Was Going Through My Asoue Tag Yesterday (of Posts I’ve Reblogged, Not My Own Posts) And Found The

was going through my asoue tag yesterday (of posts i’ve reblogged, not my own posts) and found the post about klaus thinking even years later that he should’ve done something to help uncle monty and prevent his death and how important and heavy and terrible that guilt is and i was reading my tags on it and wanted to make them into a bigger post bc like, this really is heartbreaking, and so is reptile room in general

reptile room is such an important book!! bad beginning sets up olaf and his desire for the baudelaire fortune (and general abuse), but reptile room is the one that creates the set up for the rest of the books – new guardian (or new circumstances), olaf eventually appears – and is the first time it happens!! the kids go from suddenly losing their parents, to getting olaf, who’s a terrible, abusive person, to then getting a new guardian, who’s, nice. monty is still, incredibly misguided and a well-meaning but ultimately useless adult, because he doesn’t recognize olaf and focuses more on the herpetological society than baudelaires telling him olaf is a threat, but he’s also still a good person, and he’s the first good, kind, decent person the baudelaires meet after losing their parents.

he gives them their own rooms, with things he knows they’ll like, and he lets them be involved in his life and work and help prepare for the trip to peru. (this is also assuming that peru was not vfd-related, which i don’t think it was.) he makes them feel important and needed for themselves, not for the money they’ll one day have. he gives them a home, a safe place, somewhere they’re cared for, by someone who genuinely cares about them. it’s not like being at home with their parents, because nothing is going to compare to that, but it’s close. especially after living with someone like olaf, who hit klaus, locked sunny in a cage, tried to marry violet. and in no other book do they have the opportunity to be as comfortable and safe and cared for as they are with monty in the reptile room. (josephine’s fear prevents her from really being a parent and connecting with them, sir makes them do child labor, nero doesn’t care about his students and puts the kids in the orphan shack, esme and jerome are, esme and jerome, the vfd village also treats them as child labor, after that they’re on their own and the adults they meet still can’t do anything to really help. even dewey’s offer of the kids staying at the hotel falls flat in the face of, it is a vfd hotel, and even as neutral territory and ‘the last safe place’ it’s never going to be completely safe. the only place they have ever been remotely as safe as they were in their parent’s house is with monty.)

(and especially in the way that monty isn’t just montgomery montgomery, he’s introduced as uncle monty. it’s unlikely that he really was related to beatrice and bertrand, but he’s considered family.)

and then olaf comes back. and he corrupts that safety, and murders monty.

and it’s like the baudelaires lose their parents all over again. but this time, it was supposed to be different!! because before, when the fire killed their parents, they weren’t home, they were at briny beach. but now!! this time they were home!! this time they were there!! they were with a guardian who was family and like a parent and supposed to protect them, and the baudelaires could protect him, too!! and they were there when monty was murdered and just didn’t know!!! this kind of loss wasn’t supposed to happen again but it did! of course klaus would still think even years and years later that he should’ve done something, because he feels directly responsible for this loss that wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, supposed to happen a second time!!

and there’s no way he could’ve possibly changed anything about how it played out. olaf would’ve murdered monty eventually no matter what, because monty was in his way, and olaf was always going to do it in a way no one could interfere with. even if klaus had called out to the taxi driver to take olaf away when he arrived as stephano, likely nothing would’ve happened. but klaus’ survivors guilt exists and stays with him because it’s a horrifying loss that he blames himself for, because he was there, and monty was alive and then he wasn’t, and there’s proof this time, there’s a body this time, there’s a house that remains that didn’t burn down that klaus was in, monty’s possessions are left behind, his peaches are still there, such tangible things that only reinforce what was lost and wasn’t supposed to be lost this time. klaus is twelve years old and just lost his parents and then lost the only other adult who could’ve come close to them. (and it’s not going to stop there, but how this loss functions first in bb/rr specifically is pivotal)

and that trauma never stops! ideally he should know better as an adult, that it was never his responsibility to save monty, or his parents, and there was nothing he could do, but he still thinks it was because they were so close and so similar. it’s heartbreaking that even some time later klaus can’t stop re-imagining what he could’ve done differently

Tags

reblog klaus baudelaire asoue the reptile room trr montgomery montgomery honestly I think everyone often forgets about the first few books in the series because of everything that comes after that but trr is such an important book

I wish everyone reading this a very good night.

Or a very good morning. Or a very good afternoon. Depends on where in the world you are, and when you are reading this.

Tags

I needed to write something on this blog so there you go

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thefastestshowersintheworld

1 year ago

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.

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LEMONYSWEEP c'mon vote for him!!!!

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thefastestshowersintheworld

2 years ago

HAPPY TENTH ANNIVERSARY ATWQ!!!!!!!!

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reblog atwq

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thefastestshowersintheworld

2 years ago

I was just casually rereading Coraline and I noticed THIS 🤩

now they ARE connected, you can't convince me otherwise 😌

He even read it out loud *^*

Tags

reblog Coraline neil gaiman lemony snicket only found out about this now and thought it was interesting

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thefastestshowersintheworld

2 years ago

Relationship status: single... like, permanently

Favourite color: for show purposes, green (real answer: I, for the life of me, cannot pick favorite things)

Song stuck in my head: Dead Girl Walking from Heathers: The Musical

Favourite food: same as with the color, but I’ll say soup or salad or pasta or tea or something (do drinks count??)

Last song played: well... it wasn’t really me who played it but Dancing Queen (at a party I just came back from)

Dream trip: another one I don’t know how to answer, so I’ll remain with what I said last time and give the vague answer of “somewhere where I could meet my online friends”

Last thing I googled: Cyprus localization (wanted to see where Cyprus was compared to the African North to see something)

and I can’t think of ten people to tag so I’ll also leave it open for anyone who wants to join :)

Thanks for tagging me @emyn-arnens!

Rules: Tag 10 or more people you want to get to know better

Relationship status: Single

Favorite color: Red, currently. it changes a lot

Song stuck in your head: Sucker by the Jonas Brothers

Favorite food: Frozen raspberries

Last song played: The Ball from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

Dream trip: Georgia to visit some close friends of mine

Last thing I googled: dream of the rood

No-pressure tags: @flanneryculp @accidentallylita @wigilda @lesbian-in-leather @hopefullystillliving @tilions