Revolting Reading: TSS

[Glittery666]

Chapter 5
Very good depiction of trying to decide on a question to ask.
I kind of wish we got a flashback of Quigley finding Uncle Monty’s library.
Good thing Bruce didn’t decide to investigate the noise.
I’d like to hear more about the Baudelaires’ climb.

[Glittery666]

Chapter 6
I’m a little surprised that Sunny didn’t try to climb into the car, since it’d be at least a bit warmer in there.
The image of the eye tattoo replacing the eyes of their parents is amazingly eerie.
Sunny insulting everyone because no one can understand her was also featured in the ASOUE movie.
Olaf not knowing the point of floss says a lot.
The fact that he’s grossed out by iced coffee and sorbet also says a lot, granted something hot would’ve been
better in this situation.

[Gregor Anwhistle]

Chapter 5

I like how Vertical Flame Diversions are VFD's version of the poles used in fire stations.

The passage was last used by one of Lemony's comrades, who removed the pole for use in the construction of a submarine. A nice bit of foreshadowing for TGG's setting.

Lemony's letter is our first mention of the Hotel Denouement. I find it rather sweet he used Beatrice's birthday as a way for Kit to know when he'll reach the hotel.


Chapter 6

Olaf wears the same outfit for weeks at a time. Yikes.

That red snowsuit with the embroidered 'B' was likely Beatrice's. Interesting how Olaf quickly tries to divert Sunny's attention when Esme says it's stolen.

The white-faced woman giving Sunny a small smile is our first hint about the two women's eventual defection from Olaf's troupe. They also compliment the coffee and suggest maybe it was too much to ask a baby to prepare the meal. The cracks in their villainy are starting to show.

"Is it safe to eat raw toast?" made me laugh. I need to work that into a conversation someday.

Ah, the Sinister Duo. I like the way they're introduced, a line of dialogue followed by an explanation about having an aura of menace. And it's cool to be at this point in the series and see villains who make even Olaf nervous. The woman's infant servant, who's "not necessarily" grown up, is a chilling hint to what these two individuals are like.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

So, after many years, I can finally face my greatest nemesis again. The TSS secret letter. I think it is very appropriate to talk about her again here. There were many theories, and there were many discussions. And I think I found the best way to explain it. Let me copy it in full.

My dear sister, I am taking a great risk in hiding a letter to you inside one of my books, but I am certain that even the most melancholy and well-read people in the world have found my account of the lives of the three Baudelaire children even more wretched than I had promised, and so this book will stay on the shelves of libraries, utterly ignored, waiting for you to open it and find this message. As an additional precaution, I placed a warning that the rest of this chapter contains a description of the Baudelaires’ miserable journey up the Vertical Flame Diversion, so anyone who has the courage to read such a description is probably brave enough to read my letter to you. I have at last learned the whereabouts of the evidence that will exonerate me, a phrase which here means “prove to the authorities that it is Count Olaf, and not me, who has started so many fires.” Your suggestion, so many years ago at that picnic, that a tea set would be a handy place to hide anything important and small in the event of a dark day, has turned out to be correct. (Incidentally, your other picnic suggestion, that a simple combination of sliced mango, black beans, and chopped celery mixed with black pepper, lime juice, and olive oil would make a delicious chilled salad also turned out to be correct.) I am on my way now to the Valley of Four Drafts, in order to continue my research on the Baudelaire case. I hope also to retrieve the aforementioned evidence at last. It is too late to restore my happiness, of course, but at least I can clear my name. From the site of V.F.D. headquarters, I will head straight for the Hotel Denouement. I should arrive by—well, it wouldn’t be wise to type the date, but it should be easy for you to remember Beatrice’s birthday. Meet me at the hotel. Try to get us a room without ugly curtains. With all due respect,

Lemony Snicket

P.S. If you substitute the chopped celery with hearts of palm, it is equally delicious.



1 - My dear sister, I am taking a great risk in hiding a letter to you inside one of my books, but I am certain that even the most melancholy and well-read people in the world have found my account of the lives of the three Baudelaire children even more wretched than I had promised, and so this book will stay on the shelves of libraries, utterly ignored, waiting for you to open it and find this message.

Considerations: When Lemony wrote this letter, Kit was already dead. And Lemony knew it. As I already explained, Lemony published all his books over many years, even though he started writing TBB during the main events described in Asoue, he only managed to publish TBB a few years later, and after that each book took time for research and preparation of the manuscript, and the period of time between the publication of TRR and TMM was particularly long, what I call a great hiatus. This great hiatus lasted for many years. So Kit was certainly already dead when this letter was written. Lemony was doing some event confirmation research as he had access to the Baudelaires' writings which is where he discovered events that only the Baudelaires could know about from private conversations to what happened in the caravan in TSS (which Lemony explicitly did not find to be able to deduce what happened inside). This whole concept is very important to asoue, and it is clear that this was the author's intention in several parts of the story. So instead of undoing an important component to the story (the fact that Lemony is researching the past from his point of view while writing asoue) it is more logical to believe that the true recipient of the letter is not Kit Snicket, but rather someone who assumed her identity. After all, just like Count Olaf, Kit died on a desert island with few witnesses and her death was simply not a fact known to the general public until then. 

It is significant that Lemony explicitly spent several weeks searching for the caravan. It is already evident that the moment of search for the caravan cannot be the same moment that the main events of asoue are unfolding. Some people say that this letter was written during the main events of Asoue, but in this excerpt Lemony explicitly quotes what he had just written. So he's writing the letter right after writing about the Baudelaires' climb to the VFD base. And he could only have written this after having written everything he had written before. Lemony also hopes that the book will be published and will go to bookstores so that her "sister" will eventually find the book and read the message. It wouldn't make sense for all of this to happen in the few days that pass between the main events described in TSS and the main events described in TPP.

The meeting at Hotel D must be in a Hotel rebuilt after many years. 

2 -  (Incidentally, your other picnic suggestion, that a simple combination of sliced mango, black beans, and chopped celery mixed with black pepper, lime juice, and olive oil would make a delicious chilled salad also turned out to be correct.) 

This description of the salad is the same salad that Beatrice made, according to Lemony's memories. Evidently, this is evidence that points to a friendship between Beatrice and the true recipient of the letter. Canonically there is no evidence that Kit Snicket and Beatrice Baudelaire were close friends. On the other hand, canonically there is evidence that Beatrice and R were close friends in LSTUA and TBB. In fact, there is evidence in LSTUA that R had disguised himself as a member of the Snicket family previously. So, the person most likely to be the true recipient is R, not Kit. After all (it cannot be repeated enough) when Lemony wrote this letter, Kit had already been dead for many years. In fact, as I have shown previously, Beatrice JR's search for Lemony Snicket took place before Lemony published TWW, since the young girl was in Lemony's office in the building where Lemony lived (with a description identical to what Lemony described in TWW) she didn't recognize what the shape of the paperweight was. If Lemony had already published TWW, it is extremely likely that Beatrice Jr would have already read it because she is like a fan of Lemony, explicitly claiming to have read books that Lemony had already published. This shows so much that when Lemony published TWW Beatrice Jr had already been born many years ago and evidently Kit had been dead for many years, and when he published TSS, Kit had been dead even longer.

3 - "I am on my way now to the Valley of Four Drafts, in order to continue my research on the Baudelaire case"

When Lemony wrote this letter, he explicitly stated that he had not yet reached the Valley of Four Drafts. Evidently he is referring to the fact that he is writing many years after Asoue's main story took place and confirming the events little by little. He couldn't have not reached the Valley of Four Drafts and at the same time described the Baudelaires' ascent to the VFD base. In fact, by writing TSS so many years have passed that Lemony knows that if the women with their faces painted white died when they came down from the mountainous region, the rest of them were just bones. And when writing the ending of TSS, Lemony explicitly states that he spent some time collecting bones and taking them to a specialist. Evidently, Lemony's research to be able to write TSS took a long time. Imagine how strange it would be to do all this in time to show up at Hotel D a few days later!

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

I just realized that I consider this letter to be a living female entity. Actually, this makes a lot of sense.

[Tiran O'Saurus]

Okay. I have a few questions:

1. Why is he pretending R is Kit? For a letter only she's going to read?

2. Not really a question, I just want to point out that the Hotel Denouement mentioned might be the underwater one, which survived. According to Lemony in TPP, the surviving Denouements all joined smaller hotels, they didn't rebuild their own.

3. R, Beatrice, Kit, and Lemony were all in VFD at the same time and basically grew up together. While it's never said Beatrice and Kit were particularly close, I don't see any reason why this couldn't be true. Especially since it's possible Kit wrote the salad recipe down somewhere, and many VFD members used it.

4. Your chronological analysis all fits. I am genuinely stumped by this letter. Maybe it's that he's holding out hope his sister is alive? He doesn't seem to trust the island book very much, since he's fact-checking every minute detail in it.

5. Or maybe, and this is a massive stretch, could Lemony have another sister? If he's working off the island book, we don't know how long it's been since the events, although TAA and THH make it seem like a very long time indeed. Lemony's parents are never described as dead. (In TCC there's an oblique reference to Olaf trying to steal the Snicket fortune, but he could have bungled the murder part.) Maybe they had another child between The End and Lemony's research, and she's now a Sunny-style junior member of VFD? It doesn't really fit with the bit about the sister inventing the recipe, unless it's some sort of thematic parallel? Wait, I think I have it. I'm going to mark dates as BC14 (before Chapter 14) and AC14 (after Chapter 14)

1 BC14: the events of ASOUE.

0 BC14: the events of Chapter 14

1 AC14: birth of the youngest Snicket sibling

~3 AC14: just like Sunny, this child becomes a chef as a baby and rediscovers a salad recipe that Beatrice had invented in her later years, after she and Lemony separated. He thinks it's a new idea.

~4 AC14: Lemony starts investigating the Baudelaire case

~5 AC14: He investigates the events of TSS and sends this letter.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Nov 26, 2023 16:28:42 GMT -5 Tiran O'Saurus said:

Okay. I have a few questions:

1. Why is he pretending R is Kit? For a letter only she's going to read?

In LSTUA Lemony responds to a "sister" interested in helping the Baudelaires. Certainly the same person. R's first letter to Lemony contains indications that she was under surveillance. Of course, she disguised herself to avoid persecution from her enemies and Lemony didn't want to blow her cover.

Nov 26, 2023 16:28:42 GMT -5 Tiran O'Saurus said:

2. Not really a question, I just want to point out that the Hotel Denouement mentioned might be the underwater one, which survived. According to Lemony in TPP, the surviving Denouements all joined smaller hotels, they didn't rebuild their own.

I discussed this possibility with Dante. He told me it's unlikely the underwater library had windows that needed curtains. I had to agree. Furthermore, TBBRE talks about the trolley whose wood was used in the foundation of a hotel. It is possible that this refers to the step needed to rebuild the hotel. Furthermore, rebuilding the hotel would be necessary for the TPP narrative to make sense. According to Lemony, he was at the Hotel (both above and underwater) during the writing of TPP. Evidence of this is the paper used in the letter to the editor published in TGG. The need to rebuild the upper hotel is evident, to try to hide the underwater library. However, it is interesting to note that the upper hotel during the writing of TPP was again destroyed, according to Lemony's narrative in TPP.

3 - It is possible. But still, there is no canonical evidence of intimacy. Either way, Kit was already dead when this letter was written.

4 - Someone was corresponding with Lemony. He responded to a question sent by a so-called "sister". In TGG Lemony even insinuates that he could save Kit's life by speaking her name by name. This is evidence that someone was intentionally impersonating Kit. I can't guarantee that Lemony wasn't tricked. But I think it's unlikely, because of his knowledge of the Island book. All of his research indicated that what was written there was true. And Beatrice Jr appeared in his life as further proof. The fact that Lemony knows about events written in chapter 14 indicates that he talked to Beatrice Jr. Because what is written in chapter 14 is not written in the Island book.

5 - I even considered this possibility. At the time I dismissed it outright because I considered the booklet 13 Shocking Secrets About Lemony Snicket to be canonical. One of the secrets about Lemony was that he was one of three siblings, or something like that. I also rationalized that Kit claimed her parents were dead in TE so there was no point considering the birth of another sister. But of course, she could be mistaken just as she was mistaken about Lemony's death. However, what shows that Lemony wanted to trick people into believing that Kit Snicket specifically was alive, is the fact that he mentions Kit's name in TGG as if he could at the time of writing TGG somehow save Kit, through a salad. However, Kit was already dead at the time of TGG's writing. What made him reveal the truth to TE about Kit's death must have been the fact that the person who was pretending to be Kit had already died or was out of danger. When I say this person is R, that's just a guess, I need to acknowledge it. But it is a guess based on the fact that Daniel Handler had developed a story behind the story involving R recently when publishing LSTUA. He entered various details about LSTUA in asoue from TSS. R is also mentioned in TGG. And a friendship involving R and Lemony had also been portrayed in LSTUA. And a long-time friendship between Beatrice and R was about to be portrayed in TBL. And R was portrayed as a master of disguise in LSTUA. Could it be someone else pretending to be Kit? But I think it's more likely R pretending to be Kit. The same could apply to Miss K, the person who went to Prufrock Prep. But that's another discussion.

[Tiran O'Saurus]

Yeah, fair enough. I do have to question treating 13 Shocking Secrets as canon and not The Dismal Dinner, since both were promotional materials and not really part of ASOUE. 13 Shocking Secrets is full of obvious statements, nonsense charts, and has no real new information besides the "niece is an orphan" thing.

I'd forgotten Kit said her parents were dead, so that probably stops that theory. I was mostly just spitballing there anyway. I kind of suspect a fake Kit more than it being R, honestly. While I can understand R wanting to hide her identity, impersonating Kit is too strange of a move. Lemony being hopeful that the Baudelaires' book was wrong, that Kit somehow survived the Medusoid Mycelium and crawled out of her grave and somehow got back to the mainland, fits with his character.

Good point on the stationary. The bit with the trolley being used to make a hotel, along with the stationary, does make the Hotel Denouement being rebuilt seem more likely.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

I can understand without any problems. In both cases, Lemony is an unreliable narrator: either he is mistaken in believing in Kit's survival or he lied on purpose. Even though he is mistaken, there is someone he corresponds with who he believes is Kit or someone he knows is not Kit. But the most important thing for me is to get as many people to accept the chronology of the letter. It was written many years after Kit's death. The reason for this is debatable. But the fact is that it was written many years after Kit's death.

[Glittery666]

Chapter 7
I must admit I haven’t heard the phrase corridors of power except in this book, I’m going to have to try to start using it.
Quigley having a commonplace book is an early hint that he’s somehow connected to Duncan and Isadora.
It seems like Klaus was an early reader, it doesn’t specify how old he was in the flashback, but he’s described as
very young and not reading for very long.
That building must’ve been beautiful, wish we could hear a bit more about it.
The survivor is finally revealed.

So do you guys think the sister is Kit or someone else?

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Chapter 7:

Let's talk about "the survivor". I've already talked about this, but I think it's important to highlight it again at this point. The Snicket File line that references the survivor should not refer to Quigley. 
I'm not saying now that Quigley is lying, I'm just saying he's mistaken.


"Because of the evidence discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor’s whereabouts are unknown.’

Isadora and Ducan are in fact survivors of the Quagmire fire. They were in the house when it caught fire and they came out of the house alive and their parents died. Both are therefore survivors.The Snicket File does not claim "one more survivor". Experts are talking about a fire that was thought to be unsurvivable and may perhaps have been one (number 1) survivor.

[Glittery666]

Chapter 8
I wonder if Uncle Monty knew about the passageway.
Imagine learning that you’re parents are dead from the newspaper, at least the Baudelaires were told
by someone they knew.
So Jacques has been following the Bauds, even though he has good intentions that’s a tad creepy.
Almost all the places where the Baudelaires have stayed at have been destroyed in some way; their own house,
Aunt Josephine’s house, Heimlich Hospital, Calgari Carnival, and now Uncle Monty’s house.Now there’s just Lucky Smells
Lumbermill, Prufrock Prep, 667 Dark Avenue, and VFD(the town)left standing.
Also, it was a good thing Uncle Monty was long dead when his house was set on fire.
There were once multiple safe places and that number has been slowly dwindling.Pretty much all that’s left at this
point is the Hotel Denoument, and even that not for too much longer.

[Glittery666]

Chapter 9
Honestly I don’t think Bruce is either a volunteer or an enemy, I think he’s like Mr Poe, too dim to pick a side but
ends up causing damage because of his stupidity.
Not only did the Sinister Duo burn the headquarters to the ground, they also stalling Sunny in making everyone a meal.
I’m kind of curious about this Mr Kornbluth.
Who knew fridge magnets could make a code.
Any theories on what the parents would think?
Chapter 10
The frozen pool sounds like it might be fun to ice-skate on.
The fathers having the same saying about a good meal backs up my theory that the Baudelaire and Quagmire
parents were planning to introduce their kids to each other and just never got the chance.
Methinks Violet and Quigley might’ve kissed in the missing passage, they’re certainly starting to seem like
they have a thing for each other.
Lol at Babylaire.
Sunny’s definitely growing up.

[Tiran O'Saurus]

Nov 27, 2023 19:42:29 GMT -5 Glittery666 said:

Almost all the places where the Baudelaires have stayed at have been destroyed in some way; their own house,
Aunt Josephine’s house, Heimlich Hospital, Calgari Carnival, and now Uncle Monty’s house.Now there’s just Lucky Smells
Lumbermill, Prufrock Prep, 667 Dark Avenue, and VFD(the town)left standing.

By the time TAA was written, you can add Prufrock Prep to the list. Lemony opens a chapter describing how it has decayed to ruins by the time of his research. And looking at later books, the Queequeg is crashed into by the falling Self-Sustaining Hot-Air Mobile Home and the Hotel Denouement is burnt down. So I think it's just Lucky Smells, 667, Village of Fowl Devotees, Mount Fraught, and the Island.

[Glittery666]

Chapter 11
Good thing that flashlight still has battery left.
Even after its destruction, the library provides some shelter.
Fun fact:This is the last book where Sunny is referred to as a baby.
Maybe whoever left the message for Jacques didn’t know he was dead, or they left it for some other JS.We know of
3:Jacques, Jerome, and Justice Strauss.Or maybe it was someone we haven’t met before.
If Esme falls in that pit she’ll be pissed.