#0558

In The Devil Is A Part Timer, the character voiced by Aaron Dismuke is frequently bullied by a much taller man for being useless and lazy.

Inktober Day 20

Small Friends Trio strikes again!

Day 1: Friendship Day

I’m really late and I could only draw one prompt but I hope it’s okay

I wanted to draw these 3 because I think their relationship is so cute

Good question. Olaf indeed shared a lot more with Isadora and Duncan than he ever did with the Baudelaire orphans. However I think the information Isadora doesn’t want Duncan to reveal is just examples of threats Olaf made to them. He promised the Quagmires he would do terrible things to them and Isadora doesn’t want to verbalize them. It would make them real.

“How will he do that?” Violet asked.“The police have been informed of your kidnapping, and are on the lookout.”

“I know,” Duncan said. “Gunther wants tosmuggle us out of the city, and hide us away on some island where the police won’t find us. He’ll keep us on theisland until we come of age and he can steal the Quagmire sapphires. Once he has our fortune, he says,he’ll take us and–”

“Don’t say it,” Isadora cried, covering herears. “He’s told us so many horrible things. I can’t stand to hear them again.”

[…]

Duncan flipped the pages of his notebook, and his eyeswidened as he reread some of the wretched thingsGunther had said. “I don’t know,” he said.“He’s told us so many haunting secrets, Violet. So many awfulschemes–all the treachery he has done in the past, andall he’s planning to do in the future. It’s all here in this notebook–from V.F.D. all the way to thisterrible auction plan.”

[The Ersatz Elevator, Chapter Eight]

This passage is important as it basically explains how Olaf plans to really get his hands on the fortunes once he gets custody of the orphans. Basically his only option is to engineer Stockholm Syndrome: weaken his captives’ will little by little and brainwash them until they begin to act as his minions and obey his orders. This is definitely what he and Esme were trying to achieve with Carmelita Spats. The idea is that by the time she came of age she’d be so fanatically devoted to Olaf that she would just hand over her fortune to the troupe.

The trouble is that Olaf WANTS to enact this plan but is just too emotional to get through with it. The orphans remind him too much of himself when he was younger, so he lashes out at them constantly. This is why Esme and Olaf broke up. Esme was 100% committed to pretending being good parents to Carmelita while Olaf found the entire ordeal insufferable. Parenthood is his trigger. It’s ironic because Olaf, by treating the Baudelaire orphans so terribly in “The Bad Beginning”, might have done them a favor. He was so mean and brutal that brainwashing them was impossible. They saw right though him immediately.

I think the reason that Olaf shared these things with Isadora and Duncan is that he doesn’t feel so intense a connection with them as he does with the Baudelaire orphans. It was the Baudelaire parents who destroyed Olaf’s family, not the Quagmire parents. Olaf gets defensive and tight-lipped around the Baudelaire orphans because he’s feeling too many emotions.