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Post by lorelai on Oct 23, 2016 13:07:26 GMT -5
Welcome back! *goes off to read*
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Post by gliquey on Oct 23, 2016 16:52:25 GMT -5
Wow. As high quality an article as ever. You always make me question parts of the storyline I had always taken for granted.
For TBB, I suppose the natural reading is that he formulates his "Marvellous Marriage" plan the day the children visit Mr. Poe, who promptly blabs about them to Olaf. The next day, Olaf brings the play up at breakfast, under the pretence that he wants to be a better father. But I think that from the beginning he must have realised Mr. Poe wasn't going to just hand over the fortune. I thought he only slaps Klaus for talking back, because he got angry, rather than because Klaus was telling him anything he didn't already know. I also don't think Olaf is the kind to take the fortune piecemeal through asking for lots of bits of it to fix his house; he seems greedy enough to want it all at once. He might have just adopted the orphans thinking "they're rich", impulsively and without a real plan, and then developed his "Marvellous Marriage" plan as soon as they came to live with him (he did have to write an entire play, after all).
But anyway, you've got me thinking. It's an interesting question.
To expand on the "nineteenth cousin" quote, I knew it was absurdist humour but I never realised how absurd until just this second:
Cousins are related by their grandparents. Second cousins have common great-grandparents. You have four grandparents and eight great-grandparents.
Nineteenth cousins are related by their great(x18)-grandparents, of which they have over half a million.
There's no way Mr. Poe has a Baudelaire family tree with half a million people on, let alone one where he's exhausted so many thousands of options that he needs to resort to looking for nineteenth cousins. So this claim of his is quite suspect.
I look forward to your next post on the subject.
(PS: weird typo - you have written "duriNG" at one point, which should either be fully upper or fully lower case.)
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Post by Hermes on Oct 23, 2016 17:09:45 GMT -5
Well, you can know one nineteenth cousin without knowing all of them, especially if the 18xgreat-grandparents you had in common were famous - there certainly are people who can trace relationships of that kind, though not all of them. So it may be that Mr Poe knows one nineteenth cousin of the Baudelaires, and when he has exhausted the nearer cousins, this happens to be the only one he can still find.
I guess a more basic question is whether, when told something that doesn't make sense in real life, we should doubt it, or treat it as part of the oddness of Snicket's world. We might, for instance, think that when Lemony tells us about the Duchess of Winnipeg, we should conclude he is lying, because everyone knows Canada doesn't have titles of nobility. But I feel that would not be the right way to approach it.
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Post by Teleram on Oct 28, 2016 20:30:07 GMT -5
Guess who's back! This is actually the first part of a longer analysis of Mr. Poe's behavior regarding the Baudelaire parents' will. Stay tuned! As 667 Dark Avenue's resident Mr. Poe fan and the founder of the Anti-Defamation of Mr. Poe League, I declare this post to be unadulterated Anti-Poe propaganda (or, for short, Poepaganda). Expect to hear from our lawyers shortly. |
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Post by thedoctororwell on Dec 7, 2016 12:44:52 GMT -5
And the second part is finally here ! Sorry, Darius, but you're in for more outrage on my part. |
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Post by thedoctororwell on Dec 27, 2016 8:55:00 GMT -5
The Netflix adaptation will soon be upon us, so I decided to write something different for this unfortunate occasion. |
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Post by Teleram on Dec 27, 2016 14:11:46 GMT -5
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Post by Abi Faye on Jan 14, 2017 23:22:25 GMT -5
Thank you so much for writing these! I've been a huge fan of yours from Tumblr (I'm ofsteelroses over there) and - while I hadn't been to 667 in many (many) years (absolutely cannot remember my original login), you have lured me back here  !! Thanks. |
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Post by thedoctororwell on Jan 28, 2017 13:08:40 GMT -5
Thank you, Abi Faye! I've been very busy these last few weeks; a new job, an apartment hunt... And that weird new Netflix show everybody seems to be obsessed about. Oh, well, at least I have time to talk about old topics nobody really cares about. I'm sure that won't be controversial at all! |
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Post by gliquey on Feb 2, 2017 18:09:27 GMT -5
I'll read your Netflix review tomorrow, but I really like your breakdown of the "horseradish inside the sugar bowl" theory. I truly hope it's not what Handler intended to be the solution, and I doubt it is, not just for the reasons you cite but also because I would just find it unsatisfactory. Oh, it's some horseradish - so what?
One thing you don't mention is Dewey's line "You won't dare unleash the Medusoid Mycelium. Not while I have the sugar bowl." (TPP, p.215) Looking at it again, I suppose you could interpret it in a way that adds to the evidence that the sugar bowl contains horseradish - the villains shouldn't release the Medusoid Mycelium because Dewey would simply use its antidote. But I have always read it in a way that suggests the sugar bowl can be used as a weapon - the word "dare" in particular makes me feel like Dewey is threatening them.
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Post by thedoctororwell on Feb 3, 2017 9:00:41 GMT -5
Yeah, I didn't bother looking for too many quotes in favor of the horseradish theory because I was going to criticize it anyway.
Dewey's line could be interpreted that way, yes: Olaf doesn't want to unleash the MM unless he gets the antidote for himself. But we also have to consider that he also threatens to release the fungus in "The End" even though he hasn't got any antidote at his disposal. Sure, he's desperate at this point and that might have been a gigantic bluff. Then again Friday calls out his bluff with the harpoon gun in the beginning of the book and he decides not to use it, so... Whether he's serious about releasing the mushroom depends on your interpretation of the character.
However there are many other reasons why Olaf wouldn't unleash the MM until he gets his hands on his antidote. Firstly, the number of volunteers who know where the sugar bowl is located is extremely reduced. If Olaf kills them all in one swoop, the sugar bowl will be lost forever, and he doesn't want that. When he realizes in the laundry room that Dewey gave him false intel, he's devastated. He really should have kept him alive and tortured the actual location out of him.
Secondly, it's possible that the sugar bowl contains a living, breathing thing. Exposing it to a single spore of the MM could destroy it.
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Post by thedoctororwell on Feb 26, 2017 17:56:49 GMT -5
Oh, so you thought I was done with that damn sugar bowl? Think again. |
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Post by thedoctororwell on Mar 31, 2017 17:24:25 GMT -5
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Post by Hermes on Apr 1, 2017 9:43:40 GMT -5
Ha!
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Post by Mr. Dent on Apr 1, 2017 15:07:01 GMT -5
What an incorrigible beast. I can't believe how duped I was.
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!! Thanks.
