Do You Think Mr. Poe's Chronic Cough Could Be From...

The Snicket Sleuth — Do you think Mr. Poe's chronic cough could be from... 1.5M ratings 277k ratings

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paraphernalia-wagon asked:

Do you think Mr. Poe's chronic cough could be from inhaling smoke instead of just a constant cold? I saw your theory that he may have been a member of VFD so if he was involved in stopping various fires he could have been exposed to quite a bit of smoke.

Arthur Poe’s coughing is probably an allusion to the life of Edgar Allan Poe. All the important women in his life died of tuberculosis: his mother, his foster mother and his wife. Tuberculosis unfortunately involves a whole lot of coughing.

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fluxwire asked:

Finally, have you ever discussed with anyone why Mr. Poe was coughing so much? There's a scene in the Netflix series where he's at the bank and he coughs particularly hard and stares wide-eyed at his handkerchief afterwards. It made me think his coughing might be a sign of a serious disease akin to tuberculosis, which imo seems to share a few similarities w the effects of Medusiod Mycelium. Do you think there might be a connection? (Such as extremely minimal exposure to the fungus?)

Arthur Poe’s cough can be explained away as a darkly humorous literary allusion (Link). Because he has a possible connection to V.F.D. (Link), it’s possible his lungs were injured because of the smoke of a fire. There’s precedence on trauma from various VFD-related incidents: Duncan’s pyrophobia, Jacques’ fear of snow gnats, Josephine’s hypervigilance, etc. But it’s all speculation at this point.

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actually-seriously-trash-deacti asked:

Something that always puzzled me and I may have known at some point, but now have forgotten. Why did the Baudelaires keep on going/not give up despite all the horrible events that befell them? Was it the fact that all they had was each other that kept them motivated?

Hello, @chabo-the-wolf-baby!

I am very happy you raise this point. The Baudelaire orphans’ resilience and sour determination in the face of adversity is by far the biggest plotpoint of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”. It is largely a cautionary tale of morality and a story of corruption (or lack thereof). How much did these terrible events truly affect the way they see the world? How have they really changed in the way of hardship? Can they ever really go back to the way things were?

These questions are crucial, as the series’ real villain puts it:

In silence, they waited while Mr. Poe had another fit of coughing, and then the banker put his hands on the Baudelaires’ shoulders, pushing them toward the entrance to the hotel.“There are people who say that criminal behavior is the destiny of children from a broken home,” he said. “Perhaps such people are right.”“This isn’t our destiny,” Klaus said, but he did not sound very sure, and Mr. Poe merelygave him a sad, stern look, and kept pushing.[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Ten]

I would argue that the Baudelaire orphans’ greatest strength is the fact that they had a happy, simple, functional childhood. Memories of happier times haunt them throughout the series as they worry about what their parents truly intended for them. These memories are crucial because they prevent them from normalizing and internalizing the terrible abuse they suffer (which is sadly what happened to the Freaks at Caligary Carnival). These memories give them the guideline they very much need to determine what’s okay and what’s not. The Baudelaire orphans repeatedly remove themselves from the deshumanizing narrative that awful adults (Poe, Olaf, Geraldine, Ishmael) write for them.

A lot of fans are baffled by Beatrice’s and Bertrand’s decision not to tell their children anything about V.F.D. These people, I think, forget that, by removing V.F.D. from their lives, the Baudelaire parents gave their children a space that was theirs and nobody else’s, a chance to experience what it is to feel in harmony with society, a universal ground to build their own lives in the future. Love is, in itself, a strength. Those who experience true love can recognize it elsewhere, and are not so easily swayed by cheap imitations of it. This is the real “moral compass” which guides the children through their misadventures.

What the siblings needed was a compass, but not the sort of compass Violet had mentioned. The eldest Baudelaire was talking about a navigational compass, which is a device that allows a person to tell you the proper direction to travel in the ocean. But the Baudelaires needed a moral compass, which is something inside a person, in the brain or perhaps in the heart, that tells you the proper thing to do in a given situation.[The End, Chapter One]

Daniel Handler has even created a foil to the Baudelaire orphans in this matter: the teenage Lemony we see in “All The Wrong Questions”. Both are faced with a crucial moral choice in the last book of their series: to kill or not to kill. Although they share an enormous amount of similarities in background and motivations, the protagonists choose differently: the Baudelaire orphans do not throw Olaf overboard, but Lemony throws Hangfire in the jaw of the Bombinating Beast. And what makes Lemony so different, if not the fact that he was raised by V.F.D. instead of his own parents, that he never got to live the normal, boring life every child is supposed to get?

Interestingly, we see teenage Lemony at his most humane when thinking about his sister Kit’s predicament. He sees his desire to save Kit as his greatest weakness, an obstacle to his mission in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, even though it’s by far the more moral option. Hector calls him out on that at the end of “Who Could That Be At This Hour?”, to no avail. At this point Lemony’s mindset has been fully warped by V.F.D.’s self-destructive ideology.

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dayriderbusking-done asked:

Hello there! The Netflix series has rekindled my love of this series. From reading your theories, I especially loved the LS is the taxi driver in TWW/TPP. Following on from someone else's question, the taxi driver is very clearly not Lemony in the Netflix adaptation. As Handler is helping with the show, does that debunk it, or has he cleared that the universes are separate?

Hello, @dayriderbusking-done! I take it you’re talking about this theory: (Link).

It astounds me that people are still unsure whether the TV show and the books happen in a different universe. The series has gone out of its way to edit the original plot. Yes, it had done so with Daniel Handler’s full blessing and participation, but it’s still not canonical. Different continuities.

Here’s what the author has to say on the subject:

Paste: You mentioned the grander VFD conspiracy, coming up with a way to work that in. When one reads the first four books, they’re more stand-alone stories. Did you bring in VFD to take it from four distinct stories to one cohesive season?

Handler: I guess that was part of it. Mostly, I would say it was two things. One is that TV and film are really literal media. You can’t imply that something might be happening, you have to kinda show it or not. So a lot of the mystery that’s lurking around the edges in the early books had to be stitched out a little bit more or eliminated. And then it just seemed to me, in adapting it for TV, that I didn’t want to mess with the original narrative line that much. So the stories of the Baudelaires are very faithful to the books, but I thought a fun thing to do would be to add things.

Paste: To that end, adding the Quagmire parents [Will Arnett and Cobie Smulders] was brilliant. As a book reader, I was like, “What? The Baudelaire parents didn’t survive, did they?” Then you get to “The Miserable Mill” and it’s a total mindfuck. How did that twist come to mind?

Handler: We were just thinking about different ways of stitching in a mystery, and it was an idea that I liked right away. I liked the idea that fans of the books would be upset for most of the first season, thinking “I can’t believe they changed it,” and then would suddenly be relieved, and then people who were unfamiliar with the books would be relieved and then suddenly not.

[Daniel Handler’s Interview with Paste by Zach Blumenfeld, “A Series of Unfortunate Events Author Daniel Handler on Bringing the Baudelaire Orphans’ Miserable World to Netflix”, January 20, 2017 (Link)]

So yeah, even though the writers don’t want to completely alter the plot, they’re fully embracing the changes. There’s even a scene in the seventh episode where Arthur Poe literally panics and screams that things have gone completely “off-book” to Daniel Handler’s face (he makes a cameo as a fishmonger).

Therefore the TV Show and the books use a completely different canon. I would really advise against using elements of the TV Show to theorize about the books’ content (or vice-versa, for that matter).

Did you have to go back and reexamine the series’ overarching mystery for this adaptation?The conversations in the various rooms were about how to lay in a big, hovering mystery that would be suitable for TV, and that’s really the big change in the adaptation — to make that mystery more present and to make it something that you need to notice. In a book, you can put in a stray sentence, and if you’re reading the book obsessively, your eyes will eventually fall on that sentence. But in television, you either have to make a mystery or you don’t. You can’t say, “I hope that people look under the table.” They won’t look under the table unless the camera looks under the table for them.

Has the mystery itself significantly changed from the books?I would say that the destination is the same, but the route is different.

Is there anything you wrote (or didn’t write) in the books that, now that it’s a TV show, you regret writing (or not writing)?Not too many specific things, but I would say that in general, my entire literary career is one of regret and despair, so just to re-read A Series of Unfortunate Events in preparation for this project was a little like going through old yearbooks. I’m used to being a constant disappointment to myself, so some individual sentence that turned out to be troublesome was kind of small potatoes next to a general feeling of failure.

[…]

How precious are you about the material, on a scale of J.K. Rowling to P.L. Travers?I love that scale. I have a sense that when you write a book the way you want, which certainly happened with me, then you have that unfettered, uncompromised vision already. And so [for the TV series], I wasn’t the sort of person who said, “Well, I never pictured the window in Uncle Monty’s house to look like this! Everybody stop, we have to rebuild it according to the blueprint I have in my head.” I was more interested in what would people think or do. That isn’t to say we never argued or disagreed, but I was more interested in people having a good time and coming together to make something that seemed exciting, rather than laying it against page 57 of a book and saying, “No, wait a minute.”

[Daniel Handler’s Interview with Entertainment by Mark Snetiker, January 11 2017 (Link)]

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mermaids-indians-pirates asked:

Hi! I don't know if you've answered this, I was wondering what was your opinion of the Netflix show, given that you have such extensive background knowledge on the actual books. Are they being loyal to the real VFD? Or are they inventing too much? I myself am a little confused about my feelings toward it. I am super interested in the VFD background they are showing us because it was my favorite part of the books. Are they being loyal to it? (in your opinion) thank you!

Hi! As other reviewers have pointed out, this is less of an adaptation than a reboot. Daniel Handler had already gone on record, several years ago, that he hadn’t incorporated any mysteries in the first 4 books because his original contract only went so far. He had no guarantee the series would be published in its entirety and didn’t want to introduce plotlines which would have to be left uncompleted. So basically he wrote the first 4 books as Chekhov’s guns and plot coupons and introduced V.F.D. later. So the Netflix show, in a way, gives us a flavor of what the plot would have looked like had Handler been “allowed” to introduce V.F.D. from the very beginning.

It’s definitely fascinating to look at the way Handler is essentially changing his own plot. For example the way Arthur Poe handles the Baudelaire parents’ will is a messy mystery in the books, but episode 2 of the Netflix show retcons Arthur’s actions in a much more satisfying manner. The only downside is that the plot is being changed in such as significant manner that the books and the show now exist in two separate continuities. We shouldn’t rely on the show to explain away the books or vice-versa.

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detectivefernald-deactivated201 asked:

Hello, Sleuth! As always it's wonderful to see your theories! In an earlier ask, I remember you answered that the reason that Arthur Poe coughed so much was because of tuberculosis or the smoke from fighting fires. However, in the Unauthorized Autobiography, Elenora Poe states that Arthur had a COLD since he was a child. It's not really a question, I just wanted to hear (or read) your opinion.

Hello and thank you, @detectivefernald! I take it you’re referring to this Q&A (Link)?

I think the line is another piece of dark humor, in typical Handler fashion. Eleonora is extremely gullible, perhaps even moreso than her brother. There is no way a simple cold can last this long. Arthur probably has a much more serious health problem (asthma? tuberculosis? lung damage?) but Eleonora dismisses it as a cold, thinking “it will pass”.

This would be horribly poetic because Mr. Poe is meant to represent the way children are constantly gaslighted by adults: their emotions and opinions are routinely ignored. So it would make sense if Arthur were gaslighted since childhood into thinking he has a cold when the reality is much more serious.

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fuckablejughead-deactivated2018 asked:

I just read through the books and I’m hung up on what happened to Violet’s hair ribbon at the start of The Penultimate Peril. She had one in the pocket of her uniform, and then Kit gives her one, but there’s no mention of her having two. And having two might have come in handy in The End when Ishmael makes her give it up. So did Kit, like, pick her pocket and then give her own ribbon back to her?

No, I think it has something to do with these damn Queequeg uniforms. The last time we saw Violet’s ribbon, it was in the waterproof pocket:

With the other hand she reached into the waterproof pocket of her uniform, and drew out a ribbon to tie up her hair.[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Seven]

It’s assumed that once she was done inventing, she put the ribbon back into the waterproof pocket. And we know the Baudelaire orphans still had their uniforms on when they met Kit Snicket on Briney Beach:

“Don’t be absurd!” Mr. Poe sputtered. “I don’t know where you’ve been, or how you got here, or why you’re wearing a picture of Santa Claus on your shirts, but –”“It’s Herman Melville,” Klaus said. “Goodbye, Mr. Poe.”[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Thirteen]

You’ll notice that Brett Helquist drew the orphans in their “usual” cloths in the final illustration of “The Grim Grotto”. This is a big continuity error on his part.

So we’ve established the Baudelaire orphans are actually in their Queequeg uniforms when “The Penultimate Peril” begins. So Violet’s ribbon should still be in the waterproof pocket, which would explain why she reaches for it.

The conversation was so bewildering that the eldest Baudelaire wanted to concentrate as hard as she did when she was dreaming up an invention. Tying her hair up helped Violet focus her inventing mind, but before she could find a ribbon, Kit smiled kindly at her, and produced a ribbon of her own. She gestured for the eldest Baudelaire to sit down, and with a gentle look in her eyes, the distraught and pregnant woman tied Violet’s hair up herself.[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]

After that the orphans change into their Hotel Denouement uniforms behind a tree. What happened to their Queequeg uniforms?

“Change?” she asked.“I guess so,” Violet said with a sigh. “It seems a shame to waste all this food, but I can't eat any more brunch.”“Perhaps the volunteer who is cleaning it up will bring it to someone else,” Klaus said.“Perhaps,” Violet agreed. “There’s so much about V.F.D. that remains a mystery.”[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]

Apparently they just left them with the rest of the brunch to be picked up by a volunteer.

“When you’re done with your brunch, you can change into your uniforms behind that tree, and signal to Frank that you’re on your way. Do you have something you can throw into the pond?” […] “Don’t worry about the brunch things, Baudelaires. One of my comrades has volunteered to clean up after our picnic. He’s a wonderful gentleman. You’ll meet him on Thursday, if all goes well. If all goes well-“[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]

Okay, so the person Kit is talking about here is clearly Dewey Denouement (whose identity she’s not allowed to reveal to newer members). So I guess Dewey picked up whatever was left of the brunch and the Queequeg uniforms. He’s the last known owner of the original ribbon. There’s some symbolism here of Violet carelessly abandonning her ribbon/identity/independence to the organization, even though there’s very little chance she’ll ever retrieve it.

If I had to guess where the original ribbon went, I would say it’s currently stored within the secret underwater library underneath Hotel Denouement. So it’s not really a continuity error on Handler’s part. More worrying is the mysterious case of Violet’s disappearing hospital gown: (Link).

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ginnyweasley-hp asked:

Firstly, wow! Your theories are incredible and I agree with practically all of them, even the ones that are painful to consider such as Beatrice Sr surviving the original fire only to die at the ball. Thank you for clearing up so many childhood mysteries, especially the Sugar Bowl secret and the identity of J.S the imposter! One thing I've always wondered though, why does Mr Poe assume Geraldine Julienne sent him the note telling him to go to Briny beach? The note was signed J.S not G.J?

You give me too much credit, volunteer! I try to stick as close to canonical evidence as possible, but I daresay I’m not even halfway sure about most of my theories.

Now back to Arthur Poe. This is one of his most baffling lines for sure. Well… At least he got one letter right:

“I guess so,” Mr. Poe said, frowning and taking a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “I received a message saying that you’d be here at Briny Beach today.”“Who sent the message?” Klaus asked. Mr. Poe coughed once more, and then shrugged his shoulders wearily. The children noticed that he looked quite a bit older than the last time they had seen him, and wondered how much older they looked themselves.“The message is signed J.S.,” Mr. Poe said. “I assume that it’s that reporter from The Daily Punctilio – Geraldine Julienne. How in the world did you get here?[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Thirteen]

He could just be that dumb, however. It’s Mister Mustard we’re talking about.

If you assume he’s lying, of course, you could argue that Arthur Poe knows actually quite a few things about V.F.D. and doesn’t want the Baudelaire orphans to notice (Link). This ties with the bank robbery he has to investigate in “the Penultimate Peril”; recent considerations suggest J.S. and Kit may have enabled the heist and that the money stolen was actually the Baudelaire fortune (Link). So it’s possible that Mr. Poe had already got wind of these events at the end of “the Grim Grotto” and wanted to save himself the embarrassment in front of the Baudelaire orphans.

EDIT : @chillgamesh-the-swing pointed out that Jacques Snicket used to work for the Daily punctillo and probably is the “dramatic critic” whom Geraldine Julienne replaced at the beginning of the series. Arthur Poe would be aware of that because Eleonora Poe is editor-in-chief. So he would be tempted to believe that Geraldine Julienne has taken over Jacques Snciket’s correspondence and sometimes writes under his initials. A good theory!

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Anonymous asked:

Do you happen to know how long it's been between Ike's death and the children arriving at Josephine's? I haven't read the books in years and Netflix implies it was quite recently (like just before the fire recent it would seem.)

Oi gevalt, that’s actually a difficult question. According to Mr Poe’s, Ike’s death happened shortly before the Baudelaire orphans arrived at her house:

“She’s frightened of anything to do with Lake Lachrymose ,” Mr. Poe said, “but she didn’t say why. Perhaps it has to do with her husband’s death. Your Aunt Josephine-she’s not really your aunt, of course; she’s your second cousin’s sister-in-law, but asked that you call her Aunt Josephine-your Aunt Josephine lost her husband recently, and it may be possible that he drowned or died in a boat accident. It didn’t seem polite to ask how she became a dowager.[The Wide Window, Chapter One]

What supports this, in my opinion, is that Damocles Dock’s taximan is unaware that she’s deadly afraid of Lake Lachrymose. In the un-Authorized Autobiography, her old friend the Duchess of Winnipeg asks Kit to bring Jerome’s wedding photos to Ike. Given that Jerome’s wedding probably happened after “The Wide Window” and before “The Miserable Mill”, it seems the news of Ike’s death haven’t reached R. yet. So it would have to be quite recent indeed. It’s difficult to tell whether that happened before or after the Baudelaire fire, but during the same year would probably be a safe bet.

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Anonymous asked:

You've been absolutely DRAGGING Mr. Poe in all your last theories! Savage, Sleuth, savage... Not that the incompetent buffoon is undeserving of being dragged to hell and back (metaphorically and literally).

I didn’t mean it that way! Readers had been asking for an analysis of Poe’s behavior for quite same time, and it took me so long I had to split it into two articles. Then I wrote an analysis of the 2004 movie in anticipation for the Netflix series, and I had to address the underestimated issue of the changes the adaptation made to his character.

But no, I’ve come to despise Arthur Poe more and more in the last few years. I used to just dismiss him as an idiot in my teenage years (when i first read the books), partly because a lot of his methods and rhetorics are frequently presented by real-life adults as perfectly normal, especially in the education system. Children internalize a lot of harmful myths and this indoctrination is frequently exploited to justify the adults’ shortcomings.

But then I became an adult, then a hall monitor, and finally a high school teacher. Now that I’ve actually dealt with kids as a job, with varying degrees of success, I’m much more judgmental. Arthur Poe’s not just blind, he’s willingly blind and an enabler of abuse.

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tsuki-no-miyako-deactivated2018 asked:

Hi there Snicket Sleuth! I was wondering if Olaf's plan in the Bad Beginning had come to fruition (marry violet, acquire the fortune) what would have had happened to the Baudelaires? I personally believe, he would have acquired the fortune and then proceeded to kill all three Baudelaires and flee the country/hide somewhere remote.

Hi there, @tsuki-no-miyako!

To be fair, “The Marvellous Marriage” seems to be an afterthought. Olaf only started plotting to marry Violet once it became clear neither Arthur Poe nor the Baudelaire orphans were willing to hand him over the fortune.

That being said, yes, the bald man states he very much planned to kill all three Baudelaire siblings:

“Don’t think you’re so safe,” the bald man whispered to Klaus. “Count Olaf will take care of you and your sisters later. He doesn’t want to do it in front of all these people.” He did not have to explain to Klaus what he meant by the phrase “take care of.”[The Bad Beginning, Chapter Thirteen]

Although Olaf never states that himself. On the contrary, he affirms that he wanted to “toy” with them afterwards:

“Of course, of course,” Mr. Poe said, patting himon the back. “Well, Polly and I had better take our seats. Break a leg, Baudelaires!” “I wish we could break a leg,” Klaus whispered to Violet, and Mr. Poe left. “You will, soon enough,” Count Olaf said, pushing the two children toward the stage.[The Bad Beginning, Chapter Twelve]

“It was child’s play, winning this fortune. Now, if all of you will excuse me, my bride and I need to go home for our wedding night.”[The Bad Beginning, Chapter Thirteen]

Everything has gone according to plan. Please remove Sunny fromher cage and bring her directly to the theater. Klaus and Sunny have some chores to do before they go to bed.” Count Olaf gave Klaus a sharp look. “Are you satisfied now?” he asked. “Yes,” Klaus said quietly. He wasn’t satisfied at all, of course, but at least his baby sister was no longer dangling froma tower.[The Bad Beginning, Chapter Thirteen]

So would he have eventually killed them? That’s a matter for discussion because in later books Olaf is trying to gain custody of the Baudelaire orphans even though guardians can’t legally inherit the Baudelaire fortune. The most likely answer is that he wants to become their legal guardian to abuse them and harass them until Violet finally gives up and offers him the fortune out of her own accord, once she turns eighteen.

We also have to remember that Olaf belongs to the “villainous” side of V.F.D., which routinely kidnaps children for their own usage. Why murder the Baudelaire oprhans when you can slowly brainwash them into becoming your little minions? It’s pretty telling that Olaf’s troupe includes two ophans who lost their family because of the Schism (the white-powdered women) and the child of one his enemies (Fernald). This may have been the original plan, come to think of it.

“I don’t understand,” Violet said. “Why weren’t we taken, like you?”“You were,” Dewey said. “You were taken into the custody of Count Olaf. And he tried to keep you in his custody, no matter how many noble people intervened.”[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Eight]

In “The Slippery Slope”, Esme and Olaf say they plan on stealing the Spats fortune then adopt Carmelita. It’s pretty obvious Esme’s affection is partly self-serving: she’s brainwashing Carmelita and grooming her as a minion-in-training. I think that’s what Duncan was talking about in this passage:

“I know,” Duncan said. “Gunther wants to smuggle us out of the city, and hide us away on some island where the police won’t find us. He’ll keep us on the island until we come of age and he can steal the Quagmire sapphires. Once he has our fortune, he says, he’ll take us and– ”“Don’t say it,” Isadora cried, covering her ears. “He’s told us so many horrible things. I can’t stand to hear them again.”[The Ersatz Elevator, Chapter Eight]

For some reason, Olaf’s plan to steal the fortunes requires the children to become financially responsible. Which seems weird at first glance because he looses any sort of power over them once they become adults. But this plan makes sense if Olaf plans on brainwashing them though abuse and cult-like methods. By the time they’re eighteen, they’ll be fully devoted to Olaf or too broken not to hand him over their fortune.

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