#asoue meta

[monmouthmintleaves]

As much as I enjoy the Netflix series and generally like these characters on their own, I’ve always found the inclusion or Jacqueline and Larry Your Waiter and even the changes made to Olivia Caliban to undermine the core theme of the adults in the Baudelaire lives constantly failing them. If anything TPP makes in explicit that in the best case scenario for VFD children are put in precarious situations. And all the attempts to make these adults competent can only go so far because it would interfere with The Word of God. Like the banality of the Baudelaires predicament is that they’re failed by both their Allies and their adversaries at every turn - coincidentally the same lesson lemony learns by the end of ATWQ

[inthemoodforblastt]

Well... Hi, I really admire the way you conduct your analyses and I'm truly happy about the blog's restart; nobody could stand those clueless anonymous users anymore. Since this is a multifandom blog now and I saw that you like ASOUE (P.S.: One of my favorite sagas since I was 10 years old), I wanted to know what you think about Lemony Snicket and his role as narrator, since it's been shown that he can be an unreliable narrator many times. That's it, a kiss and all the best to you.

(English is not my first language and I'm using Google Translate to write this, sorry for any mistakes)

ASOUE is interesting because it’s like a huge thirteen-book fairy tale, and it has a very dark, almost horror-story tone. In fact, the real horror in ASOUE is the anxiety it gives you as a child, when your biggest fear —the fear any kid has, even those who had to grow up fast or fend for themselves— keeps coming true over and over: that all the adults will fail you and you’ll be left alone having to manage everything without a support network. I remember feeling so anxious every time an adult didn’t take the Baudelaires seriously or failed them, or even tried to protect them but was clearly doing a terrible job, and you could see that if things ended badly it was because they treated the children condescendingly. And now, as an adult, I think about it and I understand it perfectly. It’s what I find most wonderful about the series: the author understands that the real terror for a child is being alone and feeling alone, feeling like you can’t rely on anyone because there are no adults around who can truly help you, so you have to save yourself. That idea is terrifying, and the story uses it brilliantly.

Writing the series as a kind of biographical, journalistic account of the Baudelaires is very clever, and so is the fact that Snicket, as both narrator and active character, gradually reveals himself to be completely biased, with a very partial view of events. In fact, by the end we discover that Snicket knew from the beginning why Olaf does what he does and has been pretending not to know, he’s one of the many adults who fail the children, which adds a very interesting twist to the story. What’s great about ASOUE is that in the end you realize the narration itself is unreliable because the story is being told by yet another adult who should have protected the children but fails miserably. And it’s wonderful. I’ve always thought it’s an incredibly intelligent series for many reasons, but the theme of adults collectively being a disaster is the perfect finishing touch.

[twiceroyaldove]

oh hey i have an asoue question

why did beatrice and bertrand try to build a tunnel from the island to anwhistle aquatics?

to burn it down and kill gregor, as a vfd assignment

to burn it down and kill gregor, acting alone

to burn it down (vfd assignment) and kill gregor (not part of the assignment)

to sabotage the medusoid mycelium but not with arson or murder (vfd assignment)

to sabotage the medusoid mycelium but not with arson or murder (acting alone)

to take control of MM for their own faction's use & kill g (vfd assignment)

to take control of MM for their own faction's use & kill g (acting alone)

to take control of MM (vfd assignment) & kill g (not part of the assignment)

to take control of MM for their own faction's use, no murder* (vfd assignment)

to take control of MM for their own faction's use, no murder* (acting alone)

just to have a connection to a vfd facility, nothing to do with MM

something else👀

Voting ended onAug 24, 2024

* "no murder" as in no murdering of gregor or anyone else inside the facility during this particular mission. these options are agnostic as to whether they would use the medusoid mycelium for murder.

[littlestsnicket]

the more i think about it, the more confused i am by the headcanon that the baudelaire parents tried to leave vfd. and especially that it’s so prevalent that it seems like most of fandom doesn’t even realize it’s a headcanon?

by asoue standards, we have really concrete evidence that the baudelaire parents are actively involved in vfd up until their deaths. we know that beatrice was collecting documents from an associate involved in vfd the day they played in the fountain. klaus remembers their parents getting upset that he found books in the library that were very very strongly implied to contain vfd secrets. the baudelaire parents are strongly implied to be involved in the sugar bowl plot, and while it takes a lot of inference to get that from the original publication of asoue, it’s pretty explicit in the annotated version of the bad beginning and the dinner party story (which i can’t remember where it was published at the moment, but i think i first read it on the snicket sleuth blog).

anyway. all of the available evidence indicates that the baudelaire parents were actively involved with vfd and that vfd respected their decision as to how involved they wanted their children to be. and i think this is really really important to the themes of the series and how you are supposed to interpret the ending of the baudelaires actively choosing to re-engage with the world, because they believe that is what their parents would have wanted, and, after their experience with ishmael, they believe their parents are right.

[eyeofthebrainstorm]

I remember Handler once saying something like: count Olaf looks and acts whatever kids think old people look and act. And it got me thinking. You know how asoue is set in a vague time period, and it was also always visually adapted to keep that aspect undefined. I think asoue is set in a kid's Idea of the Past. The only thing a reader needs to perceive at the beginning is that this a story being told that already happened some time ago. Also to feed in that sense of helplessness to the situation. It's in the past, there's nothing we can do about it. We can't fix it.

I think we are told to believe, especially when we're young, that major problems in life and in the world belong to the past. We had terrible wars, hate and violence. We were poor uncultured barbarians for some time, but we evolved! We're better now! Just go and see how bad things were before, you'll understand.

But as you grow up you see that it isn't true. Bad things are catching up with us every day, we carry aftermaths through generation, and that undefined "past" where bad things are segregated it's not strange and unfamiliar. It's yesterday.

And so when you're a kidand you're told that bad thing happened to good but unfortunate children, your mind puts these events in the "past". Because there's no way this could happen now. But as the story goes on you can feel the distance getting shorter, you understand the proportion of time. The writer himself gets closer to the events he's telling. He's not picking up clues of a disntant past, his following a trail which bring us back to "now". And you begin to notice how that "past" looks like your present.

[unfortunate-stranger-losers]

anyway i firmly believe that in the 2004 movie universe, klaus is the biological lembea kid and not violet 

evidence: 

klaus gets way more focus and introspective in the film, to the point where it's, from a doylist perspective, blatantly sexist, because in the books violet mostly gets that 

exact same voice as atwq!lemony (liam aiken narrated the atwq audiobooks) 

doesn’t need glasses 100% of the time bc he didn’t get vision problems from bertrand 

sp*rty 

in that same vein, his inventing skills are a recessive snicket gene that kit also had 

idolizes the shit out of his older sister (”what would violet do?” / “i wish you were here”) 

snarky as shit

"do the scary thing first, get scared later" 

you can't tell me atwq!lemony didn't disassociate at hungry's until jake asked him what the fuck he was doing 

[asoue-sideblog]

The Marvelous Marriage shouldn’t be legally binding, because Violet was coerced into signing the marriage document. Before Violet reveals her handedness gambit, Klaus says “You promised to let [Sunny] go!” and in response Olaf calls Fernald to tell him to bring Sunny to the theater. Olaf has clearly demonstrated in front of Justice Strauss and Mr Poe that he was holding Sunny hostage to frighten her siblings into cooperating - even if he hadn’t been doing anything illegal to threaten Sunny, that’s extortion. I don’t think there’s any code of law in the world that would absolutely require a judge to enforce an extorted signature. It makes no sense that Justice Strauss would be unable to, at the very least, declare a voidable marriage. (Still potentially risks the fortune since it might take time for Violet to officially contest the marriage in court, but Strauss should have at least mentioned it as an option.) Also, I seriously doubt there’s no other legal issues with the marriage and with Count Olaf withdrawing the entire Baudelaire fortune. It is unimaginable to me, based on my understanding of real-world legal systems, that Justice Strauss and Mr Poe would have absolutely no room to challenge him.

Of course, ASOUE is absurdist fiction, so it’s 1000% valid to assume that the law somehow really does work that way in Snicketverse. But personally I think it doesn’t. I think there were things Justice Strauss (and Mr Poe) could have done.

First of all, after the marriage is voided by the handedness argument, Violet mentions that Sunny was being dangled out of a tower window; Justice Strauss and Mr Poe take Violet’s word for it and declare that Olaf will go to jail for that crime. But they already knew Olaf was holding Sunny hostage in some capacity. Extortion of a signature is illegal. Even if that’s not enough, they could have questioned the children for more details about what Klaus and Olaf were talking about and where Sunny was. Then the authorities would have justification to arrest Olaf. Even if this somehow nonsensically didn’t provide legal justification to challenge the marriage or forbid him from touching the fortune, at the very least jail time would keep Olaf away from the kids and stall his banking transactions. But the two adults were too focused on how Olaf had tricked them to notice this possibility. (They weren’t thinking about where Sunny was, or what Olaf had done to make Klaus and Violet play along - they weren’t thinking about the children at all.) If they missed this solution, they could have missed other solutions.

Second of all, in The Penultimate Peril, Daniel Handler criticizes strict constructionism (that is, a philosophy that judges must interpret the laws as literally as possible, with no room for personal judgment) through an allusion to its infamous proponent, Justice Scalia.

In TPP, Strauss asks the children to follow the law even after realizing the High Court itself is rotten to its core. She is foolish and inflexible, rigidly sticking with the idea of trying to bring criminals to justice even as it becomes increasingly obvious that the legal system is broken. I believe Strauss leans heavily towards strict constructionism. (Sunny’s quote is criticizing a High Court decision, and Strauss is a High Court judge.) Of course Justice Strauss would enforce a wildly unethical marriage based on the most literal interpretation of the law, passing over the obvious consent and coercion issues in favor of splitting hairs over the phrase “own hand”. She has the justification and the power to challenge the marriage, but she won’t do it, because it goes against her ideological interpretation of a judge’s role.

[homeinabookshelf]

Now I know that the reason that the opera scene used adult actors is because the producers wanted to give Patrick Warburton the scene, but there could be some really cool meaning behind it. What if they look like adults though they were supposed to be teenagers at the time because they’ve been forced out of their childhood for far longer than they should’ve been. Based on ATWQ, they’ve been making “adult” choices since they were like 13.