#lemony snicket books

[feyres-divorce-lawyer]

asoue girlies when a series of events are indeed unfortunate

[um-respectfully-no]

asoue hit different when you were like twelve and had emotionally abusive parents but you grew up homeschooled and isolated so every adult you had access to was friends with and/or exactly like your parents so when you told them you were met with "oh that's normal" and "your mom's a really nice lady though" and you just kinda looked at the baudelaires like "fucking same though"

[belamercado]

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I'll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I'll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.

- Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events

[makethosenarratorsfight]

UNRELIABLE NARRATORS; FINALS.

Eugenides Propaganda:

the entire plot hinges on a detail he lets the reader (and every other character) assume is true. I don't want to spoil it because it's a really fun reveal but he is lying from the first second he appears on the page and you can't trust him to tell the full truth about ANYTHING related to himself and his goals. he mostly does it to keep his advantage and not have other characters be suspicious of him but it's just so fun when you realise he's been lying the whole time

Lemony Snicket Propaganda:

(I would like to preface this by saying that Lemony Snicket is the author's pen name, not a real person, and he exists as a character in-universe as well as being the one in-universe who writes the books!) I'd say he's unreliable because he spent time collecting information about the Baudelaire kids and then... wrote books about it. He has no idea what any of their dialogue actually was, what they were thinking, or even the whole plot, he's just doing research into the incidents and then filling in the gaps to make it a story. What ACTUALLY happened to the Baudelaires? Nobody really knows for sure

While the Baudelaire siblings are in potentially life threatening danger, he will randomly start talking about his own life and just leave the siblings hanging. For example, once Count Olaf was threatening to kill Violet, and then Lemony randomly began talking about how he met the love of his life at a costume party. This man CANNOT stay on topic. Usually when a new character is introduced, Lemony tells us right at the start that they’re either going to die or that the Baudelaire siblings will never see them again. Foreshadowing is not subtle in these books. CONSTANTLY emphasizes how miserable he feels while writing these books. At one point he admits that he had to put his pencil down and go cry for a while because of how sad it made him. Once he filled an entire page with nothing but the word “ever” to emphasize how dangerous it is to put forks in electrical outlets. He also repeated a paragraph about deja vu later on in the book to give the reader deja vu.

[amiserableseriesofevents]

Reading ASOUE as a child, I didn't end up with a Violet Baudelaire complex (tying my hair up every time I have to think), or a Klaus Baudelaire complex (reading a shit ton of books about everything), but a rarer third thing I like to call a Lemony Snicket complex (I am very very sad, I write, I love desperately, and I still hope for the best)

[lunamonchtuna]

when lemony snicket wrote “I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every tuesday” brb gotta jump off the roof

[quotespile]

The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

[jasminumtea]

A series of unfortunate events: reimagined 🥀

[athena-theunicorn]

The Baudelaires: That's count Olaf! Every adult in a five mile radius: Don't be ridiculous.

[mirefireflies]

i am once again thinking about a series of unfortunate events and the way that it twists the idea of being doomed by the narrative. specifically the song at the end of the first season and the effect of having the villain, a cartoonishly evil and awful man, sing about the inescapability of tragedy. because he IS the tragedy he is what causes all the unfortunate events and suffering… but when he sings that there’s no happy endings it almost seems like he’s also trapped in the narrative. the story has already happened, its being told to us after the fact when it’s too late for anyone to change how it ends, but the song creates this strange feeling that olaf is also doomed, except he’s doomed to be the villain in this story. it’s not as if he makes any effort not to be the villain of course, but for just a moment, you realize that his fate is also already written and his role in the story cannot change because the story cannot change. he has already done all these terrible things and the story has already been written but then there’s this brief moment of awareness, where all the characters turn to the audience and say “this is a tragedy and it has no happy ending and that’s just how the story goes,” and it’s as if none of them have any control over the narrative, not even the villains. that’s just how the story goes

[paigesqualor]

literally them

[ilovehowyoufeel]

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[blendereels]

If you were to inspect the last remaining octopuses in Stain'd-by-the-Sea, you may be surprised to see that they are entirely black. Their ink is exceptionally dark and incredibly staining. As the octopus population has shrank and been pushed into smaller pools, the same few schools of octopi have been used for their ink, becoming gradually darker.

Stain'd octopuses were named after the town closest to their habitat rather than their discoloration, which is a recent development. The Stain'd octopuses that still live in the sea have retained their ability to change colors.

[makethosenarratorsfight]

UNRELIABLE NARRATORS; THE FINAL FINAL

Shen Qingqiu Propaganda:

The entire series is told from his POV and the story seems like a comedy. The side stories from other characters POVs make the story sound like a tragedy. He thought that Luo Binghe hated him and wanted him dead while everyone else knew that Binghe was in love with him.

the whole book he’s using his OWN interpretation of the world to explain literally everything, not knowing that his introduction into the world changed it so fundamentally that his prior knowledge of it is less than useless. he’s like “binghe is being sweet to me because binghe is sweet to people that wronged him before repaying their slight a thousandfold, and he only adds their acceptance of his sweetness to his tally of their sins!! i have to run away forever or he’ll tear my arms and legs off!!!!!!” and binghe in reality is like “wow the love of my life my beloved shizun is scared of me still :( i should act sweet and nonthreatening so he’s not scared of me :(“ and he literally doesn’t have this corrected until the end of the book. but even when that one thing is corrected he still is like “haha okay but these other six things-“ bro……. cucumber bro………….. you homosexualized the world just accept it

He examines the entire reality he's isekai-ed into as if it's still fictional and his inner monologue ignores any "character trait" of the people around him that doesn't fit into his perception of "canon" despite everything he's done to change reality from the canon of the novel he first read. He routinely mislabels his own emotions as well as making heteronormative assumptions about himself and the people around him before he finally realises he's in reciprocated gay love with a man. It's a book that benefits being read twice, so the second time around you can focus on the implications Shen Qingqiu blatantly misses.

Transmigrates into a novel he “hates,” assumes he’s doing a good job pretending to be the character whose body he got stuck in, assumes other characters will stick to their original paths. Lotta assumptions, lots of rationalizing, lots of incredible feats of misunderstanding/misinterpreting things. His internal narration is also hysterical.

Lemony Snicket Propaganda:

(I would like to preface this by saying that Lemony Snicket is the author's pen name, not a real person, and he exists as a character in-universe as well as being the one in-universe who writes the books!) I'd say he's unreliable because he spent time collecting information about the Baudelaire kids and then... wrote books about it. He has no idea what any of their dialogue actually was, what they were thinking, or even the whole plot, he's just doing research into the incidents and then filling in the gaps to make it a story. What ACTUALLY happened to the Baudelaires? Nobody really knows for sure

While the Baudelaire siblings are in potentially life threatening danger, he will randomly start talking about his own life and just leave the siblings hanging. For example, once Count Olaf was threatening to kill Violet, and then Lemony randomly began talking about how he met the love of his life at a costume party. This man CANNOT stay on topic. Usually when a new character is introduced, Lemony tells us right at the start that they’re either going to die or that the Baudelaire siblings will never see them again. Foreshadowing is not subtle in these books. CONSTANTLY emphasizes how miserable he feels while writing these books. At one point he admits that he had to put his pencil down and go cry for a while because of how sad it made him. Once he filled an entire page with nothing but the word “ever” to emphasize how dangerous it is to put forks in electrical outlets. He also repeated a paragraph about deja vu later on in the book to give the reader deja vu.

[wandalives]

persephone had it right

“a burning hill,” mitski/“the beatrice letters,” lemony snicket/“cigarettes & saints,” the wonder years/“the beatrice letters,” lemony snicket/“samson,” regina spektor/“the beatrice letters,” lemony snicket/“letters to doc,” cathy linh che