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Post by Hermes on Feb 5, 2009 11:27:29 GMT -5
Of course, Harry Potter is planned in advance (to an extent, even if not perfectly) in a way that ASOUE isn't. (When Harry Potter fans get upset about J.K. Rowling's inconsistencies over the Weasleys' ages, and the like, I sometimes feel like screaming 'Try reading Lemony Snicket!') But I guess in this case it probably was planned in advance; after all, VFD sometimes stands for Volunteer Fire Department in the real world; and they are a very odd set of initials to come up with if he hadn't a definite interpretation in mind.
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Post by Dante on Feb 5, 2009 15:14:32 GMT -5
Oh, I'd be very surprised if he didn't always know what V.F.D. stood for. To say that aSoUE wasn't planned ahead is a little harsh. Handler did plan ahead, to a degree (I'm certainly not saying he plans to Rowling's extent; it isn't that sort of series, and if he has bundles of notes on the life stories of every character, I'll eat my fedora), but - well, I remember reading an interview in which he said that he would write a plan for each book, and end up ignoring at least half of it. I presume what he does is that he leaves a lot of things fairly open, but has things like the setting and the general direction of the plot pinned down. And no matter what happened with the sugar bowl, I feel no doubt that in TAA Handler didn't, and at the time of TAA he wouldn't, just throw down three random initials that he had no idea what he was going to do with. Real volunteer fire departments aren't that obscure. I don't know what we'd have said if 667 was around before TVV gave us the first initial, but it's no coincidence that Volunteer Fire Department was always the most popular theory. Looking backwards, I find it less likely that he'd have just come up with V.F.D. and later shoehorned in something that fit the initials, and more likely that he would've changed it from Volunteer Fire Department to something entirely different - which of course he didn't, but it'd fit.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 5, 2009 15:33:27 GMT -5
Oh, I don't say it's not planned in advance at all - just not in the way Harry Potter is. Planning each book in advance is not the same thing as planning the whole series. I'm fairly certain that, when Rowling wrote the first book, she already knew - SPOILERS FOLLOW -
that Harry was a horcrux, that Snape loved Lily, that Dumbledore was once a friend of Grindelwald, and that there were some significant entities called the Deathly Hallows. Whereas there's some evidence that Handler didn't know, until he was quite close to the end, who Beatrice was, and I'm rather doubtful if he knew that Olaf and Kit were going to die.
Of course, there must be some things that are worked out a bit of time in advance. (One which comes to mind, apart from VFD, is 'Overboard: see Quagmire, Quigley'.) But it's not a feat of planning in the same way.
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Post by cwm on Feb 5, 2009 15:40:39 GMT -5
Well, he must have planned things out at some point 5-6 timewise with the introduction of V.F.D; the books weren't going anywhere specific prior to TAA.
Re Germany translating V.F.D. into F.F.: I just tried to sketch a glaring eye using two large F's, and I can see it'd just about work...
But now I want to know how Very Fancy Doilies, Village of Fowl Devotees and all the other V.F.Ds are translated and still work. The French translation of the former is 'napperons très de fantaisie', for starters.
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Post by Dante on Feb 5, 2009 15:46:41 GMT -5
I assure you, I quite recognise the distinction; my memory of Handler's planning process, admittedly misleadingly-chosen, was to reflect on how he plans, not when. Certainly, it's not the same kind of series as HP - not in length (of each book), not in detail - and I should expect that was reflected in the planning process. Nonetheless, it's funny you should mention Beatrice's identity, as I'm convinced that Handler knew it from the start, changed it, and then later changed it back. My opinion is that he probably knew that Olaf would die, at least once he knew he was getting thirteen books... but didn't know that Kit would even exist. I guess my analogy would be that he had a road map for the series with a few places signposted but a whole lot of empty space everywhere else. And that most of it was drawn out after he'd already made the first four stops.
Edit: Back on translations, cwm: I think that what the foreign editions do - I'm not sure how I know this, but I do own a French copy of TGG - is that they translate some things and not others according to what works. Where the plot requires it, they'll do everything they can to bludgeon a translation in, but for things in passing that don't matter (Vessel For Disaccharides, say), they'll ignore things that don't translate, and perhaps V.F.D.-ise things that didn't use the acronym in the original.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 5, 2009 16:43:20 GMT -5
Dante: I don't think we disagree; sorry if I gave that impression.
What you say about Beatrice seems plausible - but TUA actually seems to give evidence pointing in opposite directions; the (real or fake) Duchess's letter, saying 'Beatrice is past caring... which is, no doubt, why you are devoted to the cause of those poor orphans' (or words to that effect) makes most sense if she is their mother; but the masked ball, at which Lemony spoke to Beatrice, and which by the TUA timeline must have happened after the Baudelaire fire, suggests she isn't.
Yes, on reflection, Olaf's death seems a very plausible end to the series, and could have been planned from early on - it ensures that this series or unfortunate events is at an end, without actually creating a happy ending which would spoil the mood of the series. And I agree that to start with there was no reason to think Kit would exist. But I think there was a period when she existed but was not doomed to die - given that Lemony is sending messages to her in some of the later books. (I know you can account for that by saying he is writing just - as in, a day or two - after the events happen; but there's stuff in those same books which suggests quite a lot of time has elapsed.)
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Post by Dante on Feb 5, 2009 17:09:00 GMT -5
What you say about Beatrice seems plausible - but TUA actually seems to give evidence pointing in opposite directions; the (real or fake) Duchess's letter, saying 'Beatrice is past caring... which is, no doubt, why you are devoted to the cause of those poor orphans' (or words to that effect) makes most sense if she is their mother; but the masked ball, at which Lemony spoke to Beatrice, and which by the TUA timeline must have happened after the Baudelaire fire, suggests she isn't. If I recall correctly, the U.A. can be a bit of a mess... been a long time since I thought it through, so I don't want to go into it. That evidence there does seem to be internally at odds, so possibly Handler was planting red herrings hither and thither, or honestly wasn't sure at that point and was hedging his bets... I do think he started off thinking Beatrice was the Baudelaires' mother, though. Again, always the most popular theory, and at that stage in the series - I've changed my mind. Just now. Funny, should've done it years ago. I think Handler maybe didn't even think she was anyone at all to start with. She didn't need to be. Just another gothic artifact, a potent reminder of the author's tragic loneliness. Eventually, though, he'd have had to come up with something. The sugar bowl was in less than half the series, so to a degree he can get away with never telling us what was in it, but asking us to believe that the woman he's been harping on about since the first book was nobody in particular - no, that wouldn't do. By TMM, we can see that he's starting to think about tying things in, but with Handler it's hard to tell if an offhand reference or anecdote means something, or of it's just that, offhand... There were discussions about whether we thought Olaf would die. It seems like the chief argument against would be that it was a bit cheap. Ultimately, it wasn't that simple. But it would always have been more difficult to contrive a solution in which the series ended with Olaf still alive but somehow neutralised as a threat, versus Olaf dead. Not that Snicket didn't hint a few times that Olaf was still around and a danger to him, but that might just've been in the odd interview, I don't remember if it was in the "canon," as it were. And it wouldn't do to tell everyone that he was going to die at some point, either, even if it was talking from a perspective of "long after the series has concluded." Handler says he always knew how the series would end, and I think that was true for some elements; I'm happy to think that's the case with Olaf's death. I don't see that as being especially problematic. But I think the circumstances would have been considerably different, if he knew them at all. Good point. Personally, I'm content overall to conclude that the series are being written not so long after events take place - oh, there are horrible flaws, but I think this is generally the line the books are taking later on and the line we really have to take given things like Lemony's letter to Kit in TSS - but I agree, it's hard to know if Handler always knew Kit would end up dying as soon as she was identified as a character. Maybe once she was identified as a character who would actually appear, given the lengths the final books go to to get rid of anyone who might give the Baudelaires a concrete future. It's a foggy one. I'm not going to speculate on whether Handler knew Kit would even appear when he first started planting references to her in the U.A., or whether she'd just be another cryptic figure in the background like the Duchess of Winnipeg. We're talking about how much he plans, but at the end of the day we don't know how much he plans, and it doesn't matter as sometimes he changes it anyway. Frankly, by now I'm far more interested in the many "What if?"s of the series than the unanswered questions. Incidentally, for some Kit was a potential candidate for Baudelaire mother (that business with the salad in TSS), in which case she'd already have died. (Unless she was the survivor of the fire, in which case she might still have died again.)
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Post by cwm on Feb 6, 2009 4:18:38 GMT -5
Not that Snicket didn't hint a few times that Olaf was still around and a danger to him, but that might just've been in the odd interview, I don't remember if it was in the "canon," as it were. The Reptile Room has an implication that Olaf is still around at the time of writing, I think. Canon issues are resolved by having Olaf die and get buried on a remote island so nobody would know for sure he was dead unless they got there.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 7, 2009 12:26:23 GMT -5
Regarding the dating: as far as I can remember, all the explicit indications of when Lemony is writing suggest it is quite a long time after the events; the evidence that he is just behind the Baudelaires comes from putting together information from different places. For instance, the letter to Kit in TSS is evidence that he is writing just after the events because we know that Kit is dead (and that the Hotel Denouement has been destroyed). If we stick to what is in TSS itself, he might well be arranging to meet Kit years later, at the place where some of the events happened, where he would naturally go in the course of his research. So I think that the 'long after' theory better represents Handler's intentions, and the 'just behind' theory is something we have to invent to deal with inconsistencies.
More speculatively, I think that this also makes better sense of TBL - I get the definite sense that when Lemony first heard from Beatrice (which can be pretty firmly dated to eight or nine years after the unfortunate events), he did not know who she was, which would not make sense if he had already written The End.
I think there was a definite shift in Handler's plans between TGG and TPP. The end of TSS (with its reference to the last safe place where all the volunteers, including Quigley, could gather) and of TGG ('turning the tables of their lives and breaking their unfortunate cycle for the first time') seem to point to something very different from what actually happens in TPP. He seems also to have made up his mind about who (the original) Beatrice was at this point. I think that by the time he wrote TPP he knew where the story was going, and that it's very likely that this was the point at which he decided to create young Beatrice, and, at the same time, to kill her mother.
Edit: cwm, you can find some French equivalents of VFD terms in the French Wikipedia, which has an article on 'VCD - Societe de Compagnonnage Fictive'. They are quite imaginative, though it involves a bit of stretching sometimes. 'Villeneuve-des-Corbeaux' sounds a very good name for a village.
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Post by MasterKlaus247 on Feb 26, 2009 14:08:42 GMT -5
Well, it is a peculiar eye.
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Post by jacquessnicket on Dec 21, 2009 20:37:20 GMT -5
When I first saw it I was confused...But just a few weeks ago I studied it and found the V F and D in it the letters are all mashed up but still visible
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Post by lemonylove on Dec 23, 2009 16:32:20 GMT -5
im bored so im just typing cause of the fun of it soooooooooo i love asoue i have dedicated my life to when im old and wrinkly i would say i will still be like i am now a little miss burton/asoue/harry potter/twilight girl but by then i will be big ms burton/asoue/harry potter/twilight woman at night at my house and you come down for a midnight snack or a glass of water of to sneak out to kidnap babys to be v.f.d. members you would he the constannt clicking of the computer / laptop of scribbling on a page or when your asleep on the couch i will wake you up by accident you look up and im on a a series of unfortunate events wiki but i will still be the same _____ year old girl inside i might have to go to a boring job for 7 years just to make myself a ok knonw author but im terrible at makikng up stories i might be an actress and a producer i will make a new asoue i will be violet i will make book 1-3 then a year later 4-6 next year 7-9 and then 10-12 i wont ruin the ending i wish they finished the books but they cant change the well known actors/actress's the actor who played sunny will be like 7 imagine a 7 year old actress playing like a 2 or 3 year old its mad
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Post by tigerseye on Dec 23, 2009 17:15:34 GMT -5
i noticed it wasnt right in the film too
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Post by Isadora on Feb 16, 2010 20:26:42 GMT -5
I can never find the "F" ...
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Post by Christmas Chief on Feb 17, 2010 7:29:23 GMT -5
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