vinegretteofconfusionandconflict:

There are a lot of reasons I was drawn to A Series of Unfortunate Events as a kid, and if I wanted to try and analyze them all I would have to write an entire anthology of books about the series and me and psychology and by the end of the day I would be very tired and you all would be very bored, so I’m not going to do that, but when I think about the series and probably the main reason why I’ve stuck with the series so long as a kid and now as a quasi-adult, what stands out to me is the beautiful way that Daniel Handler writes, portrays and deals with abuse.

There are a lot of messages that the series conveys across its thirteen volumes and even more in the companion pieces Handler has authored, but almost all of them come back to deal with abuse in some way, particularly child abuse. Even beyond just roundabout lessons that can be applied to child abuse, it actually depicts and deals with child abuse, a topic that is virtually nonexistent in middle grade literature even now as we start to become more aware of the topic. Children with harrowing backgrounds are common in the genre, but the difference between the Baudelaires and Harry Potter is that Snicket makes it very clear that what is happening to the Baudelaires is abuse and is wrong, whereas the Harry Potter series dismisses Harry being forced to live under the stairs as simply mean guardians and an abusive school teacher as a romantic pining for his lost love (don’t get me started on Snape discourse). A Series of Unfortunate Events tells children up front that abuse does happen and that that is what it is – abuse.

It showcases dozens of different varieties of abuse, physical, emotional, neglect, and it even hints at sexual with Olaf’s predatory behavior towards Violet. It shows different kinds of abusers, Mr. Poe, who does it out of genuine ignorance and an unwillingness to learn, and Count Olaf, who does it out of cruelty.

More than showing child abuse, it shows how people react to child abuse, either through internalizing it and believing that they are deserving of their fate, withdrawing from other people, or becoming distrusting of any and all adults to the point that they might miss out on people who could have possibly saved them if they had just trusted them. A Series of Unfortunate Events presents trauma in an accurate, non-sugar coated way to the audience that most needs to hear it.

As a seven year-old kid living with abusive parents, at the time I didn’t know why I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events so much, but I knew I loved it in a way I had never loved or related to a book before, and more than a decade later it still has a dramatic impact on my life. I was a cynic from a young age, and there’s something just draining about reading story after story of quick fixes and happy endings and stories where things go right when your life never seems to go right. I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events because the things that were happening to the Baudelaires, even though they took place in a fictional universe, were real. Handler never tried to pretend that life was great because it isn’t and if you’re a kid who has been taught by literature over and over that life is supposed to be great all the time and it’s great for everyone except you, that messes you up. A Series of Unfortunate Events told me it was okay to be messed up, and it told me that other people are messed up too, and the world is just as imperfect for everyone else as it was for me.