there’s an interesting subtext in a series of unfortunate events regarding how the series treats literacy and the idea of being ‘well-read’
we get the impression from early on that well-read people are virtuous, and less well-read people are villains. the baudelaires and associates all quote classic literature and poetry, whereas olaf and his ilk don’t seem to care and scorn the idea, making a point to burn libraries. this is best seen in the grim grotto, where the good-aligned characters wear uniforms with herman melville’s image on them, who the narration explains is a good author. the villais wear uniforms with edward guest on them, who both lemony and klaus disparage.
olaf, too, is this idea to the extreme. we see him have trouble with spelling, in penultimate peril in particular he tries to spell poison as ‘poyzon’. he mocks klaus’ literary tastes, and doesn’t care much for the more high-minded interests of the kids and volunteers he fights.
and yet. olaf goes out quoting phillip larkin off the top of his head. and he has a pretty good vocabulary. he’s not stupid, not really.
is it possible that olaf just has dyslexia, or something similar, that bars him from reading classic literature? if so, what does that say about vfd’s treatment of him? could his struggles to engage with literature have alienated him from the volunteer side of the schism and driven him into the arms of the villains? it’s not hard to see how a kid treated like he was lesser than the others of his generation might turn away from them and want to strike back at the organisation that hurt him (we see this more explicitly in the netflix canon, where we see the aftermath of the night at the opera)
and i think that if this point is being made, it’s intentionally as a point on the 'vfd isn’t always morally good’ column. after all, the baudelaire parents and kit snicket are well-read, and we know they have done some things that range from kinda questionable to outright morally reprehensible. and that seems to be part of the subtext of kit and olaf’s death scenes - that they are not so different, that they were forged in the fire of vfd in exactly the same way, that both of them did some pretty messed up stuff in the name of the organisation that practically raised them, regardless of which side of the schism they were on. it chewed them up and spat them out and led to them dying alone and distraught on the same beach, beside each other, casualties of a pointless war.
in the end, it’s not how much you’ve read that makes the difference. it’s the person you are and what you do with the knowledge you’ve attained.
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