Yes, I think we'd all like to know that....

What if Pip+Squeak crashed their dad’s taxi into the police car in ATWQ?? (Or maybe it was their dad who crashed and the injury he sustained in said crash is what he’s recovering from?) I am saying this bc both vehicles are dented so maybe they were damaged in the same accident…

[‘Evidence’ from ATWQ book 1 ‘Who Could That Be at This Hour?’]

He was younger than I think of librarians as being, younger than the father of anyone I knew, and he had the hairstyle one gets if one is attacked by a scissors-carrying maniac and lives to tell the tale. --wctbath

“Of course,” Uncle Monty said. “You can't study snakes for forty years without encountering some dangerous ones. I have a whole cabinet of venom samples from every poisonous snake known to people, so I can study the ways in which these dangerous snakes work. -- trr

Family Tree Headcanons

I’m the kind of person who often holds multiple contradictory headcanons because I like exploring possibilities. Within the space of this blog, I use headcanons for some internal consistency, but even so, I treat threads as independent and may play with different headcanons thread to thread. That being said, I wanted to lay out a ‘default’ for this blog/my own writing regarding the Snicket family tree.

ABC Generation The family tree starts here. This could mean C was the first Snicket to join VFD, much as R was the latest in a long line of duchesses, but was the first VFD member. But Lemony mentions in EE that he learned the code from his grandfather, who learned it in turn for at least four generations (two grandfathers) back. And the map of the city which includes “sketches of costumes” and VFD tunnels, has had “twelve previous owners”. Whether or not it was formally VFD, Snickets have been involved in codes and conspiracies for way before ABC. 

I personally headcanon ABC as brothers, possibly identical triplets (similar to the Denouements. Twins/triplets skips a generation and re-appears in Jacques and Kit). Charles’ name is canonically known. In previous threads I’ve used Aaron as E’s uncle and I might stick with that. Though I also like Abraham for its literal meaning (”father of many” as the eldest of this massive Snicket clan) and for the VFD parallels of the story of Abraham and Isaac, as a father willing to sacrifice his son on faith. B I headcanon as Benjamin. The reason his whereabouts are uninteresting is he never joined VFD. He was just never interested. Benjamin Snicket lived out his life having a normal, mundane job like being a florist or something and never got caught up in the codes and plots his brothers were into. 

DEF Generation I’ve personally established F as Fiona in a thread before and I’m sticking to that. I like the idea of Fiona Widdershins being named after someone two generations earlier. E, is of course, the Snicket mother. I’ve been personally calling her Esther in my head but I’m not locked in on that. I do accept the common fanon that D is the parent of the Anwhistle brothers (see below) with one eyebrow and ear. However, I will typically not be following the other common theory that this is also Ishmael’s student. Ishmael’s student was orphaned, and C lived long enough to meet and teach Lemony and Kit. Personal headcanon name: Delilah.

GHI Trio I will be following common fanon that  G and I are Gregor and Ike Anwhistle, taking their last name from their (unnamed) father. This does mean that Gregor and Ike are first cousins to Jacques, Kit and Lemony. VFD families are often interconnected. Some people theorize H is Hector, who is a VFD member. But Hector’s interactions with the Snickets in both VV and WCTBATH? don’t really fit a ‘first cousins’ vibe for me. There are enough repeated initials in VFD to go around. No locked in name (Heather? Hailey?). Tempted to say H is named Helvella after a family of mushrooms.

Connection to Beatrice It’s mentioned in the Wide Window that Ike is also Beatrice’s cousin, and whistling is a family trait. There is a way for this to be true without Lemony and Beatrice being related, if Beatrice is Ike’s cousin on his father’s side of the family. This, again, gives a neat way for the Baudelaire family to get involved in VFD and repeates the motif of layered VFD families. Betrand (as stated by Poe in TPP) was an orphan, so might have taken on the Baudelaire family name, as Jacob did for the Snickets. This does mean Lemony and Beatrice, while themselves unrelated, would share cousins. (It makes me think of stories where sets of sisters marry sets of brothers).

JKL Jacques, Kit and Lemony. The classic Snickets. Firmly established in canon.

MNO I do not think O is Olaf, it does not make sense given how the characters interact and talk about one another for him to be cousins with JKL. M and O being Miranda and Olivia Caliban is more plausible (definitely not in TV-based threads where J and O are a couple) but even in book verse I don’t think there’s any indication Lemony and Jacques interact with O in a familial way. This is something I might use in a thread-by-thread basis, but as a rule of thumb MNO will be different characters.

I'm curious, what are all of the Snicketverse books ranked, in your opinion?

okay confession I….have not read them all 😭i am outing myself as a fake fan i’m so sorry 🙏

however i will list a couple of my faves: i’m a poison for breakfast enjoyer through and through; it’s literally my joker. my favorite asoue books are TRR, TPP, and THH. i have not finished atwq yet i am SO sorry but i really do love WCTBATH. i am for sure forgetting a book or two but these ones stand out in my mind. once i have the focus and free time to properly sit down and finish reading all the snicket books I’ll make a detailed post lol

i loved your sybis moodboard sm!!! if it's not too much trouble, would you be willing to make one for either wctbath or 13 suspicious incidents?

after approximately 40 years, heres wctbath!

and 13si!

Thank you for being patient, these were fun! :) unfortunately i lost the links to the individual sources, but all the pictures are from unsplash.com

i elected to do some old fanfiction.net re-digging of asoue fics that i remember reading years after the end got but before atwq 1/wctbath got release (my first time lurking, in fact, in general too.)

why i’m doing some old fanfiction.net re-digging of asoue fics? i’m bored, and being on the tumblr/ao3 fandom landscape for several years now has me thinking of the fandom past. and oh my god. as much as there are great gems on ao3 and on tumblr i love, i forgot i have favorites on that website.

like fernald’s folly. honestly speaking i love this fic because it goes into hindsight of what happened to jacques in tvv and fernald’s feelings on it all. and fernald’s interaction with fiona makes it a cherry on top.

oh, and speaking of jacques, this fic hypothetical situation is such a lovely look at jacques and lemony’s relationship when they were younger. being a pre-atwq fic adds another level to it, as jacques and lemony’s relationship in canon in atwq does get explore (got to love the beethoven game).

there’s also initial reflection that goes into what could be jacques final thoughts in tvv. it’s in first person, just letting you know. so you can prepare yourself if that isn’t your normal thing (it’s sure not mine, and i still enjoy it).

and speaking of jacques’ death, this kit fic title withdrawal does an interesting take of her reaction of it. another kit focus fic though not really because it features another character, is who i think you are, which i found very bittersweet in its ending.

i should go ahead and also link in unguarded moment which is in first person. it’s in ernest’s perspective. and re-reading it, i’m 95% certain the few thoughts i have of have of kit and ernest (not really explored but it’s in my mind rent free), it’s rooted in that fic. all the fics linked so fair are all written by the same author phoebonica. they wrote more asoue fics, but these i remembered enjoy reading first and the ones that got my interest way back when.

going to fics that isn’t by the same author of the others fics above, one i remember enjoying, though it did mess me up is sorry, which is a josephine focus fic that is goes into dark/suicidal territory (warning you all now). another fic is c and s, which is about charles and sir’s not healthy relationship and gives charles’ perspective (warning again, due to sir’s behavior).

there are a few more fics that i enjoy that is on that site, and heck, i found a few new favorites in my re-digging (some i glossed over the first time around)! but these i want to share/recommend because these i remember for sure as being the first fics i read in the fandom.

At the end ATWQ, *SPOILERS* do you have any thoughts on why, in-story and writing/meaning reasons, the Associates reject Lemony at the end? Is it because he became an adult or was becoming an adult as conceptualized in the story? Or was it something else?

Whether or not Snicket became an adult is a complex question. His “apprenticeship [is] over” (4.291), but the last thing he tells anyone before disappearing is that he’s “not old enough” (4.288), an assertion laden with irony and a callback to the Bombinating Beast not attacking him in SYBIS because it’s “not old enough” (3.221) to harm anyone. By the end of ATWQ both the Beast and Snicket have aged out of this inability and Snicket has fulfilled his destiny of becoming Hangfire’s disciple. Hangfire, ATWQ’s largest-looming embodiment of adulthood, may look “peaceful” and “as if something at last was his” (4.252) during the Beast’s siege because he’s completed his true objective of passing on his legacy. In SYBIS, the “box of matches in [Snicket’s] pocket” implied his potential to turn into an adult arsonist like Hangfire, and he’s held back only by childish beliefs like “adults should[n’t] be encouraged to smoke” (3.27). In the climax of WITNDFAON, Snicket now likens Hangfire to his “teacher” (4.245) and credits him for instruction on how to “play” (4.248) the Beast statue and unleash his potential for destruction. 

I’ve always held it as a weak deus ex machina that ATWQ’s master of treachery could be defeated with a deception as plain as “what’s that behind you”. I can only justify it as the metaphorical gateway into Snicket’s “wild, lawless” place, that he commits a sort of ur-deception or “very old trick” so archetypal that, like “the old myths and superstitions” (4.246), its recounting requires the Association of Associates to recite it like a Greek chorus outside the derailed train. Snicket’s apprenticeship in Stain’d-by-the-Sea ends not just because he murders Hangfire, but because he tricks Hangfire with malicious intent, because he summons the Beast, and because he reveals previously suppressing Hangfire’s identity. Eve’s original sin wasn’t a magicked apple but the indelible knowledge that she had the ability to disobey and, what’s more, to lie about it and to implicate others. 

After Snicket’s misdeeds culminate in a literal trainwreck (in the shape of “a dead serpent” [4.259] that recalls Eden’s lech), Snicket finds that “friend or enemy, associate or stranger, [everyone shrinks] from [him]” (4.258) like he’s “a moving shadow, casting darkness over everyone” (4.286). In essence, he’s like Armstrong Feint. Note the lone cross in Seth’s opening illustration to chapter thirteen, after Snicket reflects that Hangfire was the only person “brave enough to face the beast directly” and who Snicket classifies among “heroes [and] villains” (4.252). It’s uncertain whether Snicket views himself as more “like Armstrong Feint, someone once kind and gentle who lowered himself into treachery, or more like a mysterious beast, hidden in the depths and summoned to wickedness” (4.290), but he now empathizes with both figures. Daniel Handler and I are technically Jewish, but feel free to interpret Hangfire as a Christ figure martyred by his inability to overcome humanity’s disbelief in his message, and Snicket as his reluctant disciple as he records the man’s story in a tetralogy mirroring the four gospels. 

The series ends with Snicket’s coat housing the Beast statue (and presumably the same box of matches) even as Snicket muses that “long ago, [he] had made a promise to return the statue to its rightful owner” (4.289). Snicket told Theodora in WCTBATH that the Beast “has been associated with the Mallahan family for generations” and that they’re likely the statue’s “rightful owners” (1.93-94). But Snicket doesn’t give the statue to Lady Mallahan’s only competent descendant, nor would Moxie likely want something she now knows brings with it only destruction and covetous frenzy reminiscent of the Maltese Falcon. Despite his misgivings about alienating his friends, Snicket never offers up the totem of chaos, and alongside his warped notion that he “think[s he] kept [his] promise” (4.277) to help Ellington find her father by unmasking and killing him, it’s quite possible Snicket also believes he’s fulfilled his promise to find the statue’s rightful owner: Himself. A statue only capable of chaos would “rightfully” belong to someone capable of chaos, and by tricking Hangfire with malevolent intent, Snicket has wrested ownership of the statue from Hangfire like Malfoy wrested ownership of the Elder Wand from Dumbledore. Even the Beast, raised and nourished by Hangfire, recognizes Snicket’s authority over the hand that fed him; Hangfire points uselessly at Snicket when he speaks his last words, but the Beast only obeys Snicket’s wordless pointing to leave, after looking over “[Snicket and] the statue in [his] hands” (4.254). 

As discussed in my earlier essay, Snicket never shakes the feeling that he, like Ellington, will always be an outsider to the residents of Stain’d, Associates included. Snicket’s not surprised in the climax that “the Mitchums of the world just bicker” while ignoring evil, or that Gifford and Ghede think it's “not [their] job” to intervene in a wrongful arrest. What ultimately drives Snicket from Stain’d is alienation from his friends. The Association is horrified by Hangfire’s murder because, unlike Snicket, they had only learned his identity moments before his death—And his identity is that of the absent parent, a specter that haunts each Associate. The Association relies on hope, but Snicket quietly believes that “Moxie’s mother [will] never send for her” and “Pip and Squeak's father [is] gone forever” (4.288). That said, the Association’s schism isn’t about Snicket’s deviation from the group’s strict moral code. Moxie laments that Snicket “didn’t have to feed [Hangfire] to that creature” (4.270) while simultaneously dismissing Feint’s orphaned daughter as “deserv[ing] to be in a prison cell” (4.279) for a murder Ellington didn’t commit. Snicket is ultimately as repulsed by the Associates’ hypocrisy as they are by his.

This brings Snicket to his second epiphany, that not only has his apprenticeship ended, but it’s now his responsibility to document its events. This is a postmodern concept of penance, to make amends not to the man Armstrong Feint (by, for example, rescuing his daughter) but to Feint’s story, lest he be erased a second time. Handler distinguishes between signifier and signified several times in the denouement: The town’s ink becoming “weaker and fainter” made the facts it represented appear “less certain” (4.263); Moxie equates Snicket “destroy[ing]” Hangfire to destroying a book and its “important secrets” (4.269); the Beast’s and Snicket’s actions have erased Hangfire’s meaning like “spilled ink across paper” voids the meaning of the words (4.249). Feint and his words “have vanished,” and though Snicket “wish[es]” his actions would too (4.254), he knows these actions obligate him to record his wrongdoing. Snicket ends WCTBATH with “practically none of” its events entering his official report (1.252), and this pattern persists through the second and third books. It’s only after “destroying” a man that Snicket pledges to revive Feint and his story in a fragmentary plot for the librarians. After all, “paper will put up with anything that’s written on it” (4.272), whether it’s spilled ink that destroys important secrets or words that resurrect a dead man “the way an idea moves from a book to your mind” (4.248).

The Chemist. The Journalist. The Variable.

S. Theodora Markson with her roadster, photography taken by her apprentice Bertrand before their second mission. 

Miss Markson’s sister, interviewed by me after many years, handed me this photo and a teacup, saying that her first apprentice was one of the very small group of people that could make her laugh.  

S.’s whereabouts are unknown, but there is a rumour going around saying that she left VFD and now participates in car racing under a false identity. 

My books from All The Wrong Questions (plus File Under:13 Suspicious Incidents) by His Highness Lemony I The Sneaky(et) finally arrived, and although I had to plough through puddles and piles of dead, wet leaves while rain was, well, raining and wind blowing (so probably I’ll get ill again), I’m tremendously happy and now I can feel safe again cause I have my dear books. I’ve already read the first two ATWQ books on e-reader (they were great and I highly recommend this series), cause I couldn’t wait, but I restrained myself from devouring the third and fourth. So, Snicket awaits!

Just wanted to share happinesses.

How often has Hangfire been following - preceding Lemony around, to see what he's up to?

What if Lemony didn't drink the tea, or did not leave the city? ---- . . . #asoue #atwq #wctbath #lemonysnicket #kitsnicket #vfd #drawing #art #sketch #illustration #applenotes #snicket #associates #theworldisquiethere

“I was tempted to take my socks off, and not only because they were uncomfortable. ‘I’m part of an organization,’ I said, “that I’m sure can be of service.’”

Do they all have tattoos?! I feel like i should’ve remembered that detail

lemony snicket stop trying to make me hungry challenge