A Series of Unfortunate Events/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Characters

The Baudelaires

Orphaned when their parents die in a fire, the Baudlaires now have to escape the greedy hands of Count Olaf...and on their way, they uncover a massive conspiracy.

Violet Baudelaire

The oldest of the Baudelaire Trio, Violet is an intelligent 14-15 year old inventor and responsible older sister.

Klaus Baudelaire

The middle Baudlaire and only boy, Klaus is extremely bookish and prone to using big words. The vast amount of things he's learned from his reading, as well as his research skills, come in handy.

Sunny Baudelaire

The youngest Baudelaire is only a baby and only intelligible to her brother and sister (at least at the beginning). However, she is extremely intelligent, and in addition to having four very sharp teeth as a weapon, she also demonstrates admirable cooking skills later on.

  • Baby Talk
  • Character Tics: Sunny likes to bare or sharpen her teeth, chews on objects when she's agitated or just for fun and bites people gently in greeting and hard if she doesn't like them.
  • Chef of Iron
  • Child Prodigy: What she will definitely grow up to be.
  • Intelligible Unintelligible: People who know her well understand her.
    • And in later books, instead of gibberish, she often says words (or partial words) that relate to her response, or at least the topic being discussed. For example, when describing a sword fight, she says "Flynning", when somebody mentions a train, she says "Esoobac", when talking about going undercover, she says "Dragnet", and when somebody asks her to do something impossible, she exclaims "Unfeasi!"
  • Little Miss Badass: She once fought against a sword-wielding hypnotist with her teeth- and won.

Count Olaf

The main villain of the series. His goal is to get the Baudelaire fortune, no matter where they go and how many stupid disguises he has to wear. He's revealed to have a connection to the shadowy organization known as VFD.

Esmé Gigi Genevieve Squalor

One of the Baudelaires' many foster parents turns out to be evil and becomes Count Olaf's girlfriend. She's a wealthy woman ridiculously dedicated to keeping up with every ludicrously inane fad that comes about.

Lemony Snicket

The mysterious narrator of the series who holds a torch for a deceased woman named Beatrice.

  • Alter Ego Acting: Daniel Handler and Lemony Snicket - separate characters in the books themselves.
  • Author Appeal: Mild example - Daniel Handler is something of a gourmand, and hence the Lemony Narrator never misses an opportunity to describe some delicious dish, even providing a salad recipe in the midst of an urgent-seeming message to his sister embedded in the tenth book.
  • Dogged Nice Guy
  • The Eeyore: He is very sad.
  • The Faceless: Largely because he's a wanted criminal.
  • Greek Chorus: Lemony Snicket provides a running commentary on the events, and often addresses the reader directly.
  • Lemony Narrator: Of course.
  • Literary Agent Hypothesis
  • Narrator
  • Plot Based Photograph Obfuscation: Snicket never shows his face in photographs, but there are several possible explanations for why this is, and most such photographs are only seen by the audience in his author bio rather than by the characters.
    • This also applies in-universe. A note in the Quagmire diaries indicate that Snicket's face is never seen in a photograph. And indeed, when the Baudelaires find a photo of their parents, there is an unidentified man with his back turned next to them.
  • Stalker with a Crush: Inverted - Lemony's a good guy, but he does stalk the children of the woman he loved but couldn't have but should have had.
  • The Woobie: Not even counting the things about his past that are revealed outside of the thirteen books, Lemony has been dumped by his fiancee because she read an unreliable newspaper that claimed he was dead, and then a villain, so he went on the run and STILL is. His beloved married someone else and then died in a horrible fire. Lemony's brother Jacques and sister Kit have both died, and he continues to become entangled in terrible situations as he relentlessly tries to gather information about the children of the woman he loves so that the world will know about the treachery that follows them. This guy's life sucks.

VFD

The mysterious initials of a shadowy organization that everyone - from Olaf to the Baudelaires' parents - is connected to.

The Quagmires

The Baudelaires' friends are a identical brother and sister whose brother Quigley died in a fire. Referring to themselves as "triplets" (just because Quigley's dead doesn't mean they were born twins), they help the Baudelaires out and get kidnapped for their trouble. Duncan is a journalist while Isadora is a poet specializing in couplets. Later on, Quigley is revealed to have survived.

Carmelita Spats

The bratty girl becomes a hindrance to the Baudelaires in book 5 and is later adopted by Olaf and Esme.

Count Olaf's Troupe

Olaf has a large variety of henchmen he calls his "acting troupe."

Other Characters

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