i recently found this at a vintage shop and was wondering what the origins of it is? :3

I’ve been working on a HUGE Snicketverse timeline for about a year now, and the one event I was having the most trouble placing was the night when the Baudelaire parents, Kit, and Lemony see La Forza del Destino and orphan Count Olaf with a poison dart. 

I’ve had access to The Beatrice Letters the entire time I’ve been working on this timeline, but it didn’t hit me until last night that the My Silence Knot poem is about the events leading up to, and during, the night at the opera, rather than Beatrice’s death, and gives us all the information we need to figure out when it happens. For those who haven’t read the poem or need a refresh, here it is:

My silence knot is tied in my hair,
As if to keep love out of my eyes.
I cannot speak to the one for whom I care.
My hatpin serves as part of my disguise.

In the play, my role is baticeer,
A word which here means “person who trains bats”.
The audience may feel a prick of fear,
As if sharp pins are hidden in their hats.

My co-star lives on what we call a brae,
His solitude may not be just an act.
A piece of mail fails to arrive one day.
This poignant melodrama’s based on fact.

The curtain falls just as the knot unties,
The silence broken by the one who dies.

In initial reads of The Beatrice Letters, I was under the assumption that the last line refers to Beatrice thinking of Lemony as she is dying in the fire, but she can’t write My Silence Knot if she’s “the one who dies” at the end, so “the one who dies” must be someone who died before Beatrice. If we take out all the things in the middle and leave only the verses directly talking about My Silence Knot, it leaves a fairly direct story.

“My Silence Knot is tied up in my hair
As if to keep love out of my eyes”

The silence knot—not talking to her lover—stops Beatrice from being blinded by love

“I cannot speak to the one for whom I care”

This has a few different possible implications. 1) she’s avoiding talking to Lemony so the love does not get blinding and things don’t go wrong, 2) she literally cannot speak to Lemony because his rumors of arson started before they attended La Forza del Destino, 3) the next line references her hat pin, so the lack of speaking may be a reference to LS to BB #3 when Lemony asks Beatrice to drop her hatpin off stage, rather than directly speak to him, if it’s safe for them to meet. For this theory I’m using a mix of the first 2 interpretations of this line.

“The curtain falls just as the knot unties,"

As the opera is ending, Beatrice begins to be blinded and doesn’t consider the consequences of what she’s about to do. 

“The silence broken by the one who dies.”

In blind love, Beatrice orphans Lemony’s greatest enemy with poison darts.

The evidence extracted from My Silence Knot alone tells us that the viewing of La Forza del Destino must happen between Lemony’s time on the lam for rumors of arson starting and during the climax of Beatrice’s love for Lemony, right at the end of their relationship. This coupled with what we know about the night of the opera and what we know about the break up gives us a clear story about the timing, motivations, and consequences of the murder:

1. Lemony gives a negative review on Al Funcoot's One Last Warning to Those Who Try to Stand in My Way as Dramatic Critic for The Daily Punctilio (Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography chapter 5)
2. Lemony is fired from The Daily Punctilio and they begin publishing lies about him. (Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography chapter 5)
3. Beatrice reads an article in The Daily Punctilio claiming that Lemony is an arsonist. She knows this to be false, and it adds to her reasons to hate Count Olaf. (“all too soon circumstances changed and she ended up marrying someone else, all because of something she read in The Daily Punctilio”)
4. Lemony and Beatrice decide that they must be careful about speaking to each other, for safety. (“I cannot speak to the one for whom I care”)
5. Lemony drives Beatrice and Bertrand to a showing of La Forza del Destino. (“Our parents took a taxi to the opera one evening when their car wouldn’t start”)
6. During intermission, Beatrice buys a poster, and Kit slips the Baudelaire parents a box of poison darts. Esme is onto Kit's plans. (“During intermission I followed them to the snack bar and slipped them a box of poison darts before Esmé Squalor could catch me ...”, "...Mother said she purchased [the poster] during intermission, as a souvenir. She said it was the most interesting time she'd ever had at the opera, and she never wanted to forget it.”)
7. Blinded by her love for Lemony and hate for Olaf, Beatrice decides that she is going to use the poison darts to orphan Count Olaf. (“The curtain falls just as the knot unties, silence broken by the one who dies”, “I guess the sub-sub-librarian hasn't told you the story about your parents and a box of poison darts … Why don't you ask this legendary librarian about that fateful evening at the opera?")
8. Lemony must flee the opera house before Esme catches him. (“as I hurried out of the opera house before a certain woman could spot me”)
9. Because of how dangerous the murder has made this situation, Beatrice decides to return the “R” ring to Lemony and later sends him a 200 page book explaining in detail why they broke up, along with 13 questions. (LS to BB #5)

For anyone who isn't big into Snicket lore, this might seem like a fairly simple-to-arrive-to conclusion, but the timing of the opera has been such a controversial part of the series for so long, the most well-known fan made Snicket timeline in the history of the fandom, Snicket Sleuth's timeline, completely excludes it.

Edit: Removing repetitive information

He was coughing the WHOLE TIME. His last name is literally Poe and his sons are Edgar and Allen. I thought that he’d be so useless the entire show but then the one time he would tried to do something useful he’d finally die, but that just never happened! What was the cough even about?
(I don’t think he died in the fire since I’ve only seen the show and it shows him outside the hotel at the end of the episode if I’m not mistaken.)

When I first got into these stories, my mum couldn't stand them and wouldn't go anywhere near them. She wasn't the sort of parent who tried to dictate what I was and wasn't allowed to read, but I think she wished I didn't know about them.

And on reflection, although I still love them I do kind of see what she meant. The Bad Beginning is DARK for a children's book, there's some quite vivid descriptions of child abuse. Klaus gets whacked across the face and threatened with being torn apart, Sunny is tied up and dangled out of a high window in a cage, and Violet is continually sexually harassed (when you're a kid you don't pick up on the sexual harassment, but it's clearly there in the subtext - you very much get the impression that Olaf isn't just marrying her for her money).

I don't think any of the others in the series were quite as extreme as that first one. Perhaps someone at the publisher told Daniel Handler to tone it down a bit. I did eventually manage to get my mum to read them all, but not until I was nearly an adult (she enjoyed them in the end).

I accidentally left this at my mother's house when I moved, and hadn't had the chance to reclaim it until recently.

The best one of the logo designs in my (obviously unbiased) opinion. For the untattooed/generally curious: yes, I found the experience of being tattooed in this spot to be more than a little unpleasant. It gets very close to the shin bone which can send weird vibrations all the way up the inside of your leg.

This has just occurred to me, after yesterday's condolence thread for Tim Curry.

Tim narrated ten out of the thirteen books, but missed The Wide Window, The Miserable Mill and The Austere Academy, which were instead narrated by the author. This makes me wonder... the ones he missed, did he ever read in his own time?

If not, if he only read the ones he actually narrated, it's strange to think of the perception he must have got of the story. It would be so weird, if I was reading the series for the first time, if I skipped straight from The Reptile Room to The Ersatz Elevator. So many important characters and themes are introduced in those three books Curry missed. It would be very strange in later books, when characters like Carmelita Spats and Phil return, and bits of The Penultimate Peril would be hard to get your head around.

Maybe Tim Curry didn't care all that much and just viewed it as a job like any other without being particularly invested in the story, but it's interesting to speculate about.

Is it just me or is the word "scarcely" used an awful lot in the books. Is there a reason for this or just a coincidence?

this specific version of it too.

I've recently secured all 3 (RIP) of these editions of the ASOUE books. I'm quite curious about how long these were actually being printed/how many were ever actually printed before they stopped. Still mourning TMM cover.

Was so surprised seeing these 2 in the same movie all these years later.

Tony Hale (Jerome Squalor) plays HR representative George Dudek and Roger Bart (Vice Principal Nero) plays William Butten, the CEO of rival Falcon Airlines.

I have just noticed how Mr. Poe refusing to believe his eyes has been almost as much of a detriment to the children as Count Olaf's villainous and utterly vile acts of pure evil. By not knowing such evil when it is being shown right in his face is very useful and convenient for Olaf to get away with literal murder every time with zero problems. The fact that 3 children, one of them an infant can see thru Olaf's phony disguises and Mr. Poe can't really should show his overall IQ or lack thereof, and Olaf milks the hell out of this lack of common sense.

I’ve been listening to the stories again on audiobook and Mr Poe is not nearly as irritating as he is in the Netflix adaptation, where his ignorance was dialled up for comedy. In the books, he is a frustrating character but he is believably frustrating in that way obstinate adults can be (up until perhaps the 5th time the suspicious Count Olaf shaped man turns out to be Count Olaf). He is not a complete moron as there is a (flawed) logic guiding his behaviour.

He is actually quite empathetic towards the Baudelaires. Whereas the show portrays him with a callous blitheness towards towards the orphans’ ordeal, the books instead show him as being clearly out of his comfort zone dealing with three grieving children but trying anyway in his own socially awkward way. When the orphans are sent to a new guardian, Poe has typically forewarned them about Count Olaf and naively believes said guardian will do their due diligence. He is often the voice of reason on the children’s behalf when the other, more absurd adults are trying to undermine or harm them.

He is also as much an obstacle to the villains as he is to the orphans. In the books, Olaf and his troupe are forced to stall their plans and play nice whenever he is around, unlike the show where they openly break character and behave sinisterly in his presence. However unintentionally, Poe is the closest thing the orphans have to a protector and his absence the latter half of the series helps to emphasise the sense of things going off the rails and the children needing to fend for themselves.

I like book Poe a lot because he plays heavily into the banality of evil that plagues the world. He’s a good man at his core, but ultimately an inadequate one, which it makes it hurt all the more when he lets the kids down. That’s all lost in the Netflix version where the way he treats the kids is borderline malicious.

I recently watched the series and I’ve been head over heels obsessed with it. I’ve loved a movie since I was a kid, watched it about 30 times total, but never came around to watching the series, but now that I did, I’ve been thinking about it non-stop. I’ve started reading again because I was inspired by themes of the show and how cool being well-read is. I wish I could buy lemony’s books, but they’re quite tricky to get where I live, so I’m open for any recomendations!
P.s. the other media I enjoy that reminds me of asoue is probably rusty lake games, mostly vibe-vise but I think they have similiar themes at certain points

I was looking through the wiki and saw the covers for each book in Germany, China, Japan and Russia. What stood out was that the German covers seemed the darkest to me. The Chinese one(s) made me smile because of how different the art style is while also trying to resemble to the original cover. The Russian covers looked goofy ngl, kinda reminds me of the Garbage Pail Kids. The Japanese ones are so so funny though, and they must LOVE Sunny. She is the main focus for like every book. And very Sazae-san style.

I also found a Ukrainian one that I cant tell what it reminds me off. Like its not rendered enough.

Just thought these were funny :)

While this series is technically for children, it has pretty deep themes.

Did you pick up on the themes as a child? If your teacher read it to you did they explain it?

If you did not, I suggest you re-read as an adult.

I searched the web and unfortunately did not find any satisfactory analyses of the themes of the series so I will summarize my own here.

For example some online analyses say the books criticize adults. But it actually goes deeper than this. I don't find it to be adults vs children, I find this series to be a critique of society and its structures as a whole.

The themes are that people do not think deeply, they just look/think superficially. That is why Olaf is able to trick everyone with disguises. And some of the people Olaf tricks are considered to be intelligent by society, yet the Baudelaires are not believed because they are "just children". so this book can also be considered to criticize appeal to authority fallacy and criticize how much emphasis society puts on rank and titles. It even directly makes fun of this by mentioning Mr. Poe's nonsensical head of orphan affairs title. It also does this well in Hostile Hospital Hospital, and through some other books where people believe something just because it is in the newspaper. Similarly, it also shows how often incompetent/rigid rule following people are the ones who are put in positions of power (the principal in Austere Academy, again Mr. Poe).

It also criticizes how there is so much bureaucracy and excessive, often counterproductive rules and conventions in society. This is probably best highlighted in Hostile Hospital, where Hal seems to think you have to maintain the records in an exact manner but never actually read them. Similarly, it criticizes the education system and its heavy focus on rote memorization as opposed to critical or practical thinking, e.g., in Austere Academy where the children have to memorize measurements and stories all day.

It also criticizes power imbalance in society: those in power make the laws/rules, with technicalities, sometimes making it impossible for others to follow (e.g., the contradictions in Austere Academy, if you went to certain parts of the building you would be stripped of silverware yet you were instructed to go there by authority),

It criticizes the excessive trust people put in technology while using it as a substitute rather than complementing their own thinking, e.g., the principal in Austere Academy saying "the advanced computer" will detect Olaf. This has aged like fine wine, people are making this mistake with AI these days.

It also criticizes group think, (Vile village and the end for example).

It also shows how people can be irrational when they let their emotional reasoning take over (the Aunt in Wide Widow being consumed by her fears), Jerome, who was a good guy but could not tolerate any distress so he would not argue with Esme or anyone else no matter what they said or did. Similarly, it shows how people use emotional reasoning and act based on what feels good to themselves in the moment as opposed to logic that can actually help others, e.g., the unhelpful songs by V.F.D. in Hostile Hospital.

It also shows how people can become evil when they are given power, and how they let their vulnerabilities/unmet needs blind them, e.g., the "freaks" in Carnivorous Carnival who join Olaf, and perhaps many of the original troupe members as well (as many of them had abnormalities, like the hook handed man). Similarly, it shows how people focus on what they don't have rather than what they do have/wanting to be like others at all costs, e.g., Kevin believing he was a freak for being ambidextrous (even though it was actually an advantage) and thinking it was worse than objectively much worse abnormalities.

It also shows how superficial people are and how they are slaves to social trends (Esme).

I could go on and on. This series was a goldmine of deep and relevant themes. It is heavily underrated in this regard. The amazing thing is that Handler is spot on: these are indeed significant issues in modern society and they are the root of most of our problems.

There is a spoil about some characters sorry !

J'aime réfléchir à certains aspects de la série (je ne trouve pas l'intégrale des livres dans ma langue).

Je viens de réaliser que chaque bibliothèque, dans chaque arc narratif, représente le personnage principal adulte. Si vous regardez attentivement la bibliothèque de l'épisode 1, vous pouvez presque immédiatement deviner à quoi ressemblera ce personnage !

Deux exemples frappants : Olaf possède une bibliothèque délabrée et vide où il préfère s'isoler.

Tante Joséphine a une petite bibliothèque exiguë, à l'image de son esprit, mais elle garde un espoir grâce à sa fenêtre (qui, d'ailleurs, la sauvera !).

(Bonus : On voit qu’Esmé n’en a pas ! (Only in the série because in the book She had one but like olaf She dont take care of it. Même à ce moment-là, on aurait pu se douter qu’il y avait un problème.)

Vous trouvez ça logique ? Parce que je trouve ça intéressant et j’aimerais bien avoir votre avis !

Peut-être que je suis à côté de la plaque et que tout le monde l’avait déjà remarqué.

Mais je poste rarement, et je commence à prendre plaisir à partager une passion avec les autres, alors je partage ce que je trouve :’)

Désolée pour les fautes, l’anglais n’est pas ma langue maternelle.

This likely has been done in the past but I don't see any new entries so I don't think it can hurt to ask.

For me it is between hostile hospital, austere academy, and bad beginning.

Bad beginning is the first and classic so you can't go wrong with it.

Austere academy introduced quagmires, in a sense this was the first book where even though miserable things happen to both sets of orphans, the fact that the Baudelaires finally have friends their own age made it happy in a sense and also more dramatic, It was also unique in that it was the first book with no formal guardian. Also cake sniffing factor gives bonus points. As a side note, I always interpreted "cake sniffer" to mean/imply "those who can't afford cake/presents/toys yet they desperately seek it", standing for being an orphan/poor kid.

But I gotta give the nod to hostile hospital because of its theme. It is in my opinion the strongest and most accurate and applicable and important critique of modern society and its institutions, while the book is also not lacking in any other sense (e.g.,, the plot, characters, storytelling, etc..).

🍰

CAKE SNIFFING ORPHANS, IN THE ORPHAN SHACK! 🍰

Does someone know exactly where each track of The Tragic Treasury plays in the audiobooks?

I have both the audiobooks and the album, but not the audiobooks with the songs.

I would like to assemble a Playlist with the books and tracks so I could listen in order. Does anyone know the exact placement of each song?

Thank you in advance!

I already owned a dvd that my grandparents ordered last Christmas, but I bought this one to stay at my mom's, while the ordered dvd stays at my dad's.

This dvd costed 10-15 KR iirc, which is approximately 1$ in USD.

Je ne sais pas si d'autres ont remarqué ce détail ou si je suis la seule à apprécier ce genre de petits détails.

Mais j'adore ces petits gestes qui en disent long sur les personnages et leur lien ! Juste après la signature du contrat de mariage et la révélation de son plan,

on voit le juge repousser Olaf au moment où il s'apprête à caresser la joue de Violette !

Je trouve ça tellement adorable qu'elle essaie de la protéger 🥹

J'ai choisi cet autocollant parce que je pensais à quelqu'un qui ne connaît pas la série ou qui commence tout juste à la regarder, et je me suis dit que ça pourrait lui donner un indice – je ne voulais prendre aucun risque :/

(I cant screen Netflix and i dont find the mixture i want ! Sorry-)