#0461

I forgot the shadow but I already closed the drawing :T I found a random prompt generator that suggested “shyness”

i hope they never stop making each other smile like this 😖💗 

Hello, @dayriderbusking-done! I take it you’re talking about this theory: (Link).

It astounds me that people are still unsure whether the TV show and the books happen in a different universe. The series has gone out of its way to edit the original plot. Yes, it had done so with Daniel Handler’s full blessing and participation, but it’s still not canonical. Different continuities.

Here’s what the author has to say on the subject:

Paste: You mentioned the grander VFD conspiracy, coming up with a way to work that in. When one reads the first four books, they’re more stand-alone stories. Did you bring in VFD to take it from four distinct stories to one cohesive season?

Handler: I guess that was part of it. Mostly, I would say it was two things. One is that TV and film are really literal media. You can’t imply that something might be happening, you have to kinda show it or not. So a lot of the mystery that’s lurking around the edges in the early books had to be stitched out a little bit more or eliminated. And then it just seemed to me, in adapting it for TV, that I didn’t want to mess with the original narrative line that much. So the stories of the Baudelaires are very faithful to the books, but I thought a fun thing to do would be to add things.

Paste: To that end, adding the Quagmire parents [Will Arnett and Cobie Smulders] was brilliant. As a book reader, I was like, “What? The Baudelaire parents didn’t survive, did they?” Then you get to “The Miserable Mill” and it’s a total mindfuck. How did that twist come to mind?

Handler: We were just thinking about different ways of stitching in a mystery, and it was an idea that I liked right away. I liked the idea that fans of the books would be upset for most of the first season, thinking “I can’t believe they changed it,” and then would suddenly be relieved, and then people who were unfamiliar with the books would be relieved and then suddenly not.

[Daniel Handler’s Interview with Paste by Zach Blumenfeld, “A Series of Unfortunate Events Author Daniel Handler on Bringing the Baudelaire Orphans’ Miserable World to Netflix”, January 20, 2017 (Link)]

So yeah, even though the writers don’t want to completely alter the plot, they’re fully embracing the changes. There’s even a scene in the seventh episode where Arthur Poe literally panics and screams that things have gone completely “off-book” to Daniel Handler’s face (he makes a cameo as a fishmonger).

Therefore the TV Show and the books use a completely different canon. I would really advise against using elements of the TV Show to theorize about the books’ content (or vice-versa, for that matter).

Did you have to go back and reexamine the series’ overarching mystery for this adaptation?The conversations in the various rooms were about how to lay in a big, hovering mystery that would be suitable for TV, and that’s really the big change in the adaptation — to make that mystery more present and to make it something that you need to notice. In a book, you can put in a stray sentence, and if you’re reading the book obsessively, your eyes will eventually fall on that sentence. But in television, you either have to make a mystery or you don’t. You can’t say, “I hope that people look under the table.” They won’t look under the table unless the camera looks under the table for them.

Has the mystery itself significantly changed from the books?I would say that the destination is the same, but the route is different.

Is there anything you wrote (or didn’t write) in the books that, now that it’s a TV show, you regret writing (or not writing)?Not too many specific things, but I would say that in general, my entire literary career is one of regret and despair, so just to re-read A Series of Unfortunate Events in preparation for this project was a little like going through old yearbooks. I’m used to being a constant disappointment to myself, so some individual sentence that turned out to be troublesome was kind of small potatoes next to a general feeling of failure.

[…]

How precious are you about the material, on a scale of J.K. Rowling to P.L. Travers?I love that scale. I have a sense that when you write a book the way you want, which certainly happened with me, then you have that unfettered, uncompromised vision already. And so [for the TV series], I wasn’t the sort of person who said, “Well, I never pictured the window in Uncle Monty’s house to look like this! Everybody stop, we have to rebuild it according to the blueprint I have in my head.” I was more interested in what would people think or do. That isn’t to say we never argued or disagreed, but I was more interested in people having a good time and coming together to make something that seemed exciting, rather than laying it against page 57 of a book and saying, “No, wait a minute.”