A series of unfortunate events

You'll never know ;)

Wait...they made BOOKS out of the Edward Gorey poster to try to make more money? Are these Edward Gorey? They waited until he died and then his family decided to try to cash in?

When I was a UG, the Edward Gorey Poster and one of the books were the best-selling items at the harvard coop. Why did they have to commercialize and ruin this? I'm enraged eight now...

>>8984576
>SNICKET, WHAT THE FUCKING CAUSED THE SCHISM?!?!?!?!?!

Biggest question of my late childhood, desu.

He told a reporter once that all the secrets are somewhere in his music

Gorey's estate must be getting ,obey off this. Or his scummy family at least. I used to donate money to his house in Orleans, Case Cod to make sure it was kept as when he died, and now they are ruining his work?

>>8984576
The VFD fought fires started by the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard and Count Omar in efforts to gain access to the fortunes left behind by the parents. The sugar bowl is the term for the polar opposite of honey pot. Its purpose was to create a false trail for any of those who tried to hinder the progress of Veronica, Klyde, and Susie Bald-Lair finding the last safe place and the laundry of Jay K. Ins Smuckers. That's why there were so many other VFD's implemented to throw off the scent of the real Volunteer Fire Department.

File: ]edward-gorey.png (2MB, 2794x1530px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 2794x1530px

can someone explain what these things are? THESE are Edward Gorey Books, The things you are showing look like some sort of rip offs....

The Volunteer Fire Department began as a tight-knit group of community members dedicated to fighting what was likely a dreadful Arson wave.
They were originally a vigilante society of concerned community members doing research and conducting search parties and raids trying to catch the criminals that evaded the police's meager efforts.
Also - presumably, this is only my opinion - they exhausted the original arsonists and vandals (and the crime organizations behind them), but by that time had grown to a large, nebulous secret organization with the resources to continue digging up dirt on criminals and suspects for decades.
The Schism was based on the direction the organization would take. Many believed that the organization had served its purpose and should do some combination of collapse, reveal itself and its huge trove of illegally obtained information to the authorities, and/or reduce activities to philanthropic information-peddling. The other side wanted to go further, both expanding the organization and expanding the list of "fires" to be put out, essentially making the organization an underground secret police beholden to no authority.

The Sugar Bowl was a sort of master list of evidence. Evidence implicating high-profile persons, evidence proving Count Olaf's many crimes - including the arson of the Baudelaire Estate. Evidence as well of the illegal underground activity of every VFD member, that could expose the activity of the entire operation from the beginning.

>“V.F.D. stands for Volunteer Fire Department,” I said.
>“So you put out fires?” Kellar asked
>“When we can,” I said, “but there’s more to it than that. We try to do what good we can in the world.”
>Jake frowned. “Doesn’t everybody try to do that?”
>“Not enough people,” I said.
>“I don’t understand this,” Moxie said. “What is it, exactly, that you do? What does V.F.D. believe?”
>“We believe in an aristocracy,” I said.
>Moxie wanted to type so badly that she rattled her fingers on the table. “Doesn’t that mean people who are rich and powerful?”
>“Not that kind of aristocracy,” I said, with both feet on the floor. “Not an aristocracy of power; based on rank or wealth, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Our members are found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between us when we meet."
>"We represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. We’re an invincible army, but not a victorious one. We’ve had different names throughout history, but all the words that describe us are false and all attempts to organize us fail. Right now now we’re called V.F.D., but all our schisms and arguments might cause us to disappear. It won’t matter. People like us always slip through the net. Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world”
From All The Wrong Questions, book 3, "Shouldn't you be in school"

>>8984605
>>8984641
These are a series of Children Books written by Daniel Handler under the pen name "Lemony Snicket". They're Gothic/Steampunk/Absurdist with a splash of Pynchon and Melville. The cover art (and 13? interior splashes) is done by Brett Helquist, who is a well regarded children's book illustrator. I can vaguely see a splash of Gorey in the art, but it looks like the rest of Helquist's art with a victorian splash.

At the National Book Awards ceremony in November 2014, Handler made a controversial remark after author Jacqueline Woodson was
presented with an award for young people's literature. Woodson, who is black, won the award for Brown Girl Dreaming. During the
ceremony, Handler noted that Woodson is allergic to watermelon, a reference to the racist watermelon stereotype. His comments were
immediately criticized;[23][24] Handler apologized via Twitter and donated $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books, and promised to match
donations up to $100,000.[25] In a New York Times op-ed published shortly thereafter, "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke", Jacqueline
Woodson explained that "in making light of that deep and troubled history" with his joke, Daniel Handler had come from a place of
ignorance, but underscored the need for her mission to "give people a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so no one ever
thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another's too often painful past".

>>8985160
>read the nyt article comments section
>someone unflinchingly equating invoking the watermelon stereotype to the holocaust
Probably the most concentrated sample of leisure-class white guilt on the internet. The only possible outcome after reading that article and comments section is to become a little more conservative.

Lemony Snicket's biography is better than any of his other books.

>>8984576
The whole point is that you never fully find out - because life is like that, often bewildering and unsatisfactory. It's basically My First Pynchon.

>>8984576
VFD is ambiguous, they are technically the Volunteer Fire Department, but throughout the series it's heavily implied they are mostly a book club. "The world is quiet here" tagline I'm pretty sure refers to libraries, Snicket hints at that at one point.

w/r/t Sugar Bowl I read some reddit theory that VFD used hidden voice recorders in their sugar bowls to record picnic conversations and this particular sugar bowl had an important conversation. I don't know if that's true but they had a lot of evidence and it makes sense.

I think The Schism is at least thematically supposed to have completely unknown causes. The Baudelaires and the Snickets are both in it without really understanding the causes, but they commit drastic actions for their side. In terms of like a canon explanation I think it had something to do with monetization, the Olaf side of the schism never refers to themselves as volunteers, whereas the Snicket side frequently does

What would sex with Violet be like?

>>8986177
>tfw only owned the biography
Never read the books so that biography was cryptic as fuck, I had no idea who I was even supposed to be reading about

>>8984611
part of VFD wanted to put out fires
the other part wanted to start them

>>8987744
It's pretty cryptic even with the books, it asks far more questions than it answers

>>8984576
>What did the VFD do?

Fight fires.