I’ve seen several people complain that the adults of A Series of Unfortunate Events are “too stupid” and that it damages the story. Please allow me to clarify something:
No adults in ASOUE is stupid. 100% of them are willfully ignorant, and it’s an important distinction.
- Justice Strauss is too timid and needy to critically think about the red flags around her.
- Mr. Poe cares more about his job than the people it affects.
- Uncle Monty is so self-involved that he assumes that Stephano is after him.
- Aunt Josephine is simply too afraid to consider the idea that terrible things may be nearby.
This is not a story of “Adults are dumb”. It is a story about how people can contribute to evil and cruelty simply by being passive or refusing to confront it.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
That is what the series is about. It’s an important distinction. The Baudelaires do not suffer from random fools that happen to be near them. The Baudelaire Orphans are receiving the sum total of the failings of society crashing upon them.
The author is Jewish-American and he’s said that to some extend the Baudelaires are supposed to be a metaphor for the plight of marginalized people in society. So in my interptetation a lot of the incompetent adults are like, metaphors for the sort of centrist neoliberals who will outright refuse to challenge societal oppressors because they aren’t affected by them. I’d also like to bring up Phil the Optimist, and Jerome Squalor who hates arguing, who is another dangerous example of passivity in the face of oppression
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Here’s an NYT article that mentions that Daniel Handler’s father escaped the holocaust and basically reiterates the overall points of the above comments (sorry it’s not pretty and hyperlinked for you but i’m on mobile)
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2004/09/23/movies/lemony-snickets-down-and-dirty-indie.html
The adults of Unfortunate Events are NOT stupid.
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