Olaf: villain or misunderstood ?

[amyweasley]

Hello everyone !
Here's the deal: at the end of the series, we start to see how sorry Olaf is sometimes (when he threatens Dewey or at the end with Kit).
For me he is the big villain of the series but, like all of the volontiers in a way:
He's not the greastest villain in VFD (we know he has superiors) and he suffered a lot in his childhood (the Baudelaire parents killed his and made him orphan).
I agree he's still a bad guy but all the volontiers had done horrible things, he just did more than others.

So, what's your opinion: Is Count Olaf a real bad guy or misunderstood ?

[A comet crashing into Earth]

As far as I'm concerned, Olaf is a villain. No matter your circumstances, you have a choice, and choosing murder and arson in order to get rich is villainous.
This doesn't mean that he's not human, though, or that we're not supposed to wonder or even partially understand why he does what he does. One of the things that make Olaf an intriguing character for me is that he starts out acting as your basic all-out comicbook Evil villain, and although he never shows signs of repentance or tries to redeem himself (not counting his last moments), as the series progresses we get hints of his tragic past and existential helplessness ("Poison darts", "What else can I do?"), and the Baudelaires themselves are brought into a few situations so desperate you can easily imagine Olaf turning to the dark side out of desperation rather than just malice. This way, the readers are eventually brought to feel conflicted about him, just like the Baudelaires themselves.

Still, it's a choice - one point of having the Baudelaires actively decide not to fight fire with fire is to contrast them with Olaf, who likely made the opposite choice in some desperate situation in the past; the children were noble enough, their first guardian wasn't. The readers slowly change their view of Olaf, start to see that there's also a tragedy in his character alone quite apart from the tragedy he bestows on others. And then he goes and dies without resolving that whole conflict, leaving the readers in a bewildered, melancholic state. Which works quite brilliantly, I personally think.

So my two cents are these: Olaf is a villain, which doesn't mean he's not misunderstood.

[Grace]

Also super interesting ^ how he is pretty black and white in the first several books and then becomes more fully drawn out later. I kind of see this as a flaw in the series, but can't tell if my opinion is too skewed by my general annoyance with the fact that the first few books have no VFD intricacies in them (exacerbated by the Netflix series).

[A comet crashing into Earth]

I think I choose to see it as a flaw in the early books which DH managed to turn to his advantage in the later ones.

[gliquey]

I think Olaf is mainly a villainous person, with few redeeming traits - we know even as a child he was burning ants with a magnifying glass. He has a couple of humanising moments but this is simply because he is a human, and no person is 100% bad. But he also enjoys committing murder and arson and other criminal activity. However, as you say it is very important to point out that he is by no means the most villainous person in the series - the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard are pretty clearly worse, as we see they scare Olaf.

A question that might make me a little more conflicted is whether members of the theater troupe are villains, or misunderstood. Now I think it's fairly clear that the carnival freaks are nice people who are just too dumb to think they have any choice other than joining Olaf. The white-faced women leave the troupe in TSS, and were never really dangerous people (though they may have killed Violet in THH had Klaus and Sunny not impersonated them). TGG spends a lot of time giving Fernald a backstory, and though I think he is definitely a villain, he may not have become one had his life gone differently. I think the characters that are hardest to redeem are the bald man, and the person who looks like neither a man nor a woman; the bald man in particular seems to me like the character with absolutely no positive qualities.

[Hermes]

Was the ant person Olaf? I thought we had determined they were a woman. But certainly O as a child was writing obscene anagrams. While he no doubt sank further into villainy because of his parents' death, he must have been villainous to some extent before that, given that it happened when Violet and Klaus were old enough to remember.

I'm not sure how villainous the bald man and the HOIG are, since they die before the theme of moral ambiguity is fully explored. They could well have been coerced into villainy because of their unusual qualities, the HOIG in an obvious way, the bald man perhaps because of his large nose - or for that matter O may have convinced him that baldness is freakish.

I think one thing that illuminates Olaf's character is in TSS, where one of the sinister duo says they will burn down all the children's homes, and O says 'Of course we're doing this to get their fortunes' - he is rather worried by the extremes of villainy that the duo will go to, seemingly burning things down just for its own sake.

[Dante]

Feb 17, 2017 15:26:46 GMT -5 Hermes said:

Was the ant person Olaf? I thought we had determined they were a woman.

TWW page 180, "her" magnifying glass.

[gliquey]

Bertrand's cousin was female, but I'm referring to the line:

Burning ants, of course, is an abhorrent hobby—the word "abhorrent" here means "what Count Olaf used to do when he was about your age" (TWW, p.180)

So yes, the cousin Violet is thinking of was not Olaf, but at least the way I'm reading it, Lemony says that Olaf also burned ants as a child. And although it's not canon, in the Netflix series they abandon the cousin and have Josephine mention that Olaf used to burn ants when the children come up with the invention.

[ashydutchinn]

Everyone is the hero of their own story. No one will admit to themself that they are the villain, or even the comic relief. You are the protagonist, the hero, the one who will triumph in the end after overcoming the hardships of life, imposed by others or just unfortunate circumstances. So I certainly think Olaf thinks he is the hero, at least in the beginning. As the series continues, and we see him start to question his actions and motivations ("What else can I do?"), and I view this as him coming to realize that he might be the villain in his own story, and trying to come to terms with that. Unwilling to let go, sure, in denial, probably, but at his final moments in helping Kit, I think he finally accepts that he has been truly evil, and while there is no making up for that, at least he can do one noble thing before he dies. So in my opinion, he is a villain, but he certainly seemed to start turning a different path near the end. If he would have survived, who knows, maybe he could have become noble enough.