I’d normally save this for tag-talk, but I can’t resist this time:
“I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.” - Maurice Sendak
For all of Daniel Handler’s faults, one thing he really succeeded in was depicting the tipping point of the above quote that usually comes later in adolescence but with mature, level-headed children: when you tell adults the truth about the world you and everyone else is living in, and they can’t hear it.
Children sometimes do this, but teens moreso; the urge to proclaim a hard fact you’ve learned about life as new information. But even when it truly IS new information, the unfortunate proclivity of adults is to believe you’ve learned all the important things already, and that this new information doesn’t actually hold water.
Watching ASOUE now, without the fuzzy shackles of the Nickelodeon adaptation, it is more apparent than ever how horrifying these tendencies are in practice. That even the best of adults in your life, who have your true best interests in mind, won’t listen to warnings about danger lurking right behind them because it comes from a child. And then also those children get tortured, but it couldn’t be avoided, if you were to ask any of the adults. It wasn’t as though it was the grand scheme of an evil villain. It was just a series of unfortunate events.