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Post by A comet crashing into Earth on Aug 3, 2015 9:40:24 GMT -5
Whose death is the most terrible in the series, do you think? For childrens' books, there's some quite grizzly scenarios in there. There's three events in the books which genuinely scared me as a child (and still kind of do, to be honest): Dr. Orwell's demise in TMM (this came as a small shock to me, since all the previous deaths had been off-screen, and generally less messy), the bald man and Olivia being torn apart by lions in TCC (for some reason, the death of the bald man feels more haunting to me - I'm left with a sense that it was pure coincidence how Fernald lives to become a nuanced character, while the rest of the troupe meets seemingly karmic fates, so who knows what redeeming features the bald man may have had?), and Violet almost getting a cranioectomy in THH. Nobody died in the latter scenario, so that's out of the poll, but I'm interested to hear what everyone thinks are the most nightmare-inducing parts of a story that is quite grim for its intended audience.
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Post by gliquey on Aug 3, 2015 11:07:40 GMT -5
Even as a 7 year old, I don't recall being scared by any of the deaths. I think Dante has previously noted the stark contrast between ASOUE and ATWQ, where ASOUE will kill off someone without much thought (e.g. Gustav), but ATWQ spends three books leading up to what we presume will be a single murder. I think the nature of death is often irrelevant in fiction; only the treatment of the subject by the author. A writer can make even the most peaceful death a tragedy, or turn a gruesome death into [black] comedy. In Snicket's case, I just didn't take the deaths too seriously.
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Post by Dante on Aug 6, 2015 11:23:14 GMT -5
(for some reason, the death of the bald man feels more haunting to me - I'm left with a sense that it was pure coincidence how Fernald lives to become a nuanced character, while the rest of the troupe meets seemingly karmic fates, so who knows what redeeming features the bald man may have had?) Ha ha, that's an amusing way of looking at it. The haunting backstory of the enormous androgynous assistant! What a tragic loss. As for my answer to the question... Of the options you list, only two are censored within the series itself: Dr. Orwell's, and Olivia and the bald man's. It is hard not to think that the latter would have been considerably worse.
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Post by Invisible on Aug 6, 2015 15:27:52 GMT -5
I'd say the fire-related deaths were always the most gruesome. I have a teeny tiny phobia of fire, though, that might have something to do with it.
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Post by gliquey on Aug 15, 2015 16:01:19 GMT -5
I've just re-read TRR: Monty's death and Olaf's behaviour were worse than I remembered. I see Count Olaf as an eccentric and ostentatious villain - yes, he's a criminal and he's more dangerous than Jim Carrey's portrayal of him - but he's still not as bad as the man with no hair and woman with no beard and while he does commit some crime, his plans are often unnecessarily complicated and never bloody or explicitly violent (e.g. making children run around a track, telling someone to jump out of a window).
For instance, on page 87, Snicket uses the "as if he'd just told a joke" line when Olaf alludes to the death of Montgomery. Olaf is encouraging the children to find the corpse, and he treats this as a joke; he's not just proud of killing Monty, he thinks it's funny. A few pages later (93), he starts graphically describing the body ("Look at these staring eyes") - "pale, pale face" is used quite a bit throughout the rest of the novel - and Violet is clearly very disturbed by it ("Stop it! Don't talk like that!"). He is vividly describing a dead body to a fourteen year old and a twelve year old and (if you think Sunny fully comprehends her situation) a baby. Readers should not be too horrified by Monty's death after Snicket tells us that he will die in the third chapter, but the horror comes from the description of the corpse, not the death itself.
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Post by Dante on Aug 15, 2015 16:42:18 GMT -5
The early books are really quite different in tone to the ones that come later. The comic elements only entered the series rather gradually, but they stayed once they arrived. I wonder what the series would have been like if it had remained quite so grim. Still, while quite horrible, I don't know if Uncle Monty's death is per se "gruesome."
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Post by Esmé's meme is meh on Aug 15, 2015 17:26:46 GMT -5
Dr. Orwell's death was shocking, I wasn't expecting that at all when I read TMM.
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Post by colette on Jul 4, 2018 8:11:56 GMT -5
Well, there is the difference between characters whom you miss the most and the characters who were killed in the most brutal and cruel way. Speaking about the latter, the bald man and Lulu had by far the most brutal death to me but it's not that I really miss either of them. Dewey and Olaf are the character whom I miss the most but their death wasn't particularly brutal. I voted for the bald man and Lulu. I think that being devoured by dogs is the most shocking death possible to me but nobody in ASoUE died that way. Death by lions is less shocking to me but still.
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