Asoue - Blog Posts
i cannot stop over-analyzing asoue netflix but guys. do you think that scene in hotel denoument when the baudelaires are trying to get everyone to leave the hotel that all of the side characters' reactions represent their fatal character flaws.
like how olaf's mentors immediately started berating him and calling him a disappointment just because they believed he didn't set the hotel on fire. so their fatal character flaw was cruelty.
and mr. poe and vice principle nero refused to take their blindfolds off, despite the situation, making their fatal character flaw their incompetence, which made them the series' definition of useless adults.
babs and jerome first tried to find a way out, but ended up panicking and staying in one place, so their fatal flaw was cowardice, the original reason neither of them were able to help the baudelaires in the first place.
with esmé and carmelita, it's a little more complicated, since olaf was able to trick esmé because of both her vengefulness and greed (which manifested in her obsession with the sugar bowl), but to some degree it was also about carmelita's stubborness and entitlement (which manifested in her choosing to stay with esmé)
and, finally, justice strauss, who attempts to stop the baudelaires from running away on the roof. i've always interpreted her fatal character flaw as naivety; she believes that all problems can be solved without breaking any rules. she trusts the system too much, which is why she couldn't ever fully understand what the baudelaires were going through, and that they really did not have a choice.
overall, this scene is so important to the story, because it's the exit of all of these characters. it's the last time we see any of them. that's why these negative character traits of theirs were put in the spotlight for this scene; even though these characteristics are flaws so fatal they literally end up being the characters' dooms, they're still aspects of the characters we need to remember in order to understand why nothing went right in the lives of the baudelaires: all of these characters were too cruel or incompetent or cowardly or greedy or arrogent or naive...to be able to help them.
so, as tragic as it is, all these characters end up dying (literally or metaphorically) because of the same flaws that made them useless to the baudelaires in the first place.
violet asks klaus to repeat famous quotes, not because she doesn't remember them, but because she knows it helps and calms him down
“Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA, Dead Poets Society, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Book Thief, any dog movie
If you aren’t hit with feels by thinking of these things, I’m genuinely curious how do you do it?
Random ASOUE Headcanons
Most of these take place in some miscellaneous undefined AU that is much happier than cannon.
*Isadora and Quigley are thrill seekers and do really reckless things when they’re together that consequently give Duncan a stomach ache.
*However Duncan and Quigley do stupid things together that make Isadora role her eyes. Not stupid in a reckless way, but still in a ‘what the fuck were you thinking?’ sort of way. Things like chugging 3 gallons of water and not going pee for 3 hours on a dare.
*Violet doesn’t have any fucks left to give
*Violet is a wine aunt
*We already knew this but Klaus has woke barista energy and is supremely sassy
*As a teenager Sunny is a total stereotypical badass
*Duncan is a terrible babysitter
*Klaus Baudelaire has had too many iced coffees
*Klaus, Duncan, and Isadora are insomniacs but in completely different ways
*Klaus was just up that late because he had too much caffeine and he was reading and he didn’t know what time it was.
*Duncan’s been procrastinating all day but got a burst of energy and works manically between the hours of midnight and 3 AM
*Isadora is just full of energy and down to party or she wants to quietly look at the stars and write poems, no inbetween.
THESE [teeth] WERE MADE FOR [biting]
AND THAT'S JUST WHAT THEY'LL DO
ONE OF THESE DAYS THESE [teeth]
ARE GONNA [bite chunks out of] YOU
ruby would be the NUMBER 1 snape hater
and she would absolutely END count olaf I stg
okay okay okay so the Bradley Baker/LB era of Ruby Redfort is the same as the marauders era of Harry Potter and is also the same as the VFD era in A Series Of Unfortunate Events 😭
okay okay okay so the Bradley Baker/LB era of Ruby Redfort is the same as the marauders era of Harry Potter and is also the same as the VFD era in A Series Of Unfortunate Events 😭
“Sometimes words are not enough.”🕸🍁
Now that I’ve discovered the “save as draft” feature, I have this whole backlog of things I’ve been meaning to post. I saved this back around when I reblogged that Kitlaf song. I’m not sure I can really say I ship them, but I mean, who doesn’t get beach scene feels. Well, and hero/villain ships are kind of my thing--although I suppose there’s enough moral ambiguity with Kit that it’s not that simple, which makes the dynamic that much more interesting.
I also think this is a really neat art style, like an old cameo necklace. It feels like something you might find half buried by ash after a fire stole this old necklace from its hiding place in the attic where it was tucked away decades ago. A strange old relic, full of stories and secrets, which one might turn over in one’s fingers, contemplating.
I also find the pose interesting, how Olaf is somewhere between pulling away and leaning in. The artist has done a great job of making the silhouettes recognizable, too; Kit’s messy, pencil-decorated hair is spot on.
And all I do is kiss you, through the bars of a rhyme.
This is so gorgeous and emotional and dramatic! I haven’t watched the Netflix finale yet--I guess I’m saving it for a little bit--but I’ll never forget all the feels I felt reading the beach scene in The End, back before “feels” was even a thing people said. This song beautifully captures all of those emotions and gives me plenty of its own. I’m pretty sure it gave me goosebumps although I admit it is also a bit chilly in here. But the emotion in the lyrics and the singer’s voice are certainly goosebump-worthy!
Also, FYI, the volume is fine on my end. It sounds lovely!
Edit: I realize now that I was using my cheap headphones when I wrote this; they’re not great headphones and so I always have to turn the volume up on things to compensate. I just didn’t realize that I wasn’t turning the volume up for this song. So, yes, the volume is indeed loud. It’s not hard to deal with though, and this is still a gorgeous song. I was listening to it on repeat at work the other day.
I think it’s best to listent to it at low volume because I still can’t use garage band properly and the volumes are wrong
Kit and Olaf love story was my insipiration for this song, they are one of my first ship and it felt like a nice way to honor it.
I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be posting the lyrics in a reblog so keep an eye open. also as soon as I’ll fix the volumes I’ll be putting it on band camp.
beatrice 6 + 10 thx!
When Violet is born, she’s so perfect and fragile that Beatrice is petrified of her. How can she have been responsible for this soft, unblemished little creature? This creature that needs her - really needs her. And grows up to be so sweet and solemn and clever. Violet doesn’t care what her classmates think of her. This trait amazes Beatrice, she’s enthralled with it. Violet is happy to sit with her mother in the library and look at blueprints quietly for hours, grinning at her when Beatrice brings her green tea. Violet makes her bold enough to start a family.
Klaus is more emotional and excitable, and a grizzlier baby, too. He won’t feed as easily as Violet did, but Beatrice relishes the banality of the challenge. The mundanity of these sleepless nights, the safety of a grumpy baby, it comforts her. Bertrand is better at settling Klaus than she is, and for once, that doesn’t feel like inadequacy. He needs glasses by the time he’s four and he’s got so much to say. Her little conversationalist.
Sunny is still so new, happy and gummy and teething. Surprisingly cheerful, for a teething baby. She doesn’t whine, just chomps on Beatrice’s finger. Rejects the baby food Beatrice lovingly made for her elder two but adores the wooden teething peg that Bertrand whittles her. She crawls so fast that her mother has to skitter across the carpet to keep up with her before the crazy little perfect angel tumbles down the staircase. She’s still so afraid for her children. She never stopped being afraid for them.
The day Beatrice dies, she sent the three of them to the beach. They’ve always been good at entertaining themselves. She needed them out of the house because she’s so scared for them, and old associates visited, didn’t stay long. She’s waiting for them to return, swaning around upstairs, when Olaf slips in through the unlocked front door. He doesn’t make a sound as he pours out lighter fluid, fumbles with his box of matches. If Beatrice had seen it, she would have been impressed at how quiet this loud, brash man, this boy of hers, could manage to be. Given the right motivation.
She only sees him later, the figure of him, while she’s struggling in the drapery. The smoke is thick, but his tall silhouette is unmistakable. How rude of him, not to even come to say hello, before he did this, finally. It outrages her, the indecency of it. Does the past mean nothing to him? Could he not have throttled her to death, to make it personal? Right for them, befitting of their history. Olaf sets fires when he’s angry with people who have hurt him. Beatrice isn’t just people, is she?
Then everything is dimmer and easier, and breathing seems to matter less.
Olaf, Bertrand, Poison Darts
Before Olaf ever officially met Bertrand, he had heard stories about him. Bertrand’s chaperone thought he was an amazing, model apprentice. But that chaperone also ranked last out of all 52 VFD chaperones. Who coincidentally was also Olaf’s nemesis Snicket’s chaperone, and that was where things got interesting.
Someone who Lemony Snicket was unfavorably compared to? Olaf hadn’t even met this guy, but he decided that he’s going to like him.
When they finally met for the first time, Olaf discovered that Bertrand was quite unlike the usual VFD theater teens he encountered. Bertrand wasn’t much a literature guy, nor was he invested in poetry or theater. He didn’t quote classics in everyday life (not even wrongly or sarcastically or anything) like the rest of them. (Perhaps that was how he got assigned to lowest ranking chaperone, Olaf thought.)
Despite his differences with the theater teens of VFD, they all turned out to like Bertrand a lot. He was pleasant and easygoing and because of his interests were different from them, they didn’t feel the need to compete with him. But the best thing was, he was great at building sets and props – everything the theater people needed on stage – and every fancy, overly dramatic equipment they probably didn’t need off-stage but he was nice enough to make for them anyway. (One day, the working wings of a dragonfly costume might turn out surprisingly useful for an actress, but that was another story.)
And Olaf liked him too, just like all of them. Bertrand was the only person who wouldn’t tear his Al Funcoot plays apart, and as much as it was fun bickering with Beatrice or R about the literary references in his plays, it was great to have someone who he could spend time with that didn’t care about all those and would be glad to help make the props for the play. (Although he did have to fight the other theater majors for his time – as if Beatrice’s bat-styled hot air balloon or Esme’s martini glass dress was more important than his demands.)
And perhaps that was why Bertrand’s part in his parents’ murder came as the most surprising of them all. After being friends – if he could call them that – with Beatrice for so many years since their childhood, he’d known, grudgingly that she was capable of a lot of things. Mostly in the name of drama, but sometimes for things more sinister too. He’d seen her darker sides that sometimes he wondered if Snicket realized. And Kit – she followed VFD’s orders in a way nobody else could, she planned coldblooded schemes in the name of necessary evil better than anyone else. (It probably said something about their relationship that he wasn’t that surprised when his girlfriend played a part in his parents’ murder.) But Olaf never expected it from Bertrand.
Bertrand, who got along with everyone, who was always helpful, who didn’t argue much but not in a Jerome kind of way.
He’d long known ago he shouldn’t trust actors, but perhaps the biggest lesson was to not trust the polite and practical engineers either.
In retrospect, maybe he should have known. After all, Bertrand was the one with the craftiest hands out of them all. And if he could make theater props for them, who knew what else he was able to make?
A handy little device for aiming poison darts, as it turned out.
So my mom and I picked back up watching A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix the other day, and for the most part, I really do like it and I agree it’s a highly faithful adaptation of the books (though admittedly it’s been a while since I read them, but from what I recall, the series is doing quite well).
But one thing did bother me: their Lemony Snicket is not at all like I pictured him. No hate to Kronk; Kronk is doing a great job being the Lemony Snicket that he is. But like I said, he’s just not at all how I saw the character as I was reading him.
For one thing, given that his name is “Lemon-y”, I pictured him as blonde, perhaps strikingly so. For another thing, I just got the sense that book Lemony was a touch more shy and awkward, and I pictured him as a rather wiry kind of guy--not completely scrawny, thin but tough. That is to say, less strong-shouldered than Kronk. And recently, after a bit of thought, I realized that the Lemony I was picturing as I read looked more or less like a young Tom Petty.
I could just see Tom, fedora nestled on his soft blonde hair, hanging about libraries looking for clues regarding missing sugar bowls and odd, question-mark shaped creatures, penning lengthy coded love letters to a woman who regrettably cannot marry him, and watching grimly from the shadows as a number of dismaying tragedies befall that woman’s orphaned children. He has the perfect lemon-y hair, a suitably wiry frame, and just the right amount of quirky awkwardness in his smile, I believe.
(To clarify, I don’t think Tom’s deep, Southern speaking voice would necessarily suit Lemony, just his physical appearance, so this is just for the sake of visualization.)
And so, I present to you, young Tom Petty as Lemony Snicket. Well, really just a series of photos where he looks how I would picture Lemony as looking; I haven’t edited them or anything, just arranged them.
Anyways, young Tom Petty is just generally adorable and full of subtle swag. It’s always fun to look at pictures of him.
Image sources below the cut.
picture sources, in order: 1http://www.theuncool.com/tag/tom-petty-the-heartbreakers/ 2 https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/544724517406734973/ 3 https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/tom-petty-1950-2017/2/ 4 https://www.biography.com/people/tom-petty-201299 5 https://www.listal.com/tom-petty-%26-the-heartbreakers 6 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0965382/mediaviewer/rm3324321792 7 https://www.elmodulor.com/el-modulor-ep08-tom-petty-nacio-en-florida-pero-le-dio-sonido-a-california/
“I will love you as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture.... I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back.” ~Lemony Snicket
I was just rereading the Beatrice Letters and I must say, taken out of context especially, some of Mr. Snicket’s love poetry is really dark and intense.
Also, as a southerner,
“I will love you as kudzu loves trees”
is similarly ominous.
Wanting a remake of a film that completely ignored the source material and is hated: completely fair, everyone is on your side, will likely happen
Wanting a remake for a film that completely ignored the source material but is widely beloved: insane, never going to happen, no one even cares
eleven year olds need book series filled to the brim with violence and crime. it's like enrichment for them
BRILLIANT
Asoue adaptation where everything’s the same except she’s the narrator
