captain widdershins hate blog

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[asoue-sideblog]

a lot of fixfic involves the Baudelaires and/or Quagmires making it to the Mortmain Mountains headquarters with some volunteer or volunteers, but not enough of it acknowledges that intact headquarters mean the entire mountain range is swarming with snow gnats the entire time

[asoue-sideblog]

a lot of fixfic involves Monty never dying and the Baudelaires staying at his house, but not enough of it acknowledges the tunnel between Monty’s house and the Quagmire mansion, and the possibility of Quigley eventually popping up through the floor like “where the fuck am I”

[asoue-sideblog]

To be clear, this doesn’t imply the Quagmire fire still happened within this hypothetical fixfic context. All of the Quagmire triplets would react to stumbling across a secret tunnel in their house by immediately exploring it.

[asoue-sideblog]

It seems like in the books, Duncan, Isadora, and Hector were fighting eagles for like... a really long time. Because Quigley and Kit got their distress message before Tuesday morning, but Lemony’s narration says the Quagmires (Quigley’s absence or presence not specified) were fighting eagles and Fernald late on Tuesday night. Then the SHAM home fell on the Queequeg, which is pretty dangerous obviously (Kit had a leg injury when she washed up on the island but was otherwise okay). And then, if they survived all of that and the Great Unknown (which is a big if!), they probably weren’t in a position to get immediate medical attention.

Which is to say, any of the Quagmires, Widdershins family, and Hector could reasonably have received potentially life-changing injuries due to the events described in The End.

This may be a little over-the-top with angst, and it’s a little weird, but I like the idea of Duncan losing an eye. First of all, because:

Quigley Quagmire Isadora Quagmire Duncan Quagmire

see... he’s the one with one I...

second, there’s “not identical anymore” angst, and third, it amuses me that the aesthetics of having an eyepatch don’t suit his personality at all

edit: also it would be interesting if one of Isadora and Duncan was having some kind of injury or recovery period that the other one wasn’t, split those two up a bit, maybe set all three of them apart from all of each other rather than having Duncan+Isadora and Quigley

[vacuum-fluorescent-display]

actually a dnd style game based off of asoue would be sick. there’s like 5-8 players, one has to be the various guardians, 2-4 have to be a group of orphans, everyone else gets to be friends and/or villains along the way, everyone picks a skill and the dm makes the story increasingly more ridiculous and unfortunate

[autisticklaus]

@asoue-sideblog has something like that!

[asoue-sideblog]

O.L.A.F. (Odious Lusting After Fortunes) is a rules-light game for playing as a crew of dastardly villains in disguise trying to gain custody of plucky orphans and steal away their fortunes. The orphans, their guardians, and various authority figures are all NPCs. The PDF is only like ten pages long, so it’s easy to learn to play, though it’ll probably be better if there are people in your group with Powered By The Apocalypse experience (PBTA is a framework for creating games that was used to make O.L.A.F., among many other games - some of you may recognize it from The Adventure Zone: Amnesty). I ran a session of O.L.A.F. and it went pretty well! It was fun!

[asoue-sideblog]

AU where the Unfortunate Gen kids want to play Dungeons & Dragons but none of them want to be GM, so Uncle Lemony volunteers to run a campaign he’d made for the Stain’d Squad back in the day and never got a chance to deploy

It was made for D&D 2e and awkwardly kludged to work with 5e

He wrote it assuming his friends would yell at him to shut up when it got too long-winded, but the kids are too polite to flat out interrupt an adult, so at some points he monologues for almost ten minutes straight until he takes a breath and Fiona gently cuts him off

It’s much darker and much more complex than any D&D campaign has a right to be

There are too many players in the party and they can’t get anything done

The Quagmires and Klaus take notes on the lore and clues in the sessions and fill up entire notebooks; they solve at least one mystery way in advance of when Lemony thought they would and he’s so proud

Half the group actually wants to use the rules for e.g. surviving in the wilderness and the other half forgets character sheets exist because they’re too into the RP

Beatrice pokes her head in to check on them and ends up insisting on playing one of the NPCs and the Baudelaire kids are so embarrassed

the campaign staggers to a finish after waaaaay too long and everyone agrees that that was fun but they should probably look into one of the literally hundreds of other tabletop RPGs and find a game that’s actually designed for roleplaying mysteries, conspiracies, and investigations

[asoue-sideblog]

are these the snicket siblings

[beatricebidelaire]

its kinda ironic that Kit’s costuming is the most *hotel denouement clock voice* wrong out of all characters because like if it’s any other character in my mind I could at least say well Lemony wasn’t actually there so maybe he’s wrong (like I think b&b wearing very clean looking white suits and dress feel unrealistic but as I said here I tend to lean towards that’s not what they were wearing but what Lemony thought which factored in Lemonys perception of Beatrice and symbolism or whatever) during narration but Kit’s like one person L actually met during the time period of tbb to te (aside from vks) so like that’s the single person he would actually knew what was wearing so to me looking at this in-universe-wise is. well. yeah.

[asoue-sideblog]

This implies that if Kit is not matching the style/time period of everyone else, then the inaccuracy must be everyone else's outfits. Lemony assumes everyone is wearing extremely fashionable and individually tailored vintage clothing unless he has personally seen otherwise.

[beatricebidelaire]

One of my most prized possessions is a small wooden box with a special lock on it that is more than five hundred years old and works according to a secret code that my grandfather taught me. My grandfather learned it from his grandfather, and his grandfather learned it from his grandfather, and I would teach it to my grandchild if I thought that I would ever have a family of my own instead of living out the remainder of my days all alone in this world.

– The Ersatz Elevator

[asoue-sideblog]

I don’t recall anyone interpreting anything in Handler’s books as a Victor Hugo reference, but the water cycle tangents in The Grim Grotto still feel like a direct attack on Hugo

[gellavonhamster]

I think Hugo from the Caligari Carnival might be a Victor Hugo reference? A hunchback (like Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) whose name is Hugo. I might be reading too much into this, but with Handler, you never know.

[asoue-sideblog]

Oh yeah, of course! You're right, there's no way that was a coincidence. The point still stands, though, that the water cycle stuff comes off as a burn even if there weren't any context implying it was aimed at Victor Hugo :P

[asoue-sideblog]

I don't recall anyone interpreting anything in Handler's books as a Victor Hugo reference, but the water cycle tangents in The Grim Grotto still feel like a direct attack on Hugo

[asoue-sideblog]

Lemony is unhappy as a child, and he is unhappy as an adult. He didn't improve over time, he just went through different forms of psychological unhealthiness. He loses the things that are most important to him over and over. His life meant something. He has accomplishments. There has never been a time when there was no one left to care for him, nor a time when there was no one left he cared for, even when he was isolated from all of those people.

[asoue-sideblog]

The sugar bowl generation kept playing The Resistance: Avalon at board game nights even though there was literal blood shed almost every time

[asoue-sideblog]

The Resistance: VFD as an Avalon reskin with firefighters and firestarters. Lemony is Merlin. I've never played with the other roles so I forget what they do.

[asoue-sideblog]

The sugar bowl generation kept playing The Resistance: Avalon at board game nights even though there was literal blood shed almost every time

[asoue-sideblog]

I love the subtle awfulness of R’s father giving her a cigar box on her first visit home after she was abducted by VFD. How old do you have to be before a cigar box is an appropriate present?

[asoue-sideblog]

Also while I'm on the subject, R also wrote:

It seems to me, [Lemony], that one moment you and I were becoming friends in the infirmary, telling each other stories to distract us from the pain in our ankles

Lemony was taken with Jacques and Kit. Where were they during this? It's ambiguous, but... it sounds like Lemony was separated from them at this point.

[asoue-sideblog]

I love the subtle awfulness of R's father giving her a cigar box on her first visit home after she was abducted by VFD. How old do you have to be before a cigar box is an appropriate present?

[asoue-sideblog]

[asoue-sideblog]

Violets are symbols of sapphic love, so clearly Beatrice was thinking about her firstborn like "If it's a boy, we'll name him after my ex-fiancé. But if it's a girl, I have too many amazing ex-girlfriends to pick just one, so we'll name her after the concept of love between women just like in general."

[asoue-sideblog]

"O.L.A.F. is a Powered by the Apocalypse hack based on the A Series of Unfortunate Events series of books by Lemony Snicket. It always seemed like the villains in that series were having a lot more fun than the protagonists- which, I suppose, they'd have to, as the Baudelaire orphans are known for being singularly unfortunate. Count Olaf's troupe got to put on fanciful disguises and trick extremely gullible people into enabling them to commit dramatic acts of villainy- and why shouldn't those of us unable to pursue such a career in reality get to experience the thrills of being a completely horrible person through the medium of tabletop roleplaying?"