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Post by Lady Michelina on Sept 27, 2003 20:53:52 GMT -5
I was trying to figure out what month the Baudelaires misfortune started... The Slippery Slope was probably late winter, early spring by the sound of it... and The Bad Beginning... I thought it was in fall but Im not sure...
As for year it has to be in the 90's... The first book was published in 1999. According to TUA, in the letter Brett Helquist wrote to LS, he said next to the enclosed drawing of the burned Baudelaire mansion, something like the following : "...I got to the house as soon as I can, but by the time I got there it was to late. The drawing enclosed is what I could make out of the ashy remains of the Baudelaire home" and so on, thats not it exactly but I know he wrote something like that...so anyways... this letter was probably written in 1999 or 1998, so it seems like the year the Baudelaires misfortune began was well... 1998 or 1999...what do you think?
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Post by Tyler on Sept 27, 2003 22:17:55 GMT -5
The Baudelaires happened in the 80s probabley.
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Post by Rikku on Sept 28, 2003 8:58:56 GMT -5
haha. 80's people w/ mullets ;D ok sorry bout that. I dunno it's hard to say when the series took place. It sounds like a combination between the past (like the 1930's and 1940's) and the presant.
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Post by Lady Michelina on Sept 28, 2003 9:23:49 GMT -5
Well - yes but it cant be 1930's 1940's because in the books there are computer, electricity and stuff so it cant be that far back
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Post by Tay Sachs on Sept 28, 2003 9:30:34 GMT -5
How long have these unfortunate events taken? Lemony was right, Sunny is no longer a baby but a girl. She has to be at least three to five now.
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Post by Lady Michelina on Sept 28, 2003 9:52:20 GMT -5
Im guessing 3 or 4 , Violet 15 and Klaus is still 13 just a guess people..just a guess
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Post by onerousolaf on Sept 28, 2003 17:00:50 GMT -5
How long have these unfortunate events taken? Lemony was right, Sunny is no longer a baby but a girl. She has to be at least three to five now. 3-5? Wow! That's not even close to what I was thinking. In the Bad Beginning, Sunny is unable to walk and stays that way until the end of the Vile Village. However, Sunny does possess the ability to say a few words. So she is probably around 10-12 months in the Bad Beginning. Now lets look at a chart and see how long it is from the Bad Beginning to the Vile Village. (These are estimates, not the real thing,) The Reptile Room: 10 days The Wide Window: 4-5 days The Miserable Mill: 8-10 days The Austere Academy: 1.5 months to 2 months The Ersatz Elevator: Week and a half. The Vile Village: Week and a half. Lets assume Sunny was 11 months in the Bad Beginning, 10+5+10+60+10+10=105 days, or about 3 and a half months. So at the beginning of the Hostile Hospital, Sunny is about 14 and a half months. That sounds about right since that is when most people take their first steps. Now lets add in the time for the Hostile Hospital to the Slippery Slope. Hostile Hospital: 5 days Carnivorous Carnival: 7-10 days The Slippery Slope: 7-10 days 10+10+5=25. 14 and a half months plus 25 days is 15 months and 10 days. So my guess is Sunny is now about a year and 4 months. (That seems pretty accurate since her picture on the Slippery Slope cover looks like she is still a baby.) Since Klaus turned 13 in the Vile Village, and because the amount of time from the Hostile Hospital to the Slippery Slope is about one month, Klaus is probably about 13 years and one month. And with Violet, it depends on when her birthday is. If she had had her birthday just before the events that happened in the Bad Beginning, she would be less then 14 and a half now. However, if she had turned 14 way before the events in the Bad Beginning occured, she could be having her 15th birthday any day now. The main problem with my theory is Lemony could only be mentioning the days where important things happened. So maybe their stay at Aunt Josephine's lasted 2 months. Another problem with my theory however is how much time takes place from one book to the next. (Obviously the 7th through the tenth take place right after one another.) But if there was a time period of one month between each guardian, my theory would be completely off.
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Post by Lady Michelina on Sept 29, 2003 19:42:38 GMT -5
yes now that I think about it your theory does make sense
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CactusWren
Catastrophic Captain
frighten the thing you fear.
Posts: 98
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Post by CactusWren on Oct 2, 2003 3:08:29 GMT -5
The impression I've had for a long time is that the author has been at some pains to deliberately avoid setting the stories in a specific, identifiable place or time. Thus, we have a very sophisticated computer, but the children travel by a rickety streetcar and take a train to a new place. Mr. Poe travels by helicopter and tells the children to send him a fax, but the city where the Baudelaires live has horse-drawn wagons making deliveries on cobblestone streets, and Violet and Klaus's clothing looks like something from the 1920s, as does the fire engine in the frontispiece of TBB. It's a terrific mixture of eras.
(I'm thinking here of the anime feature Kiki's Delivery Service, which displays a somewhat similar pastiche {a word which here means "a blending of disparate elements"}: the setting has 1920s aircraft and 1930s-looking automobiles, but we see girls in 1950s full skirts and capri pants listening to doo-wop rock and roll on transistor radios and watching little black-and-white television sets.)
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Post by Tay Sachs on Oct 2, 2003 9:37:57 GMT -5
Love Kiki's Delivery Service, it's in my DVD collection. And yes, I overestimated Sunny's age a bit. More like 2-3 but certainly not a baby anymore. More like a toddler. Look at the cover of TSS. She used to be the size of a shoe, which says to me she was pretty small when the books started, not even a year old yet.
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Post by depressio on Oct 4, 2003 12:57:58 GMT -5
Well - yes but it cant be 1930's 1940's because in the books there are computer, electricity and stuff so it cant be that far back I think computers were invented a while back, especially the cheap one described in Prufrock Prep since most computers don't turn green anymore. Electricity was discovered way back in sometime before or after ethe Industrial Revolution which was like a long time ago.
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Post by Freshie on Oct 4, 2003 13:16:03 GMT -5
the first computer was invented in 1965..it was a imac or something..
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Post by cwm3 on Oct 4, 2003 13:25:08 GMT -5
If it was set in 1930s to 1940s, the computers would be the size of houses.
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Post by Efogoto on Oct 6, 2003 1:17:08 GMT -5
The first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, was developed in the 1940s and it was huge. UNIVAC was developed in the 1950s and it was also huge. And expensive.
Personal computing really began in the 1970s, especially with Apple computers and the Apple II computer. The first one my family owned had 48K of memory. That's for the OS and the software.
The Macintosh was first released in the 1980s. That's about when IBM started producing its PCs too.
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Post by Quigley on Oct 12, 2003 20:01:03 GMT -5
Hm....I don't think UE has a setting or time. It just is, you know?
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