and whether the orphans are just as bad as him. But ultimately, what distinguishes Olaf from the Baudelaire orphans in the end is that the Baudelaires were “noble enough” and understood that bad situations don’t excuse bad behavior. They did bad things, but they regretted it and they only did it if it was absolutely necessary. Olaf had an incredibly tragic story - probably one of the most tragic of any children’s villain in American canon - and it’s okay to feel sad for him when you read it, but he ruined all chance at redemption when he used his tragic story as an excuse to continue perpetuating the cycle of abuse.
So much of ASOUE is a metaphor about child abuse and abusers (Handler was a survivor of CSA) and Olaf represents an abusive person who also suffered abuse. His decision to be cruel to others after experiencing intense cruelty himself is what the cycle of abuse is at its very core. It’s very sad, and it makes you look at the whole situation differently, but in the end he chose to do what he did even though he had first hand experience with how much it ruins people and that is what makes him the villain and the Baudelaires the heroes despite any tragic backstory Snicket can give
It is my sad duty to inform you that you have just stumbled upon my newly created, miserable little blog where I plan to write and record my various existential and philosophical ramblings about the A Series of Unfortunate Events book and Netflix series as well as the rest of the VFD/Lemony Snicket universe.
My name is Freddy and I have had the miserable task of being a fan of ASOUE for more than ten years now ever since I read the series first at the tender, naive age of seven. With the creation of the Netflix series, and what seems to be a revamp of the ASOUE fandom, I have taken it upon myself to force my words and ramblings upon you in blog form.
I’m currently a college student studying both English Literature and Philosophy (or as I prefer to truncate it: Poverty) so depending on how many people are willing to tolerate what I have to say, I may also include some genuine philosophical analysis here as well.
I advise you to leave, look away, or otherwise ignore this sad, lonely collection of drabble by a sad, lonely man, but if you choose to say, don’t say you were not warned.
I started this drawing after “binge reading” (if that term does even exist) the whole A series of unfortunate events book saga but at some point felt unmotivated and left it unfinished. It is a saga I first heard of because of the Jim Carrie movie, which I havent seen yet, and I didn’t expect I would love so much! The books are also beautifully illustrated by Brett Helquist. The netflix series is nice as well, I think it complements the books nicely
If you liked the illustration the english brand BookbestiesUK has released a book sleeve out of it! They are so nicely sewn, padded with a polka dots pattern on the inside. Perfect for carrying books or tablets. If someone wants one the address is this.
