#honestly wheres the line between stilted and 'read a lot of books as a kid'

[nepnym]

, . sometimes i have to look up words that i get the vibe of that my significant other uses whenever its a weight bearing word in a sentence

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

[clonerightsagenda]

Here are my collected thoughts, so far, about the ASOUE television series as a whole. I'll preface this by saying that I really enjoyed it and it was one of the best book to screen adaptations I've seen. It was fun, visually appealing, pretty darn faithful to the original material, full of Easter eggs for fans, and skillful at adopting supplemental material to flesh out the story. Some more organized thoughts below:

Unreality

Every time I started a new season of the show, I had to get re-accustomed to the rapid fire, almost stilted way the characters deliver their lines. However, I think that's intentional, along with the way that the outfits look more like costumes and the settings look more like sets than the real world. It gives the whole show the feel of a historical reenactment on TV, like we're watching a simulation of what Lemony could uncover with his research. Once I got used to it, I liked it, along with the overall surreal atmosphere.

Olaf

At first I found it odd that both the movie and TV series make Olaf far more of a humorous character than he is in the books, but book!Olaf is legitimately scary. Watching a sinister grown man terrorize three children for 25 episodes might become too distressing to function well as entertainment. Allowing us to laugh at him occasionally breaks the tension, even if it does fundamentally change his characterization.

The desperate for approval angle in the third season was also new (as far as I can remember, I haven't read the books for a year or so) but I can see where you could extrapolate it from his general theatrical behavior. As I mentioned in my commentary about previous seasons, the TV show is more of an ensemble cast rather than focusing solely on the Bauedelaires' story, so it makes sense to give Olaf some sort of arc as well if we're going to keep cutting back to him. It further undercuts his menace, but they'd already done that. It allows the show to push harder on the parallel between him and the Baudelaires as he complains that every parental figure in his life died or let him down. We may or may not pity him, but we can begin to understand and respect the children even more for not turning out like him. That also helps set up the strange, unfamiliar situation where all his confidence and power is stripped away in The End, since the tv version slimmed that down.

VFD

This is probably the change I found most frustrating, but to be fair, it wasn't a change at all from the books. ASOUE!Lemony is pretty nostalgic about VFD. Most of the more straightforward clues that neither the firefighters or firelighters were really great are present in the unauthorized autobiography. It might have been tricky to work the whole 'We stole children and brainwashed them into donating their fortunes to finance our organization for years until half of us decided burning down their houses and stealing the money right then was way more satisfying' without distracting from the Baudelaires' story. I get that. I'm not entirely sure how I would've done it. (I will probably let you know once I think of an idea.) Anyway, we still get the chef's salad speech and hints about moral grayness (the fire fighters created the mycelium, Olaf's accusations, grooming children to be secret agents and dragging kids into dangerous missions with no preparation, etc.) but framing the opera incident as an accident stole the series' best example that allegedly noble people can do wicked things just as wicked people can do noble things. It dropped a lot of the inner conflict from the last book as the children tried to grapple with their parents’ legacy. Their parents’ past research ends up saving their lives, but their past actions were part of what triggered this long series of unfortunate events. That ends up robbing the series of a lot of its complexity, especially since it spins the schism as a much simpler issue.

The Ending

I wasn't sure how they would pull off giving the show a more uplifting ending after having the narrator announce multiple times that it was going to be unhappy, but honestly I think having Lemony not know how things turned out past TPP until the last minute was a brilliant way to handle that. It gave us some much needed closure not only for the Baudelaires (we don't know much, but we know they're alright) but for minor characters (ymmv but I enjoyed the more sympathetic henchpeople and am glad they're ok) and for our long-suffering narrator himself. I loved the meta gag of seeing Lemony writing the first book and then quoting it with Beatrice; I'm always a sucker for that kind of thing.  As a kid, it was valuable for me to read a series that suggested adults aren't always right, things aren't always simple, and happy endings don't always happen, but right now, I want to think that they can. (Plus, some stuff in the Beatrice Letters and a few throwaway lines in ASOUE imply the Baudealaires survived anyway, so it's not a total divergence from canon.)

The Randomness and Unfairness of the World

Snicket warns readers the ending will not be happy or satisfying, and the books certainly fulfill that promise. You don't really know what happens, and there's a possibility some of the main characters drown or were eaten by a sea monster. The show obviously does not do this. I already mentioned that I preferred this based on our rather distressing modern times, which could also be described as an incomplete history of injustice, but what about theme? A big theme in the books is uncertainty and randomness. The Baudelaires are dropped in the middle of something they don't understand and are shunted from place to place, victims of adults' complicated machinations or genuine incompetence. There's a lot they don't know and will never find out, and the reader is left in their shoes - stuck only knowing what the children learned or Lemony was able to uncover. We're shown over and over again that the world is not fair. It does not always makes sense. It is not interested in tying up loose ends for you. I think that's a valuable message for kids to see, dark as it is. It's realistic, and we're supposed to share the Baudelaires' distress and confusion.

The show does not stick with this theme. Consistently, it reveals things that were only hinted at in the books. Viewers get to stay a step ahead of the Baudelaires. As I mentioned in commentary on previous seasons, I think that ends up working because the TV show spends a lot of time expanding the universe, although it does rob the impact of scenes like the children realizing the underground passage from 667 Dark Avenue goes to their house. We're no longer as lost in the world as they are.

I think both have their place, honestly. The books allow us to relate very closely to the protagonists, while the show creates a more satisfying holistic experience. Since many of the viewers have read the books, it's almost like we're gifted with the benefit of hindsight.

Does giving us answers ruin the theme of the book entirely? YMMV, I think. It does mean we lose something, I think. However, Handler didn't leave all the gaps in his narrative to torture us. He doesn't hand us the answers, but he provides plenty of clues in the series and its supplementary material. By piecing together that apocrypha, you may not be able to answer every question, but you can take a good stab at it. So I don't think Handler wants you to be a frustrated reader as much as a critical and active one. That's hard to do in a television show, so they had to lay more out there. They're different: different formats, different themes, different reader/viewer experiences. Imo, both are effective at what they try to do.

[planetsam]

Hi! Are you still taking stranger things prompts? If so could you write a story where Mike gets badly hurt? With Eleven super worried and maybe some Hopper also worried about his son in law? It's ok if you don't of course but thanks in advance!!!

“Hey, kid.”

Eleven has her back to him, curled in the chair. The kid weighs 80 pounds soaking wet, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her look smaller. It hurts to see her like this. But maybe that’s just the effect that hospitals have on him now, they make everyone seem smaller.

“You go in yet?” He asks, nodding at the door. He gets no response, “I know it might not seem like it, but he’s there. You can talk to him. He can hear you,” he says. No response, “kid—“

“I can’t talk.”

Hopper looks at her.

“You’re talking to me right now,” he says. He gets one of those sighs from her, the ones that remind him he’s dealing with a teenager. Jonathan set his bar way too high for this, not all teenagers are responsible male versions of Joyce Byers. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Mike talked. Every day. I knew everything,” she says, then buries her face back in her knees, “I can’t talk,” she repeats.

Hopper feels his heart breaking all over again. The Wheeler kid’s always been good with stories, like Will is with art. Eleven’s language has come far but it’s still a lot to overcome. When she’s upset it’s still more a mess of sounds and stilted words, but she’s just as likely to be silent. He doesn’t blame her for not wanting to talk. But he knows she’ll regret it if she doesn’t. How many things does he regret not telling Sara? He puts a hand on her back.

“What if we go in and you only talk if you feel like it? Or I can talk and you can hold his hand, so he’ll know you’re there?”

She raises her red rimmed eyes to him, giving him a look that’s so completely offended he almost cracks a smile.

“You don’t sound like me,” she says.

“What are you talking about? Of course I do,” he objects and raises his voice as high as he can, “nothing happens, where’s mike, more eggos—“

She claps a hand over his mouth and shake her head.

“That totally sounded like you,” he says.

“No.”

“I think you’re judging a little harshly,” he says, “we should get ask an expert.”

Her eyes go to the door and she looks down at her sneakers. Hopper puts his hand on her back. She blinks hard and he knows she’s trying not to cry. Honestly he’s kind of surprised there are any tears left in her after the past few hours.

“Mike knows how you talk,” he reminds her, softening his voice, “he likes it just fine. I think he just wants to know you’re there.”

She raises her eyes and look at the door. Hopper’s got a warped view of kids, another thing he can chalk up to cancer taking from him. But she pushes herself up and walks to the door and he can’t be anything but impressed. Eleven goes for the door handle and stops, turning to look at him. Thankfully he doesn’t need a dictionary to translate this one. He gets up and walks over, opening the door.

It’s pretty fucking heartbreaking.

Wheelers growing like a weed but it looks like he’s being treated like one. Tubes are everywhere. The worst is the one in between his lips. Hopper wishes the sound of his lungs being inflated and deflated didn’t make his heart ache. He wishes he didn’t know what the readouts meant, he wishes he couldn’t speak this language. But he can and he does and the only bright spot is that he can tell Eleven where she can sit on the bed without disturbing anything.

“Hi, Mike,” she says slowly, watching his face for any kind of response. There’s none. Eleven frowns at the white bandages and Mike’s shaved head, “no hair,” she says.

“It’ll grow back,” Hopper says, “yours did.”

She looks at Mike like that might wake him up and Hopper knows he’s got to explain this to her. What the hell do words like ‘coma’ mean to her? She’s barely got a grasp on the words in the vocab book he bought her.

“When he wakes up it’ll be slow,” he says, “not like on the soap operas.”

“I know.”

“It’ll be—“ he continues and then stops, “you know?”

Eleven nods.

Some part of him doesn’t honestly want to hear. There’s enough random cruelty that’s led to this, he doesn’t need the intentional kind. But Eleven is gently skimming her hand up and down Mike’s forearm, her other fixed on his still eyelids like she knows this. His mouth goes dry at the thought that he isn’t the only one who speaks this language.

“Nine and Ten didn’t wake up,” she says, “I did. Eight did.”

“You were in a coma?” He questions. Eleven looks at him silently for a moment before looking back at Mike, “when?” She shrugs, “Jesus,” he swears, “don’t be like nine and ten,” he tells Mike.

“Don’t be like eight,” Eleven mutters.

He lets them stay for as long as they can, hoping he’ll give her enough time before he realizes that there’s no such thing. She’ll sit in that bed forever if she has to and he can’t let that happen. When it gets dark and he gets really hungry—which means she must be starving—he clears his throat.

“Okay, we gotta go,” he says.

Eleven nods sadly and leans forward, whispering something he can’t hear before kissing the corner of Mike’s mouth.

When they leave she cries the whole way home.

It takes a week of watching this for him to get the idea.

A weekof watching her try to string together longer sentences, two weeks of embarrassment adding to the hurt. He knows she feels like she’s failing. He knows Wheeler doesn’t think that. It’s not the others fault that they talk endlessly. Constantly. That the hours they spend are full of chatter, while hers are a handful of words. She stops eating unless forced, she’s punishing herself and he can’t stand it.

The idea comes to him when he’s in the loft and he almost breaks his neck and gives himself a concussion. He doesn’t. He manages to find the ladder and scramble down, getting to the boxes underneath the floorboards. He finds it, still bright and floral. A rush of guilt hits him for it still being down there. But it also feels like it was just waiting for him. He pulls the top off and moves the rest of it aside, finding what he wants at the bottom.

In the morning Eleven comes to breakfast and pauses, looking at the stack of books.

“Sit, eat,” Hopper says as she picks one up, studying the bright picture on the cover, “you know what that says?” He asks. She nods, “can you say it?”

“Green Eggs and Ham,” she says.

Hopper nods.

“It’s hard sometimes to talk to someone who doesn’t talk back,” he says and Eleven’s face falls, “but you can read to him,” he adds quickly.

Eleven looks at the bright books and then carefully moves them aside, taking the one at the bottom out of the stack. He immediately knows that he should have expected it. Expected that. She looks up at him and he nods. When she pushes herself back from the table he kicks himself.

“Eat first.”

She eats.

She goes in alone but he watches from the window as she sits in her usual spot, this time putting Mike’s hand on her knee so she can use both to hold the book. She goes back to the beginning. Hopper doesn’t even need to be in there to hear it, he’s heard the story so many times he’s practically got it memorized. He watches as her posture straightens, as her confidence slowly grows during even that first visit. Hoppers not sure if he believes the doctors when they say Mike can hear them, but if he can he’s pretty sure he’d be damn proud of her.

Anne and her Green fucking Gables don’t wake him up.

Nor does her Island, her Windy Poplars—not for the first time he’s glad Anne isn’t real or he’d have a lot of things to say. Like why is she in so many books, for one. Eleven reads all of them to Mike. At some point he vaguely thinks if he was in a coma he’d wake up to give her some life advice. But Mike stays still. Words like long term care are being floated around and it breaks his fucking heart. Not just because he knows deep down Wheeler’s a good kid, but because Eleven’s lost enough in her life. And even if she hadn’t, even if she had a perfect life he wouldn’t want her to lose him.

“Then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that,” she reads one day, falling silent. Hopper watches as she marks the page and sets the book to the side, picking up Mike’s hand. She closes her eyes. A part of him wants to stop her, a part of him wants to let her try, “Mike,” she says, her eyes still closed, “Mike!”

He feels the name echo in his bones and doesn’t understand what’s happening. But he isn’t sure he’s supposed to. He looks over at the machines as the endless lines change for the first time in weeks. He swears, loudly and runs over to the bed. Eleven doesn’t open her eyes as he pulls her away, but he swears he sees Mike’s fingers twitch. Try to hold on. He gets her into the chair near the bed and throws his coat over her, snatching the book back at the last minute. He doesn’t have to look winded or surprised when the doctors come running in. He fucking is. On both accounts.

They’re surprised, they can join the fucking club on that one.

“He’s waking up,” one of them says.

“No shit,” Hopper gets out. He looks at Eleven and swears. He’s gonna be sleeping in this god damn hospital room isn’t he? “How long?”

“It’s hard to say—“

“Guess,” he orders.

“A few days?”

“A few days?!”

It’s a few days.

Movement of the limbs is first, followed by his eyes starting to move. Eleven stops what she’s doing on the second day, much to his relief because the bloody noses are hard to hide. On the third day Wheeler wakes up properly. It happens right when everyone’s down in the cafeteria and they only went because he swore he’d be there. He didn’t think it’d actually happen. But it did and Wheeler immediately answers the questions he had about him being okay by fighting the ventilator he’s still on. Hopper has to use actual strength to hold the kid down.

“Calm down,” he orders, gripping his shoulder, “relax, don’t—hey, stop that. Look at me. Don’t fight it.”

Wheeler opens his eyes. They’re hazy but they react when they see him. He’ll forgive the disappointment in them, just this once. He holds him down and smacks the call button to get someone in here. At the same time he raises up the bed, though it’s not exactly going to make him more comfortable. The kids been through hell and back and the moment he looks over Hopper’s shoulder he lights up like a fucking Christmas tree.

“Mike!”

Hopper barely manages to keep his footing as he’s all but thrown from the bed. Eleven throws her arms around Mike’s shoulders and his hand comes around her waist as much as it can. Its the first time Hopper’s seen Eleven relax since this whole thing started. He’s relieved too. Relieved enough to not be worried that she’s gonna use her powers on the doctors. He does jerk his head towards the chair and she moves, but she keeps holding Mike’s had as they come into the room.

“Mr. Wheeler,” the doctor begins, shining the light in his eyes and making Mike wince, “welcome back.”

They perform some tests. The worst is when they take the ventilator out. It’s the first time they both looks scared, but Eleven grips his hand and the doctors have him cough. When he doesn’t stop coughing she rubs his back until he can. He looks up at her with tears still on his face and she leans close to hear him with the breathing mask covering his mouth and nose.

“I heard you,” he rasps.

“I tried to talk,” she says tearfully, “but—“ he squeezes her hand. Hopper sits back in the chair.

“Thank you,” he says, “you sounded great.”

He goes with Mrs. Wheeler to listen to the doctor because apparently he’s the designated guy for that around here. When they come back, Eleven is in a new spot, next to Mike. His head is on her shoulder, he’s falling asleep. Eleven is reading aloud as he dozes, propping the book up on her knees so she can keep their hands squeezed tight together.

“Do you think they’ll hyphenate?” Mrs. Wheeler asks.

At this rate, Hopper thinks, it’ll be a miracle if the Wheeler’s don’t kill him with the stress level they cause. Hell he’s the one who’ll wind up in the hospital bed at this rate. But Mrs. Wheeler looks pleased at his horrified reaction, pleased enough to slip away and give them a few moments more. She’s a way better person than he is. When they’re married they can dow whatever they want but if Wheeler’s moving his hands, they better stay off Eleven.

He goes back in the room.