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lorbanery · 7 months ago

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Okay.

I've gotten some sleep, I've gotten some emotional distance, I am reenergized, so let me try and get into this.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is an excellent series. I started reading it after I graduated high school, so probably somewhere between books 10 and 11 eleven getting released. I don't remember how I found them, but I was immediately hooked awaited the releases of the final three books with the same excitement I also awaited the release of the final three books of the other more popular book series that was being published around the same time. I remember feeling excitement and devastation when I found out that both series would be publishing their final books one after the other.

But while we've since purged our household of the latter series, I've ardently held onto my complete collection of ASOUE. Both because of my personal enjoyment of the series, and in the hopes of introducing our kid to it when they're older. Well, introducing it to them properly.

See, I've already started reading it to them, even though they're only a toddler. See, one night after dinner, they started pulling the books off the bookshelf and handing them to me and @ark-shifter demanding we read them. One after another, we'd get through the a bit of the intro paragraphs and have another book shoved at us. But reading those paragraphs got me hooked again and since the only way to convince the toddler to go upstairs for bath and bedtime was to let them bring one of the books up, on a whim, I decided to start reading them at bedtime.

I don't expect them to understand anything that's going on — they're very good at nouns and pretty good at verbs, but adjectives are still a work in process and names are hit or miss. But having something long and continuous to read them instead of the stopping and starting of their short baby board books can help them fall asleep easier. Sometimes. We got through books 1 and 2 mostly fine, but now we're at the climax of book 3, The Wide Windows, in which the Baudelaires have an extended scene with the character the Netflix series dubbed The Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender, who I'll just refer to as Hench for the purposes of this post.

Now, as a genderqueer person, I appreciated the Netflix series team's efforts to correct the transphobia around Hench. But I've never really seen anyone discuss the truly violent fat hate that goes hand-in-hand with it.

In some ways, it's so much worse than most children's media, because the writing style requires every single characteristic of any and all antagonist characters to be completely and utterly abhorrent. Count Olaf's unibrow and his "shiny"(????) eyes are constantly mentioned, not just as a means of making it clear when a new character is just Olaf in disguise, but also somehow as physical evidence of how evil he is. I'll be honest, I still don't know what "shiny eyes" means in this context, I've only ever seen eyes described as some variation of "shiny" to describe someone reaction of wonder, or describing that moment before someone starts full on crying. Is this just Handler's way of telling us that Olaf angry cries???? No, probably not. Is there anything inherently wrong with having a unibrow? No, of course not, it's just facial hair. Some people (lots of people, back then) will tell you it's a sign of sloppiness, that you don't groom yourself properly. People who reject beauty standards as something people need to strive for will tell you that having hair is normal and morally neutral and you don't need to shave or rip out your hair just to make other people feel more comfortable.

Hell, even when Olaf is first introduced, the fact that the hems of his pants are frayed is presented as a reason to distrust him. Like, I want to make it incredibly clear that I understand that on some level this is a story about privileged children leaving their class bubble for the first time and experience the "real world" and growing and learning better ways to identify who they can trust and becoming more empathetic and community-minded for it. But it really is something reading about these children from a very well off family latch onto some frayed pant legs as evidence he's a shady character.

Anyway, as nameless henchpeople in a piece of children's media, Olaf's crew don't get to have multiple identifying characteristics, they only have one, which informs their entire personality, how they're written, and everything they do. To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Using single notable characteristics to make it easy to identify side-characters from installment to installment is normal and effective. It can even be used in interesting ways (see every piece of media that makes fun of boyband persona tropes).

The problem here is, like I said, because of the way the books are written, everything about the antagonist characters must be written as something horrible, as the physical representation of their inner evil.

Enter: Henchie.

Henchie's identifying characteristic is that they're fat. You might argue that they actually have a secondary characteristic: Being androgynous. I understand why you might parse it that way, but trust me, a fat person, when I say that the androgyny isn't a secondary characteristic. It's just a consequence of Henchie being so fat.

Fat is the great gender eraser. Once you reach a certain size, people will come out of the woodwork to inform you that you're so fat they can't tell if you're a man or a woman (of course those are the only two options as far as they're concerned). Ever noticed that most fat femme model influencers that get any amount of mainstream attention go hard on the pinup/rockabilly style clothing and heavy glam makeup? That's why. That's what we mean when we say that fat women/femmes need to perform femininity to a higher level than thin women to have our gender/presentation accepted. These exaggerated forms of femininity are so loud and in your face that people almost see the hyper-feminine styling first before they register the fat.

So no. Henchie's androgyny isn't a separate, second characteristic. It's inherently and unavoidably tied to their fatness. It is still very much transphobic, especially when the fact that the Baudelaires "can't tell" what gender they are is explicitly mentioned as one of the scariest things about them. But that transphobia is very much a symptom of the fatphobia.

Just like the fact that, at least in the earlier books, Henchie is written as never speaking, the implication being that Henchie is disablingly unintelligent, if not outright developmentally disabled. Ableist, certainly, but again as a symptom of fatphobia. Fat people are constantly assumed to be and characterized as too stupid for our own good. That we don't understand simple concepts like "calories in/calories out" or that exercise exists. There's even the laughable insistence that we're so ignorant and stupid we don't even know that we're fat. The worst of these stereotypes characterize us like animals who are just too stupid to know when to stop eating. That left to our own devices we'll just eat and eat and eat until our stomachs explode.

This is actually punctuated in the scene in The Wide Window. What happens is that the Baudelaires need to get across a large lake. The ferry is closed, so the only other option they have is the sailboat rental company Olaf is pretending to run. Olaf is elsewhere, so they go to the rental shack hoping its empty to steal the keys for the gate to the dock where the boats are moored. Instead, they find Henchie. They're asleep at first but are woken up by thunder just as Sunny's escaping with the keys and Henchie gets up to chase after her. The chase and ensuing struggle lasts 4-1/2 pages and where any of the other henchpeople would've been shouting at the kids to "get back here!!!" or "wait until Olaf is done with you!!!" or cried out in shock when they slipped and fell and shouted some more as the Baudelaires escaped? Henchie doesn't utter a single word, in fact doesn't even make a sound.

And that's really the mildest issue I have with this chapter.

Let's talk about pain tolerance.

There's this assumption that because fat people have this large cushion of fat that we don't feel pain as strongly as thin people. You can imagine the kind of abuse this has led to. This assumption not only doesn't match reality, it ignores really basic, elementary knowledge of anatomy. In order to believe this, you have to either not know or completely actively ignore the fact that the nerves are in the skin layer.

Here's a diagram from a Johns Hopkins article about skin anatomy:

That yellow line running through the hypodermis layer is a nerve. It is near the top of the hypodermis, but sure still within the bounds of the hypodermis. However, as you can see or read in the alt text, that main nerve has many branches extending all the way up through the Dermis.

Being fat doesn't change the basic layout of your body. Your skeleton doesn't migrate to being outside of your muscle layer. Your hair follicles don't migrate to your organs. Why would our nerves migrate from our skin to ... what? Our muscle layer?

But it doesn't matter that if these people thought about it for two seconds they'd realize that it made no anatomical sense. And Daniel Handler's apparently one of those people:

Violet was kicking the creature from behind, and Sunny was biting its wrist, but the person was so Brobdingnagian—a word which here means "unbelievably husky"—that the children were causing it minimal pain a phrase which here means "no pain at all."

Which is, frankly, even more disappointing considering one of the major themes of these books is correcting people's misconceptions, especially when those misconceptions have the chance to harm someone.

And now we're really into it.

You might have noticed some troubling wording in that quote. I regret to confirm your suspicions that this is, in fact, indicative of this entire scene.

Let me throw some numbers at you. Here is every pronoun and descriptor used to indicate Henchie by the Baudelairs and the narration in this chapter, and the number of times it's used:

Massive: 1

Enormous: 1

Blob: 1

Count Olaf's comrade: 6

Looks like neither a man nor a woman: 2

Lots of flesh: 1

Dangerous: 1

Treacherous: 1

Snoring: 1

Scary: 1

He or she/him or her: 6

That/The person: 6

It: 17

Lumbered/ing: 3

The creature: 7

Shuffling: 1

Mountainous: 1

Smelly: 1

Brobdingnagian: 1

Unbelievably husky: 1

Slimy: 1

Sloppy: 1

Gloppy: 1

Chubby: 1

Despicable: 1

Now. Several of these are pretty neutral. In the best possible light, they're just accurate descriptors of Henchie — "Count Olaf's comrade", "the person", etc. Mostly I included them to give a really clear picture of just how hatefully this character is written about. While there are theoretically neutral descriptors, the vast majority of them are intended to evoke a sense of awkwardness, disgust, and a lack of humanity.

The fact that, by a HUGE margin, the most frequently used descriptor is "it", and the number two spot is "the creature" is just. I don't even have the words.

I know there are trans folks who enthusiastically use it/its pronouns, and there is nothing wrong with that. I get the gender euphoria, I especially get the spite.

But we're not talking about someone who has asked to be called "it". We're not talking about someone who feels like they've truly found themselves when people call them "it". We're not talking about someone who has actively rejected gender and reclaimed "it" from the people who've insulted and enacted violence on them.

We're talking about a character who has expressed no preference and who is being referred to as if they're a fucking frankenstein monster cobbled together from the leavings of every liposuction procedure done in the past ten years.

And it's really just driven home when you realize the one thing you would expect to see on the list, but is notably absent: The pronoun THEY.

Handler goes so far out of his way to not refer to Henchie in a way that might preserve some kind of confirmed humanity, that several of those "he or she" phrases appear in the actual dialogue. Violet is literally nervously describing what Sunny's doing inside the shack to Klaus because he can't see and instead of doing the natural thing and referring to Henchie as they/them, uses the egregiously clunky "he or she" instead. MULTIPLE TIMES. Even Klaus does it once!

Not to mention, of course, that none of these negative descriptors has anything to do with the actual reason Henchie is an antagonist — the fact that they work for Olaf and are trying to kidnap two kids and a baby so Olaf can murder them. All of them are strictly referring to the fact that they're fat. Yes, even "despicable" — Henchie is referred to as a "despicable creature", which is directly contrasted with the Baudelaires being "in reasonably good shape" and the reason they're able to get up more quickly than Henchie.

I don't know what to say here guys.

I went into this reread thinking I'd just have a fun time revisiting one of my favorite book series while lulling my toddler to sleep. Instead I found myself skipping over whole paragraphs because, even if they don't understand most of it yet, I didn't want to read out a whole scene to my kid that spends 9-1/2 pages talking about how disgusting and inhuman people like me are.

I did a quick search to see if Handler had ever made a comment or apologized, or if anyone anywhere had brought it up, the way the Netflix series team did with the transphobia. I would've even taken someone, somewhere complaining about it. But the search results brought up nothing. Just the IMDB and Wiki pages and a bunch of promotional articles from before the Netflix release that just hyped up the series.i

I don't know. I feel sad. I feel betrayed. I feel hated.

You know, this is actually a pretty good demonstration of what we're talking about when we say "[your target] can't hear you, but your [marginalized] friends do". Daniel Handler doesn't know who the fuck I am, and he certainly didn't know who I was in 2000 when The Wide Window was published. None of the things he wrote were directed at me. They weren't even directed at a real person. But, like I said before, none of the virulently cruel things he wrote about Henchie had anything to do with the actual reason they're a bad person. All they were about was the fact that they're fat. The thing that made them disgusting and stupid and awkward and numb to physical pain and inhuman was the fact that they were fat.

Anyone have a locked and loaded rant about the really violently dehumanizing fatphobia in the Series of Unfortunate Events books? I would love to hear it.

#fatphobia #fat hate #fat liberation #fatlib #a series of unfortunate events #long post #cw #tw

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