Would VFD kill the Baudelaire kids because of Beatrice Jr.?

[lsandthebooks]

Almost everyone in the series had their parents killed. For most people it was after their 4th birthday, and for the Baudelaires and Quagmires it was when they were in their preteens-early teens.

So after Book 13, when Lemony met Beatrice Jr. who was about 10 years old...Do you think she was all alone because the Baudelaires were killed?

In the books Beatrice Jr. says she goes to VFD school, so that implies she was taken just like everyone else right?

And in the Beatrice Letters, the very first BB to LS #1 letter, she says:

"For years I kept quiet, feeling all my words twisting and tangling inside me like skeins of yarn, as I desperately searched for someone who could be of assistance..."

So. She's been separated from the Baudelaires for years. Who else could she be living with besides VFD?

[El Juanico Diez]

I was already seriously missing you! How nice to have you back interacting with us !! So, let's establish the premises of your questions (before Dante shows up here and overturns your own premises). The Baudelaires definitely survived the island and arrived alive on the continent. Considering this possibility as real (although there are people who disagree with it) we need to analyze TBL from this point of view. In this case, the simplest explanation for Beatrice Jr's letters to Lemony, chronologically speaking, is that letters 2 and 3 were written before Beatrice Jr was reunited with the Baudelaires. Then, after some time, Beatrice Jr met with the Baudelaires. It was there that she would have obtained the information to be able to enter VFD, because according to Beatrice Jr it was through this information that she found the VFD training school. After this reunion, Beatrice Jr separated from the Baudelaires again and started looking for the Baudelaires again. In this case, how was Beatrice Jr's entry into VFD? Was she seen as an orphan did the Baudelaires need to give permission? Well, the answer is simple. She was treated as an orphan. According to Beatrice Jr's words, she had to give her name at the training school. She had to find the training school alone. In other words, it was not taken. Beatrice Jr doesn't seem to have a permanent home, so she can't meet the normal requirements for being taken by VFD when you have parents. She arrived at a training center and said, "I want to be a VFD. My name is Beatrice Baudelaire". And then they had to accept it. So, the Baudelaires were not killed on that occasion. And I am sure that the Baudelaires must have stayed away from VFD to the point where their appearances were seen as an urban legend.

[Dante]

lsandthebooks, I'd like you to unpack the suggestion in your subject line, which you don't really touch on explicitly in your post. Much about young Beatrice's situation in TBL is mysterious, deliberately so - though there are some pretty strong indications of what happened and I am frankly beyond exhausted of explaining the obvious to people over and over again - but as I see it, what you're asking is not just "what happened" in a general sense, but "did this happen", where "this" is the quite extraordinary claim that V.F.D. literally murdered the Baudelaire siblings purely so they could induct young Beatrice into their organisation. Jean Lucio explains tolerably well what TBL indicates as to how young Beatrice managed to get into a V.F.D. training school, but I think it behooves me to remind you that V.F.D. as an organisation has not expressed an institutional predilection for murdering their own experienced members in order to trade them for traumatised novices. It seems a policy with a very short shelf life, and one unlikely to be popular with the membership at large. The villains of ASoUE are guilty of burning down people's homes with the intent of capturing their children into some form of enslavement, but that is a separate issue and you could not mistake anyone held captive in this way for having been formally trained (the Baudelaires under Count Olaf, the Snow Scouts and others in the Carmelita...).

[El Juanico Diez]

Yes ... As expected, Dante attacked the premises. And in that case I agree with him. Even Lemony claims to have reunited with his parents a few times after he entered VFD. It is true that Lemony's parents died at some point during his childhood or youth. But that was not due to a VFD-killing parent policy. (I believe that being in VFD is already dangerous in itself, especially after the Great Schism). Jacques Snicket, Olivia Taliban, Uncle Monty, Aunt Josephine were members of VFD who were killed because of the actions of villains and not because their children were entering VFD.


Dante and I discussed extensively about the possibility that Lemony's biological parents were killed on the day of his kidnapping, but it has been proven that this idea is not presented at LSTUA at any time. Quite the contrary: there are people in the ASOUE universe who spread fake news in order to compromise the organization's image before the public. These people make up stories with lies or half truths about VFD and some of its members. This reality is even one of the things that makes Lemony Snicket obsessed with the truth in all its seemingly insignificant details. Despite this, he knows that lying is sometimes good and necessary. But he will not do this unnecessarily in a work that is obviously a search for the truth, whatever that may be. If there is anything shameful to say, he will still say it. If there is something secret important to be told, it will still tell it. And if he is not sure about an information, he will leave the fact that he is not sure explicitly. And if he has serious reasons for not telling something, he will omit it and inform the reader that it was omitted on purpose. 

Lemony is not trying to deceive you. (Daniel Handler is trying to trick you, but Lemony is not trying to trick you). The way Daniel Handler is trying to trick you is through a plot in which the main characters do not have all the information, and in which the narrator of this story is telling the story from the point of view of these main characters. The plot is sometimes unnecessarily complex and surreal, but that is not Lemony's fault, who is just writing this story down.

All of this is important to understand something: if VFD purposely killed the parents of the kidnapped children, Lemony would have told us so explicitly. But what we have in ASOUE is not just hints from a script that may lead some to conclude it wrongly. Like the hints made by women with white faces in TSZ. These are phrases that could lead to the conclusion that VFD kills parents. But her actions show that this is not to be understood. Because the phrases they spoke led them to abandon Olaf. They were no longer convinced that fighting VFD using fire against fire was really just and right. Similarly, the fact that Dewey's parents were killed after he was taken does not mean that it was VFD who killed his parents. This is a script ruse. Daniel Handler knows that the reader can intuitively end up creating a distorted cause and consequence relationship.