just a question

[owlcitizen11]

this something iwas just wondering because i'm re-reading the books and just thought of this.

when the baudelaires go to live with the squalors, jerome takes them to all their favorites places, remember> how come they don't visit justice strauss? she was a good friend to them so i would figure that they would want to.

just a question. not a contradiction or anything.

[Dante]

That's a very good question, owlcitizen11. Maybe they tried, and found that she was so busy with her court work that she couldn't even be at home, but then again, Justice Strauss says in TPP that she'd been following the Baudelaires since TRR, so maybe she was one step behind - investigating events at Prufrock Prep. - and wasn't in the city during TEE. Or maybe Jerome told them not to bother her, or Esmé told him to tell them not to bother her, since she wasn't allowed to be their guardian (even though the rules had changed on that since TMM). I guess you can come up with any number of explanations, but the real explanation, I think, is that Daniel Handler wasn't connecting the books together very much at that point; characters didn't start returning after being absent for several books until TSS.

[owlcitizen11]

that was another thing. mr. poe says that the baudelaire's parents will says that other relatives allowed to raise the children. i don' think all the gaurdians they had were relatives.

[Dante]

After The Wide Window, none of the Baudelaires' guardians seem to be relatives, although at the start of TVV we see Mr. Poe try to arrange for them to stay with another relative, Mr. Fagin. I presume that, after the events of TWW, so many of the Baudelaires' relatives were scared off or otherwise unobtainable (perhaps due to V.F.D. duties?) that Mr. Poe was forced to waive that part of the will, or else there'd be nowhere for them to stay at all. It's at this point that, in a fairer world, the Baudelaires would've been allowed to live with Justice Strauss - my post above suggests why she may not have been available - but it's not like their other guardians were completely illegitimate. The Baudelaires' residence with Sir was a business arrangement rather than a formal adoption, their time at Prufrock Prep. was always meant to be temporary while Mr. Poe sorted out another guardian, Jerome knew their mother, and the Village of Fowl Devotees adoption was part of a program that several other communities were taking place in. They weren't just random placements which popped up out of the air. Not quite. We can rationalise them.