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Wouldn't you rather read a story about a happy little elf?
"PLEASE READ SOMETHING ELSE."
Lemony Snicket
A series of Black Comedy-filled children's books by Daniel Handler under the Pen Name "Lemony Snicket".

After their parents die in a fire at the family mansion, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire remain in the care of Count Olaf. As their sinister distant relative, Olaf wants the Baudelaire family fortune, which the children will inherit when Violet turns 18. Throughout the first few books in the series, the children are sent from one caretaker to another, each one more eccentric and troubled than the last. Count Olaf follows them in a series of Paper-Thin Disguises that only the children immediately see through. Eventually, the children must strike out on their own to discover their family's dark secret — their parents' connection to a mysterious organization. Everywhere, bizarre and improbable disasters strike the children and everyone around them for no discernible reason.

The series received a film adaptation in 2004, as well as a video game based on said film. Snicket (played by Jude Law) narrates throughout, providing commentary, anecdotes, and advice — usually against reading any more of his history of the Baudelaire orphans. While the movie never moved past one installment, Netflix obtained the film rights and adapted the books into a live-action series. This series premiered on Friday the 13th of January 2017, with Barry Sonnenfeld and Handler himself as showrunners; Patrick Warburton portrays Snicket, and Neil Patrick Harris plays Count Olaf.

A four-part prequel series called All the Wrong Questions concerning a young Snicket working for V.F.D. was later released.


A Series of Unfortunate Events:
  • Book the First: The Bad Beginning (Sep 1999)
  • Book the Second: The Reptile Room (Sep 1999)
  • Book the Third: The Wide Window (Feb 2000)
  • Book the Fourth: The Miserable Mill (Apr 2000)
  • Book the Fifth: The Austere Academy (Aug 2000)
  • Book the Sixth: The Ersatz Elevator (Mar 2001)
  • Book the Seventh: The Vile Village (May 2001)
  • Book the Eighth: The Hostile Hospital (Sep 2001)
  • Book the Ninth: The Carnivorous Carnival (Oct 2002)
  • Book the Tenth: The Slippery Slope (Sep 2003)
  • Book the Eleventh: The Grim Grotto (Sep 2004)
  • Book the Twelfth: The Penultimate Peril (Oct 2005)
  • Book the Thirteenth: The End (Oct 2006)

Supplementary materials:
  • The Bad Beginning: Rare Edition (Special edition reissue in a slipcase, with a new piece of artwork and an extra chapter of author's notes) (Sep 2003)
  • Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (May 2002)
  • "The Dismal Dinner" (2004)
  • The Puzzling Puzzles (Oct 2004)
  • The Beatrice Letters (Sep 2006)
  • Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid (Apr 2007)

This series is the Trope Namer for:


This series provides examples of:

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    Tropes A-L 
  • A Boy, a Girl, and a Baby Family: Violet and Klaus, 14/15 and 12/13 respectively, fit the bill for the two older siblings. Although Sunny is no longer referred to as a baby from Book the Tenth onward, she is undeniably the age-distant baby of the trio.
  • Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Beatrice marries Bertrand Baudelaire after she believes that her former fiance Lemony is dead, though she had broken up with him beforehand. She would've named Violet after him if Violet had been born a boy. Lemony never begrudged her for that.
  • Absurd Phobia: Aunt Josephine from The Wide Window suffers from phobias of everything — tripping over the doormat, getting electrocuted by using a telephone, and finally, realtors. In The Film of the Book, her fears of them prove amusingly real for just one evening, when a hurricane strikes her house and causes all her appliances to malfunction exactly the way she claimed they would. In both the book and the film, it's implied to be a trauma-related disorder stemming from the death of her husband. In later books, her fear of realtors is implied to be justified due to V.F.D.-related stuff.
  • Abusive Parents: Not parents, strictly speaking, but many guardians are thoroughly unsuitable, especially Olaf.
  • Adults Are Useless: A heavy undercurrent of the series is that even kinder adults simply cannot help the Baudelaires and they are forced to grow up early and fend for themselves in the face of malice. By the end of the series, Klaus, Violet, and Sunny have been antagonized by villains, disrespected by jerks, and let down and failed by even the kindest adults in their lives due to shortsightedness, flaws, and quirks getting in the way of the care the Baudelaires need—this even extends to the noble half of VFD, who prove so entangled in their agent schemes and schism politics that the Baudelaires are thrust by them into danger and confusion rather than taken out of it.
    • And some of the decent, competent adults wind up cowed into uselessness by their more forceful (evil, greedy, etc) companions, such as Charles and Sir. Or they simply don't listen to the children's "outlandish stories."
    • A recurring example of this trope is Arthur Poe. This fat sod continually believes that the children will be safe wherever they're ending up even though they were very, VERY, quickly found by Olaf.
    • Another mention goes to Montgomery Montgomery / Uncle Monty, who was a brilliant scientist and deeply cared for the children, believing everything they said all the time, and not even falling for Count Olaf's disguise, but confronted him when he believed that Olaf had come to steal away his new reptile specimen. He was right about everything except the real target of Olaf's obsessions, that being the Baudelaires and not his work.
    • To put it very simply: all the adults in the series are either idiots, well-meaning but ultimately incapable of assisting the orphans, or evil.
  • Adventure Towns: Most books are in a different town (or island or mountain or ...). The sixth and twelfth books are set in the same nameless city in which the series began, though.
  • Aesop Amnesia: Arthur Poe repeatedly forgets about believing the children when they come to him. So much that when they encounter him at the end of The Grim Grotto that Violet politely refuses to go with him in favor of going to the taxi with Kit Snicket.
  • Affectionate Parody: Handler started off trying to write the sort of gothic, bloodthirsty children's stories he wanted to read when he was a child, and most of the books take off one genre or another, occasionally straying into Deconstruction territory.
    Handler at a book reading at Washington College: "Is it so wrong that I wanted to read books where terrible things happened to small children over and over?"
  • Alas, Poor Villain: After getting harpooned by Ishmael, Olaf realizes that all of his plans have been foiled, he has nothing left to live for, having lost everyone close to him, and he has no chance of obtaining the Baudelaire fortune. After learning that Kit has gone into labor, he does what Violet labels the single good deed in his life by carrying her to an area where childbirth will be easier. Although he has eaten an apple that cures him of the Medusoid Mycelium that was released when he was harpooned, he succumbs to his harpoon wound, but not before reciting the closing stanza of a poem and giving out one final "HA!"
  • All There in the Manual: The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters.
  • Alliterative Name:
    • The Odd Name Out in both sets of triplets: Quigley Quagmire and Dewey Denouement.
    • Bertrand and both Beatrice Baudelaires.
    • The titles of the first twelve books are alliterative, as well as many, many locations mentioned throughout the books like Lousy Lane, Lake Lachrymose, Finite Forest, Heimlich Hospital, etc.
  • Alliterative Title: All but The End have an alliterative title.
  • Alpha Bitch: Carmelita Spats, a genuinely terrible little girl that the orphans first encounter in The Austere Academy. Count Olaf and Esmé Squalor hit it off with her so well they decide to adopt her, though, Olaf later leaves her to die in the Hotel Denouement fire.
  • Alter-Ego Acting: Daniel Handler and Lemony Snicket — separate characters in the books themselves.
  • Ambiguous Gender: The Person of Indeterminate Gender, a.k.a. the enormous person who looked like neither a man nor a woman.
  • Ambiguously Gay: Charles and Sir are business partners at the Lucky Smells Lumber Mill, and "partner" is used very insistently to describe them, even when it makes the sentence structure awkward. They share a room when they travel together to the Hotel Denouement, share a relaxing sauna there, and when the hotel is set on fire, they are holding hands as they attempt to escape. Also in The Beatrice Letters, one of Lemony's letters to Beatrice says he'll love her "until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love"
  • Ambiguously Jewish: The author has noted that his characters are Jewish by default, and he unconsciously inserts Jewish themes and ideas into his books. In the final book, the Baudelaires mention that it is their family's tradition to name babies after deceased relatives. This is a Jewish tradition. note 
  • Anachronism Stew:
    • The books keep the time as vague as possible, easily taking place any time in the 20th century, and the only real definite is that it takes place in the past but whether it's a hundred years ago or last month, it's never certain.
    • What with the computer in "The Austere Academy" being small and able to display a picture and may or may not be able to fake photographs, it takes place sometime after the 50s, or at least at a point when computers did not fill a room.
    • Handler has way too much fun with this. At one point, a train station is mentioned to have three shops - one is a computer repair shop. Another is a blacksmith shop. Have fun figuring out what time those two establishments could coexist.
    • In the fourth book, Klaus mentions during his speech about Hypnotism, that there was a case during the 1910s. The obvious implication being that the series takes place many years later, making this reference the only thing that we have to tie down the specific time.
    • It should be noted, though, that the text never makes explicit references to the Baudelaire children wearing Victorian clothing — even though they are often illustrated as wearing such.
  • And Now You Must Marry Me: Olaf tries to force Violet to marry him in Book the First, despite being her legal guardian. The creepiness of this is played up, culminating in the hilarious and horrifying line "You may not be my wife, but you are still my daughter, and—"
  • Anti-Hero: Arguably the Baudelaires themselves in later books, which is somewhat justified when every adult has failed them or died, they get framed for murder, and they can only rely on themselves.
  • Anti-Love Song: Several of The Gothic Archies' accompanying songs on the audiobooks and The Tragic Treasury, including Smile!, Shipwrecked, and Walking My Gargoyle.
  • Anti-Villain: Among actual antagonists, Fernald/The Hook-Handed Man seems to fall into this category as the series goes on.
  • Anyone Can Die: The series kicks off with the deaths of the protagonists' parents in a fire, and anyone who takes time to care for the orphans meets a horrible fate. Notable character deaths include Uncle Monty, Jacques Snicket, Madame Lulu, Dewey Denouement, Count Olaf, and Kit Snicket. Ultimately over the course of the series, almost every character ends up either dying or suffering an ambiguous maybe-deadly fate, including the Baudelaire orphans themselves. The only definite survivors by the end are Lemony and Beatrice II.
  • Apathetic Citizens: Most of society is unwilling and/or unable to fight injustice, and many would prefer to gawk at violence for entertainment than attempt to stop it, unless it threatens them.
  • Arc Number: 13. It makes sense, since...well, look at the title.
    • Every book even has thirteen chapters. Averted in the final installment, however, thanks to the additional "Chapter Fourteen" which is treated as a separate book despite consisting of a single chapter. This also causes the series as a whole to avert the arc number; until then, it would have had 169 (13 times 13) chapters, but it now has one chapter more than that.
    • The final installment, The End, was released on Friday the 13th of October, 2006.
    • The title is 26 (13 times 2) letters long.
    • The first season of the TV adaptation was released on January 13th, 2017, a Friday, 13 years after the 2004 film.
    • 667 Dark Avenue and Kit Snicket's page is 667.
  • Arc Words:
    • V.F.D., and later J.S. serve as Arc Initials.
    • There are also some actual Arc Words, especially in the later books and in the "supplementary materials." For example, "The world is quiet here."
  • Aristocrats Are Evil: Count Olaf, anyone?
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Lots and lots of examples.
    • The Hostile Hospital the Baudelaires are accused of being "murderers, arsonists, and spurious doctors."
    • The back covers list five or more of the "unfortunate events" found within, the last of which is usually something comparatively trivial, such as "an unsavory curry" or "tap dancing." (However, several of the books avert this, most notably the last one, which ends with "a truly haunting secret about the Baudelaire parents").
  • Artistic License – Biology:
  • Artistic License – Law: In The Vile Village, the children are framed for murder and sentenced to be burned at the stake. There are two glaring problems with this.
    • One - in pretty much every civilized country, people accused of crimes are entitled to a fair trial. The Baudelaires receive no such thing.
    • Two - pretty much every civilized country is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which bans capital punishment for minors. Violet is fourteen, Klaus turns thirteen while awaiting execution, and Sunny is about two. Despite all this, the three are put to death.
  • Artistic License – Physics: In the third book, Violet starts a fire by focusing moonlight using a telescope. What If? has a long article on why this is impossible. Basically because "You can't use lenses and mirrors to make something hotter than the surface of the light source itself."
  • Asshole Victim: It is unknown how many survived the fire at Hotel Denouement. Considering everything they put the siblings through, a certain number of characters (e.g. Sir, Nero, Carmelita Spats) may very well have earned it.
  • Author Appeal: Approximated in-universe by Carmelita Spats's ridiculous "tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian" and "ballplaying cowboy superhero soldier pirate" outfits.
  • Author Catch Phrase: "A word/phrase which here means..."
  • Baby See, Baby Do: When Violet and Klaus are talking about how "brilliant" the murdered person in The Reptile Room was, Sunny says, "Brilliant!"
  • Back for the Dead: You can make an argument for all the returning characters in Book the Twelfth, although it is stated in the text that at least some of them will manage to escape, and The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters imply one or two of them who may have survived. The TV series shows Justice Strauss escaping.
  • Bait-and-Switch Credits: Chapter 170, a.k.a. Chapter Fourteen.
  • Bestiality Is Depraved: When the Baudelaires are pretending to be circus freaks in The Carnivorous Carnival, Violet wraps Sunny up in a fake beard and sells her as "Chabo the Wolf Baby," the child of a female hunter who fell in love with a handsome wolf.
  • Big Bad: Count Olaf serves as the overarching villain for the Baudelaires.
  • Big Bad Duumvirate: The man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard.
  • Bildungsroman: Lampshaded in The Penultimate Peril by Sunny, who uses the word as a summation of the journey she's been on.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Many of Sunny's baby-talk phrases are actually related to what they're translated as, and often take the form of foreign language, such as "arigato" for "thank you", or "aubergine" to mean that she is making a plan with an eggplant. Others are a mishmash of English ("Kicbucit?" for "Is he dead?") or plain old Hebrew ("Yomhuledet!" which is translated as "Surprise" but means "birthday" and "Yomhashoah" which is translated as "Never again" but means "Holocaust Memorial Day"). The children also make pasta Puttanesca, an Italian dish translating as "whore's sauce." But Klaus explains to Violet that it means "Very few ingredients."
  • Billed Above the Title: The movie adaptation's advertising often showed Jim Carrey's name and characters way above the central characters of the series.
  • Birdcaged: In book 1, Olaf traps Sunny in a birdcage and threatens to drop it from a high place if her siblings don't cooperate with his schemes. In book 13, Olaf himself is birdcaged by Ishmael and the residents of the island colony, with Olaf guilting the Baudelaires about it by reminding them of Sunny's own caging.
  • A Birthday, Not a Break:
    • Klaus spends his thirteenth in a jail cell.
    • On Violet's fifteenth, she discovers a surprise birthday party thrown for her by Captain Widdershins and Phil has gone awry due to their disappearance...and the infection of Sunny by the Medusoid Mycelium]].
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Subverted with Esmé Squalor. To the reader and Baudelaires, she's vapid and unpleasant from the start, but she turns out to be far worse than she already seems. To the world in general, she's had a successful career and seems well-respected, but then starts an affair with Olaf while married to Jerome and conspires with him to steal the Baudelaires' fortune as well as that of the Quagmires'. In subsequent books, she helps frame the Baudelaires for murder, forcibly behead Violet while the latter is unconscious, feed people to lions, kidnap more children and whip them into rowing a submarine. It's very cathartic when it's implied Olaf leaves her to die in the fire.
  • Bite of Affection: Sunny Baudelaire is notable for biting anything she gets her hands on, and people are no different. How she bites them is how she shows her feelings. If she bites hard, she hates them. If she bites soft, she likes them.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The Beatrice Letters reveals that the Baudelaire siblings and their charge Beatrice survived to adulthood, with Beatrice writing to her uncle Lemony. This means that they survive everything Olaf and the world have put them through, and have managed to reenter society.
    • The series has many mentions of things that the siblings will later encounter or experience again and look back on particular moments... that don't happen in the series itself given each book starts almost immediately after the previous one ends. While the series ends on an ambiguous note, the total summations can give the hopeful ending that at minimum the Baudelaires will survive and return to society given they haven't experienced them yet.
  • Bizarrchitecture: Doctor Orwell's eye-shaped building, the tombstone-shaped buildings at Prufrock Prep, and to a certain extent, the Eye decor of Olaf's house. Aunt Josephine's house clinging to the edge of a cliff with rickety struts counts as well, though THAT one didn't last long.....
  • Black-and-Gray Morality: While Olaf and the fire-starters are unambiguously evil, the "good" side of V.F.D. is only relatively good in its mission. Both sides kidnap children to recruit new members.
  • Black Comedy: One Central Theme of the story is the sheer amount of this trope, sometimes hidden, sometimes direct.
  • Bluff the Imposter: In The Film of the Book, Uncle Monty exposes Count Olaf (pretending to be a herpetologist named Stephano) as an impostor by asking him to milk Petunia the snake.
  • Boarding School of Horrors: It's a safe bet that a boarding school with the motto Memento Mori, Latin for "Remember you will die," is not going to be a pleasant one. And Prufrock Preparatory School in Book the Fifth is indeed not, being headed by a cruel and useless principal, and featuring an abusive housing situation for orphans, draconian cafeteria rules, and teachers who teach mindless lessons.
  • Body Motifs: The eye that first appears in Count Olaf's ankle tattoo, and later in many other places. It's the V.F.D. insignia.
  • Booked Full of Mooks:
    • In The Penultimate Peril, the Hotel Denouement is filled with V.F.D. volunteers posing as hotel guests and employees, and the main conflict is based around figuring out which side of the organization any one person is on and who the main characters can trust.
    • Expanded in the television adaptation, when it's blatantly shown that any large crowd in or around the city potentially has a number of V.F.D. (from either side) in the mix.
  • Bookworm: Klaus is defined as a researcher and the biggest lover of reading in his family, and often uses his expansive knowledge to solve problems.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Klaus is hypnotized as an agent to execute lethal mishaps at the lumbermill in Book the Fourth; he even appears to have Mind-Control Eyes on the cover. Violet struggles to figure out how to break his hypnosis.
  • Bratty Food Demand: In "The Bad Beginning," Count Olaf's rude, evil theatre troupe bang on the table and demand their food, and when they get served spaghetti, they demand to be served roast beef instead like they'd expected...and never specified beforehand.
  • Breaking Speech: Or rather, Gloat, in the movie. Olaf reveals to the audience that he has just legally married Violet and played everyone for a sap. When Mr. Poe demands that the Chief of Police arrest him, Olaf calls Poe and everyone out on how the kids had repeatedly tried to warn the adults and asked for help, but they wouldn't listen to them. "No one ever listens to children."
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: This series is full of these.
    • In The Slippery Slope, the Baudelaires run into the Snow Scouts, who have a pledge. In the pledge, helpfully named The Alphabet Pledge, the Snow Scouts describe themselves as 26 different adjectives, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. Most of them are normal, but amongst the list are "human" and "xylophone."
  • Briar Patching: The books themselves. Each one's back cover and narration will frequently tell the reader that they'd be better off reading anything else.
  • Brick Joke: The phrase "red herring" is introduced in The Ersatz Elevator, where the ultimate payoff of the phrase is decidedly literal yet decidedly unhumorous- however, the phrase returns in a subtle joke pulled off in The Hostile Hospital. All the names on the patient list are anagrams - one of them, unmentioned by the narration, is of the phrase "red herring."
  • Burger Fool: The Anxious Clown diner near Lake Lachrymose, featuring clown-costumed waiters, balloons, and food with names like "Surprising Chicken Salad."
  • The Bus Came Back: Phil from The Miserable Mill returns in The Grim Grotto as the cook on the Queequeg. Many characters reappear after extended absences in The Penultimate Peril, including Mr. Poe, Jerome, Justice Strauss, the teachers from Prufrock Prep School, residents of the Village of Fowl Devotees, Hal (running an Indian restaurant), Carmelita Spats, Sir, Charles and Bruce (a minor character from The Reptile Room and The Slippery Slope).
  • Busman's Holiday: Lampshaded — and defined, in trademark Snicket style — in The Penultimate Peril, in which Sir, the lumbermill boss, has come to a hotel to do some business at a cocktail party and attends a sauna so he can enjoy the smell of hot wood.
  • Cassandra Truth: Every time the children see through Olaf's disguises, nobody believes them in time except in The End, where Olaf's disguise and feigned innocence never fools anybody—not that that ultimately helps much.
  • Catchphrase: A few characters have them.
    • Carmelita Spats always refers to people disdainfully as "cakesniffers."
    • Esmé Squalor always says "It is rude to...," not to mention her constant talk of what is "In" and "Out."
    • Geraldine Julienne comes up with headlines, and then immediately follows up with "Wait until the readers of the Daily Punctilio read THAT!"
  • Cerebus Retcon: As the series develops, it turns out that many of the characters' motivations and activities were tied up with the fraught history of a secret fire-fighting organization, and several innocent characters' moral characters are cast into ambiguity by revelations and dropped hints about their involvement in V.F.D.
  • Cerebus Syndrome: Zig-Zagged. The series starts moving from darkness and Grimm-style misery into comedy and wackiness but then slides back into darkness again in the later books. The end of book five is when things really start to get dark.
  • Characters Dropping Like Flies: By the end of the series, practically every notable character has either died or else been abandoned by the narrative at a point when their survival is very much up in the air. Many secondary and one-off characters from throughout the story are left trying to escape a burning hotel while blindfolded (let's just say kangaroo court and move on), including Mr. Poe, Justice Strauss and both Jerome and Esmé Squalor. Another group of characters including the Quagmires and the hook-handed man is either devoured or rescued by the question-mark-shaped entity, and the island's inhabitants are left sailing away with only the possibility of a single apple to save them from the Medusoid Mycelium's poison spores. Even the Baudelaires themselves and Kit's newborn daughter only spend a year in safety on the island before resuming their journey, pursued by the question-mark-shaped entity, which leaves their fate ambiguous as well.
  • Chekhov's Boomerang: In The Ersatz Elevator Violet attempts to use fire tongs for several different things, including welding and noisemakers. Shifting circumstances mean they only get to be effective for their final use, however.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Reading The Bad Beginning the first time, a reader might be confused as to why Snicket is so specific in which hand Violet uses to hold her spoon, or throw the grappling hook. Snicket makes sure the reader knows Violet is right-handed. In the end, the narration relates how Violet signs Olaf's marriage certificate with her left hand, thus not fulfilling the marriage requirement that a bride signs her name with her dominant hand. Violet only reveals this legal distinction after Olaf thinks he's triumphed, but the heavy-handedness of Violet's handedness prior to the signing already clues the audience in. Also, in The Grim Grotto, Sunny finds some wasabi in the underwater room. This turns out to be vital in curing Sunny from a near-death infection.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The wart-faced man from Olaf's troupe disappears after the first book and is never mentioned again. He was also left out of the movie and the Netflix series.
    • Or, in the first song in the Tragic Treasury, when listing Olaf's henchpeople the song says "and one long-nosed bald man with warts." So the wart-faced man and the bald man may have been retroactively combined into one.
  • Circus of Fear: Caligari Carnival, in Book the Ninth. It's mostly just run down and unattended until Count Olaf decides to turn the act of feeding people to a pit of starving lions into the star attraction.
  • City with No Name: Although many fictional place names are mentioned, the main city where the Baudelaires used to live (and where books 1, 6, and 12 take place) is never named. (The film identifies it as Boston, but this never occurs in the books).
  • Clark Kenting: Numerous characters disguise themselves transparently at various points, with the minor characters being better at it than the main ones. The Baudelaires begin to learn that they can fool people with very little disguising as well.
  • Coattail-Riding Relative: Count Olaf, a distant relative of the Baudelaires, spends most of the series trying to get the Baudelaire orphans' inheritance. In the first book, he tries to marry Violet to do this.
  • Comic-Book Time: Duncan and Isadora say they spent three semesters at the academy before the Baudelaires arrive. The Slippery Slope later establishes the Quagmire fire as happening after The Reptile Room. Excluding the last Chapter, Violet and Klaus only have one birthday each throughout the series.
  • Common Meter: "The Little Snicket Lad" shares the common meter with "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Amazing Grace," "Pokémon," "Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Gilligan's Island theme."
  • Competence Zone: The most competent characters are the Baudelaires, who range from infancy/young childhood to young teens for the run of the series (pre-epilogue).
  • Continuity Nod: Tons of these, especially in "An Unauthorized Biography." Lampshaded and Subverted in The End.
  • Conveyor Belt o' Doom: Occurs in Book the Fourth when Charles is tied to a log being slowly fed into an absurdly huge circular saw.
  • Cool Boat: The Carmelita and the Queequeg for sure, as one survives a terrible storm and the other is the main setting of The Grim Grotto.
  • Covers Always Lie: The twelfth book features several sinister-looking figures who seem important, but no corresponding characters appear in the text. Inverted by the British edition of the sixth book, on which the cover gives away the main plot twist.
  • Couch Gag: Every book begins with an illustration of the Baudelaires and the current disguise of Count Olaf. However, eventually, Olaf's disguise stops changing and a picture of himself as normal is used, and instead the Baudelaires start having changes done to their illustration (Carnival freaks, diving helmets and Klaus & Violet wearing Snow Scout masks).
    • The Hostile Hospital features only a radio for Olaf since his current "disguise" is never shown to the reader— he only speaks through intercoms.
    • The illustrations for The Bad Beginning and The End are Book Ends, as they are identical (as they are the only two books where neither the Baudelaires nor Olaf are disguised in some way).
  • Crapsack World: Invoked. The Baudelaires' happy, privileged childhoods quickly turn into a journey into the worst places imaginable. Over the course of the series, it's revealed that things are only going From Bad to Worse.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death:
    • Both Aunt Josephine and her husband die at the hands of the Lachrymose Leeches.
    • Count Olaf (who is disguised as Shirley) decides to kill Charles by putting him through a buzzsaw feet-first. Dr. Orwell ends up falling victim to the saw instead.
  • Curse of The Ancients: "Blasted furnaces of Hell!"
  • Damned by Faint Praise: Fernald when trying to defend Count Olaf to his sister says that Olaf's redeeming quality is his "laugh." Fiona lampshades that it's not redeeming at all.
  • "Day of the Week" Name: Book the Thirteenth features Friday Caliban, and alludes to a Thursday Caliban and a Monday.
  • Dead Guy Junior: Beatrice Baudelaire II, Kit Snicket's daughter, is named after the Baudelaires' mother.
  • Death by Childbirth: Subverted. Kit Snicket dies not as a result of childbirth, but because of the Medusoid Mycelium, the cure for which she refuses to consume because of its effects on unborn children.
  • Deathbringer the Adorable: The Incredibly Deadly Viper, which is not venomous and is friendly.
  • Deception Non-Compliance: In the third book, Aunt Josephine is forced by Count Olaf to pretend to commit suicide and turn over custody of the kids to "Captain Sham" (who is Olaf in disguise). She forges a suicide note, but deliberately fills it with misspellings so the kids pick up on the secret code she wrote for them since they know their aunt is utterly pedantic about proper spelling. But she was hoping that they would come to live with her in the cave with groceries, not try to rescue her and stand up to "Captain Sham."
  • Deconstruction:
    • The series is a deconstruction of children's and young adult media like "three kids with dead parents having adventures in all kinds of exotic locales, solving mysteries and foiling the plans of their evil adult nemesis," acknowledging and emphasizing how terrible and traumatizing such a lifestyle would be.
    • The series deconstructs itself at one point: in The End, Count Olaf disguises himself to try and fool the Baudelaires' new guardians, following the Strictly Formula the series followed between books two and seven, to the Baudelaires' sulking. However, this time, the plan does not work; the islanders instantly point out just how bad his Paper-Thin Disguise is and how bad Olaf is at acting the part, to the shock of both parties.
  • Déjà Vu: The children of A Series Of Unfortunate Events experience this in the ninth book, having been forced in front of a large crowd like in the previous two books. The Lemony Narrator goes on to explain the concept of Dejá Vu on three separate occasions in the one book, including with an almost-identical page, illustration and all, after the first page mentioning it.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: Frequently used for the Lemony Narrator in the narration throughout the series, mostly as part of the "defining words" and "translate Sunny's speech" gags:
    • The book was long and difficult to read, and Klaus became more and more tired as the night wore on. Occasionally his eyes would close. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over.
    • We all know, of course, that we should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever fiddle around in any way with electric devices. Never.note 
    • But even so, the three children were eager to leave the Anxious Clown, and not just because the garish restaurant - the word "garish" here means "filled with balloons, neon lights, and obnoxious waiters" - was filled with balloons, neon lights, and obnoxious waiters.
    • In The Carnivorous Carnival, one chapter starts with a description of deja vu. The second page of the chapter is almost the same as the first page (including the picture and the chapter heading). Several chapters later, the same passage describing deja vu is repeated.
    • "To make a hot meal without any electricity, I'd need a fire, and expecting a baby to start a fire all by herself on top of a snowy mountain is cruelly impossible and impossibly cruel."
    • In The Grim Grotto, Lemony Snicket attempts to put the reader to sleep (and prevent them from reading more) by giving a very repetitive description of the water cycle on three separate occasions (focusing on a separate step of the cycle for each).
    • The clock in the lobby of the Hotel Denouement is the stuff of legend, a phrase which here means "very famous for being very loud." It is located in the very center of the ceiling, at the very top of the dome, and when the clock announces the hour, its bells clang throughout the entire building, making an immense, deep noise that sounds like a certain word being uttered once for each hour. At this particular moment, it was three o'clock, and everyone in the hotel could hear the booming ring of the enormous bells of the clock, uttering the word three times in succession: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!Explaination 
  • Deserted Island: The nameless island in The End. Subverted in that there are already castaways living there.
  • Deus Angst Machina: The point of the series is to put the main characters through the wringer, and the narration strives to give the reader no optimism about the outcome of any book to prepare them for this.
  • Deus ex machina: Lampshaded and discussed in Book the Seventh: Klaus laments that they needed something like this to break out of their prison cell, and they instantly get what they need.
  • Devil in Plain Sight: Count Olaf is almost always one of these, and no one believes the Baudelaires until they finally prove that his latest persona is a criminal—which is always too late, and never acted upon sufficiently. Averted with Olaf's assistants, who are never detected by the Baudelaires in their disguises until too late.
  • Diminishing Villain Threat: Count Olaf gets less and less threatening as the books progress, although to some degree other villains pick up the slack. Though always dangerous, eventually the books revealed Olaf to be a Mook Lieutenant at best and a simple Mook at worst to an incomprehensibly vast Ancient Conspiracy, not fully explained, but pervading the last 4 books. Even the very evil woman with hair but no beard and man with a beard but no hair appeared to be taking their orders from someone else. And that person could have been taking orders from someone else, and so on....
  • Direct Line to the Author: The author, Lemony Snicket, makes frequent self-references and insists that this is a true story that he has extensively researched (including meeting the Baudelaire children) in an attempt to make the story of the orphans available to the general public. "Lemony Snicket" is a pseudonym for Daniel Handler; Handler is frequently referenced as Snicket's agent but is also a background character who exists in-universe.
  • Dirty Coward:
    • It isn't Aunt Josephine's numerous, crippling, irrational phobias that qualify her for this title, but rather the way she instantly and shamelessly promises not to reveal Olaf's disguise and offers for him to take the children when she is threatened. The narrator and the Baudelaires agree that she was a horrible guardian.
    • Also off-screen in The Vile Village the relatives and foster parents that refuse to take in the Baudelaires due to previous guardians getting murdered, which could be avoided if sensible people simply listened to the children.
  • Distant Finale: Seven-thirteenths of The Beatrice Letters. Ostensibly they're just supplementary reading, but there's no such thing as "optional," is there?
  • Don't Eat and Swim: An exaggeratedly dark and improbable execution. Aunt Josephine tells the Baudelaires that they must wait one hour after eating before swimming in Lake Lachrymose. Klaus initially assumes it's because of cramps, but Josephine informs him that it's because of the lake's carnivorous leeches. Later on, she attracts the leaches to their stolen boat by concealing that she had eaten a banana before boarding.
  • Don't Try This at Home: In Book the Second, Snicket tells the reader to "never ever" do something, and the "ever"s continue for two whole pages.
  • Downer Ending: Posed as optional in some books, in which the author suggests to stop reading and imagine an ending better than the real one.
  • Dressing as the Enemy: Parodied - the Baudelaires unintentionally do this in The Hostile Hospital when they disguise themselves as doctors using what end up being Paper Thin Disguises, yet are mistaken by Olaf's associates for the two powder-faced women who are also disguised as doctors.
  • Dumb Is Good: Inverted Trope:
    • "Well-read people are less likely to be evil", the belief of Quigley Quagmire.
    • Then the inversion is subverted, when the Lemony Narrator later directly tells the reader this is not always the case.
  • Elective Broken Language: Both Olaf in his "Gunther" disguise ("The Erzatz Elevator") and Madame Lulu/Olivia Caliban in "Carnivorous Carnival" speak very peculiar English as a part of their Fauxreigner image. Downplayed with Olaf (since he does it only as a part of one particular disguise), and played straight with Lulu who has been doing it for a large part of her life (Lulu's language is more idiosyncratic than Olaf's: for instance, she also uses Third-Person Person speech.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • Subverted at one point. Fernald tries to help the Baudelaires and his sister Fiona escape, with the proviso that they escape with him, but then he has to pretend that Fiona is performing a Face–Heel Turn when the siblings (but not the Baudelaires) get caught during Carmelita's performance.
    • The Baudelaires help Count Olaf break into the laundry room, start a fire as a signal, and escape from the burning Hotel Denouement because they know no one will find the sugar bowl anyway, other V.F.D. members will know "the last safe place is no longer safe." Also, while Olaf may have them, he doesn't have the fortune while they're all wanted fugitives and in the middle of the ocean.
  • Eskimos Aren't Real: When Count Olaf meets Dewey Denouement in Book the Twelfth, he is surprised he isn't just a legendary figure like a Unicorn or Giuseppe Verdi. The Baudelaires remind him that Giuseppe Verdi was a real person.
  • Every Episode Ending: Every book ends with the same formula: There's a full-page picture containing a clue to the plot of the next book; comical bios for the author and illustrator, with an obscured picture of the former and a themed illustration of the latter; and a letter from Lemony Snicket to his editor explaining where to pick up the manuscript for the next book, along with several items related to it (including one specified as being for reference for illustrations; it would never show up in the illustrations). Inverted at the end of The End, where the photograph is an unobstructed portrait of the illustrator dressed as Lemony Snicket (and a bewildered expression on his face), while the illustration apparently depicts the author, and only his eyes are obscured (by cucumber slices). The pattern is then restored at the end of Chapter 14, complete with a Gilligan Cut in the illustrator's bio.
  • Everyone Has Standards: The villagers of V.F.D. are all too willing to burn rule breakers at the stake, but they start to become uneasy when the police (Olaf and Esmé) begin breaking the rules to catch rule-breakers.
  • Everyone Went to School Together:Quite a few characters went to school together, but this is somewhat justified by the fact that they were all members of a secret organization and this was their training; also, several of these characters are The Ghost.
  • Evil Costume Switch: Fiona, when joining Olaf's side, exchanges a uniform with a portrait of Herman Melville for one with a portrait of notoriously bad poet Edgar Guest.
  • Evil Tastes Good: Esmé. "I'm going to flatten you! Olaf and I are going to have a romantic breakfast of Baudelaire pancakes!"
  • Evil Teacher: Mr. Remora and Mrs. Bass aren't evil per se, just obnoxious, and at one point they praise the Baudelaires for passing their tests. Vice Principal Nero is another story.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
    • It's a children's book series about unfortunate events.
    • A Paper-Thin Disguise of Olaf's is that of a ship captain, Captain Sham.
    • Subverted with the Last Chance General Store in Book the Eighth. It does sell a very wide selection of items, and so arguably could very well apply in-universe. However, as usual, the manager is of little help to the Baudelaires.
  • External Retcon: In explaining the difference between "denouement" and "end." Snicket "reveals" the Distant Finale of several Fairy Tale stories, involving the rather non-fantastical deaths of the heroes.
  • Extremely Short Timespan: Beginning with The Hostile Hospital, each book picks up immediately from where the last one left off, and most of the books cover a period of time lasting no more than a few days (the timeframe of The Carnivorous Carnival is about 36 hours, and The Penultimate Peril is even shorter, taking place in just over 24 hours).
  • Faceless Eye: The mark of V.F.D. is such a symbol, while also comprising the organization's initials.
  • Fake Defector: Fiona in Book the Eleventh. Olaf reveals with dismay that she and Fernald had an Offscreen Moment of Awesome by skiing away from Olaf's crew as soon as they could.
  • Fake-Out Opening: In The Film of the Book. It gives its opening credits and doesn't even put the real title on the screen afterward. It only appears in the end credits.
  • Family-Unfriendly Death:Shows up regularly, due to the books' general tone.
    • In The Wide Window, Aunt Josephine is shoved into a lake full of leeches that strip people to the bone.
    • In The Miserable Mill, Dr. Orwell is startled and steps backward... right into the running lumbermill saw she was trying to have someone else shoved into.
    • In The Carnivorous Carnival, Madame Lulu and Count Olaf's bald henchman fall into a pit full of starving lions.
  • Family-Unfriendly Violence: Daniel Handler has noted that the series was inspired by and in a sense meant to be a modern version of classic fairy tales, which are rarely as pleasant as their Bowdlerized Victorian equivalents. In keeping with this fine tradition, the series contains violence that, while not graphically described, is frequently quite serious. Legs are crushed by logs, babies are threatened with death or maiming, people are shot with harpoon guns, and the effects of the Medusoid Mycelium, a fungal bioweapon sound like something more fitting for The Last of Us than a children's book series.
  • Fantastic Nuke: The Medusoid Mycelium, an incredibly dangerous fungus, is developed as a bioweapon and ultimately unleashed as such by Count Olaf. Its cultivation by V.F.D. was treated as a He Who Fights Monsters moment.
  • Fauxreigner:
    • Gunther and Lulu, who are indefinitely foreign because it's a disguise.
    • Implied with the Coach Genghis disguise as well.
  • Fear-Induced Idiocy: In "The Reptile Room", when the deliberately-misnamed Incredibly Deadly Viper bites Sunny (a baby), Mr. Poe is scared senseless due to thinking that it really is dangerous. He begins "babbling" contradictory instructions (e.g. first saying not to touch Sunny, then saying to grab her, and later saying to leave the snake alone, but then to give it some food or lure it away.)
  • Festering Fungus: The Medusoid Mycelium, a fungal bioweapon that kills its victims by growing inside of them until their breathing passages are blocked off. Thankfully it does have a pretty simple "antidote" in the form of horseradish.
  • Fictional Document: Snicket's letters at the end of each book, leading his editor to the manuscript of the following book and several props borrowed from it; also, numerous diaries and newspapers are quoted within the narrative, while the supplementary books are each a full-blown Scrapbook Story.
  • The Film of the Book: The movie was well-received by critics, made a lot of money, but a TV series re-adaptation covering all of the books eventually replaced the prospect of a film sequel after years of Development Hell.
  • Foregone Conclusion: The intros to many of the books tell you that the story will NOT have a happy ending, and Lemony Snicket will also casually reveal which characters will have bad things happen to them throughout the book.
  • Forgot Their Own Birthday: The Baudelaire siblings are put through so much misery they forget their birthdays.
    • In "The Vile Village," Klaus turns thirteen after the trio has been imprisoned and condemned to death. When he finally realizes what day it is, he sadly wishes for a Deus ex machina as his gift.
    • In "The Grim Grotto," Violet is desperately looking for something she can use to nurse Sunny back to health. When she opens the fridge, she finds a cake her sister had baked for her and realizes it's her birthday.
  • Fortune Teller: Madame Lulu in The Carnivorous Carnival. Later on it turns out that she is a fake psychic, and the book deconstructs both tropes.
  • The Freakshow: The Carnivorous Carnival has the children traveling with one containing a hunchback, an ambidextrous man, and a contortionist.
  • Fun with Acronyms: V.F.D. stands for hundreds of things.
  • Fun with Alphabet Soup: In The Hostile Hospital, Klaus and Sunny have to use alphabet soup to solve anagrams. Since the letters are so fragile and slippery, they keep breaking, forcing the two to use chunks of carrot as stand-ins for a couple of letters.
  • Fun with Foreign Languages: Based on guesswork about word frequency, Snicket translates "cul-de-sac" as "At the end of a dark hallway, the Baudelaire orphans found an assortment of mysterious circumstances."
  • Gambit Pileup: Given the shadow war between the two sides of the VFD schism, this is described frequently happening throughout the series.
  • Garden of Eden: This motif is twisted on the island in "The End," where colonists are kept from venturing the outside world and experiencing complexity and greater joy by a robed figure who assures them they have all they need as they are. The island is dominated by a forbidden apple tree, which the the Incredibly Deadly Viper offers the children a horseradish apple from (the cure for their fungus infection but also a symbol of potential which the colonists refuse, subverting the Eden parallel).
  • Geographic Flexibility: The spatial and temporal milieu of the series is best described as "everywhere and nowhere," as it's far from most known continents, and the large city the Baudelaires lived in doesn't even have a stated name.
  • Gilligan Cut: The illustrator's biographies at the end of The End and Chapter Fourteen:
    The End: He [Brett Helquist] is hopeful that...he'll be able to step outside more often in the daytime, and sleep better at night.
    Chapter Fourteen: Unfortunately, he gets out rarely during the daytime, and sleeps very little at night.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: "Cakesniffer." (Cocksucker).
  • Grandpa God: This archetype is referenced in The End, which is influenced by the Book of Genesis. Island facilitator Ishmael, who works to keep his people contained and ignorant and forbids access to the island's apple tree, is likened to God, and is an old man with a long white beard who spends most of his time presiding in a throne-like chair.
  • Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Plays out in dialogue — and thus ends up averted — in Book the Twelfth: "I suppose I'll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies."
  • Half-Identical Twins: The Quagmire triplets two boys and a girl who are "absolutely identical," so how the Baudelaires tell whether they're talking to male Duncan or female Isadora is a mystery — although Isadora is illustrated with subtly longer hair. But at least the two brothers Duncan and Quigley never share a scene.
  • Hands Off My Fluffy!: The Baudelaires despair when a snake called the Incredibly Deadly Viper bites their sister, but Uncle Monty just laughs because the name is a misnomer and the snake is perfectly docile and harmless.
  • Hanlon's Razor: The line between willful villainy and pure incompetence is rather thin, especially since some incompetent and stupid characters become pawns in what seems like a Gambit Roulette.
  • Hates Reading: The villains tend to despise reading in contrast with the Baudelaires and their allies, who love to read. This is played up more in the live-action series.
  • Haute Cuisine Is Weird: Esmé Squalor is The Fashionista with everything, including food. Her signature drink early on is the "aqueous martini" (cold water with an olive in it) before she moves on to parsley soda. She also enjoys frequenting "Café Salmonella", a restaurant where every meal (including soup, salad, sabayon, bread, and ice cream) is made using primarily salmon.
  • Heel–Face Door-Slam: Mr. Poe's sister, the editor of The Daily Punctilio, as noted in The Unauthorized Biography. She fired Lemony Snicket for trashing Esmé Squalor's terrible acting in a play (and for an unstated reason that Lemony fails to print before he's caught in the newspaper's printing rooms), hired a shock-value journalist named Geraldine Julienne and openly engages in telling falsehoods in print. After getting trapped in a basement, she sends a distress telegram to Mr. Poe; within it, she confesses that she falsified tales in The Daily Punctilio. Unfortunately for her, Mr. Poe has been taking Geraldine Julienne's advice about not reading telegrams and sends them to said journalist without reading, along with the distress telegram that the Baudelaires sent him in The Hostile Hospital. It's implied that she dies in that basement with no one but Geraldine Julienne.
  • Hero of Another Story: Everyone in the series, but especially the Quagmires (later joined by the Widdershins family) and the Snickets (including the narrator's descriptions of the circumstances under which he is writing the story).
  • He Who Fights Monsters: Discussed in Book the Tenth, where the Baudelaires wonder if they have crossed the line by doing things like planning to abduct Esmé Squalor. Eventually Defied. While living as fugitives from the eighth book onward, the Baudelaires are forced to enact several questionable deeds, from deceiving people with disguises, attempting to trap Esmé to use as a hostage, burning down a hotel, and even accidentally killing someone. Initially, they believe they are justified in doing these because they are attempts to save themselves, but slowly start to realize that most of Olaf's wicked deeds are to save himself as well, making them wonder if they're any better than him. However, after a panicked exchange, they force themselves to see that remaining true to No One Gets Left Behind is what differentiates them from Olaf.
  • Hitler Ate Sugar: Played with, a few times. (Only a villainous person places his cup on the table without using a coaster or enjoys the works of Edgar Guest.)
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • Count Olaf dies of a wound he sustained from having his harpoon gun fired at him by Ishmael.
    • Mr. Poe's sister dies off-screen trapped in a basement when one of the journalists she hired, Geraldine Julienne, advises about how telegrams are dangerous. This leads to the distress telegram that Mr. Poe's sister sends getting sent to Geraldine, courtesy of Mr. Poe believing the news.
    • The Adults Are Useless mentality of everyone the kids meet probably made most of them Too Dumb to Live when they refuse to believe the building they're in is on fire and refuse to remove their blindfolds. YMMV on whether the (potentially lethal) negligence displayed by characters who were otherwise good people made this Laser-Guided Karma, which the Baudelaires even lament in the text.
  • Honesty Aesop: Inverted in The Reptile Room which says that although the moral of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not to lie, sometimes it's good, or even necessary to lie.
  • Honor Before Reason: Captain Widdershins and Fiona's motto: "He (or she) who hesitates is lost!"
  • Hope Spot: Several, usually lampshaded by a Snicket Warning Label. The one that makes the Baudelaires cross the Despair Event Horizon is when they end up in a Kangaroo Court in Book the Twelfth, hoping to finally tell their tale, and the corrupt judges allow Count Olaf to kidnap Justice Strauss.
  • Hostage for MacGuffin: A Subverted Trope: in Book the Tenth, where for once it's proposed by the heroes, neither they nor the villain is capable of carrying out their side of the bargain.
  • Hypocrite: Fernald tries to explain himself to Fiona when they reunite after Olaf captures the former and the Baudelaires, but while he makes good points about how The Daily Punctilio is full of lies and both he and the Baudelaires have done similar in how they have set fires, there is no mention of how he's abetted Olaf in kidnapping children and murdering adults. Up to that point in the book the Baudelaires hadn't committed murder (or "accident" according to Sunny), and throughout the book they never kidnap anyone.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Alliterated "The <adjective> <noun>," e.g., The Miserable Mill, The Wide Window, for nearly all the books, the only exceptions being The Reptile Room (the outright name of a place, not a a dramatic description of it) and The End (neither adjectival nor alliterative).
  • I Have You Now, My Pretty: In The Bad Beginning Violet is being forced to marry Olaf because he has Sunny and will kill her if she doesn't, all so he can have her fortune. He also decides that he'll let her live even after he has the fortune. However, this becomes Squick when you consider all the lines he throws around about how pretty she is and how "You may not be my wife, but you are still my daughter-"
  • The Illuminati: Hinted at with the appearance of Fiona Widdershins, who seems to prefer triangular eyeglasses.
  • In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: The Film of the Book is titled Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, perhaps to emphasize the Lemony Narrator.
  • Incoming Ham: Esmé Gigi Genevieve Squalor is the sixth most important financial adviser in the city, and she will be very sorry if you forget it—she's prone to introducing herself by her full name to people who know full well who she is and what her name is.
  • Incurable Cough of Death: Subverted. Mr. Poe's cough is his defining character quirk (other than being woefully incompetent) and serves only to show what a weak and annoying person he is rather than mark him for death.
  • Improbable Infant Survival:
    • Despite all the terrible things that happen in the books, no children are killed during the course of the series. Even though one of the Quagmire triplets was thought to be killed in a fire before the Baudelaires met them, it turns out that he survived. However, several of the Baudelaires' friends who were about their age are taken by "The Great Unknown" in the last book. While the books make it clear that this is probably a very bad thing, it is never outright stated to be fatal.
    • There's also the case of Friday... She's under ten years of age and breathed the spores of the mushroom, so she had but a few hours left to live when we last saw her. It's never confirmed she took the antidote, and thanks to mob psychology, it's highly unlikely she did.
    • The fate of Carmelita Spats remains ambiguous. She's last seen in the Hotel Denouement before it takes fire.
  • In-Universe Factoid Failure: The villains of The Slippery Slope proudly boast about how they control "two of the greatest mammals: the lions and the eagles!" Klaus calls them out on their error, but they don't care. Earlier, Esmé defines "individual practitioner" as "a life of crime." Even baby Sunny knows that she's completely off the mark (and, funnily enough, provides the correct definition).
  • Ironic Nursery Tune:
    • Book the Eighth's accompanying song, Smile! No One Cares How You Feel; Book the Twelfth's Things Are Not What They Appear feels like this as well.
    • Also, The World Is A Very Scary Place. The lyrics could be threatening, to an extent, but the music is just so upbeat.
    • The Little Snicket Lad is a Common Meter song.
  • Issue Drift: The series starts off meandering fairly aimlessly through satires of various unfortunate literary settings, with The Wide Window Lampshade Hanging its lack of An Aesop, but the later books begin to diverge wildly with mixed messages about what is justifiable in conflict; The Slippery Slope resolves this while The Penultimate Peril forgets the resolution, and The End concerns the impossibility of finding answers to the big questions in life while ignoring most of the big questions in the series.
  • I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Lemony never begrudged Beatrice for breaking off their engagement, thinking he was dead, and marrying another man, a Mr. Baudelaire. He's more worried about checking up on her children, making sure they're okay, and telling their story to the world.
  • Jerkass: Sir, Vice Principal Nero, the V.F.D. council of elders to some extent, and Count Olaf when he's not being pure evil.
  • Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The Baudelaires slowly uncover the history of a secret organization called V.F.D., of which many adults in the story are a part.
  • Joker Jury: A Subverted Trope, in that the Baudelaires accidentally killed someone and two figures of unfathomable evil run the official courts.
  • Just a Stupid Accent: Characters trying to be "foreign" use broken English with clumsy syntax (like "I am loving of the children") and frequent interjections of "Please," and everyone falls for it.
  • Karmic Death:
    • Dr. Orwell when she steps into the chainsaw that she was compelling a hypnotized Klaus to use on Charles.
    • Olaf himself when his attempt to blackmail the islanders backfires horribly; he releases the Medusoid Mycelium, but only after Ishmael shoots him in the chest with the harpoon gun—a wound which later kills him.
  • Karma Houdini: Just about every villain escapes punishment until the very last books in the series. Count Olaf always goes uncaptured after the Baudelaires foil his schemes.
  • Kick the Dog:
    • After Olaf kills Uncle Monty, the adults reveal that Monty's collection of reptiles will be separated. Some will go to zoos or museums, and some will even be euthanized. The reptiles seem to cry along with the Baudelaires when each party says goodbye to the other.
    • The Village of Fowl Devotees treats the Baudelaires as little more than unpaid servants, and then as criminals when Olaf frames them for the murder of "Count Omar" (Jacques) with flimsy evidence. Not to mention they like burning people at the stake.
    • Officer Luciana(Esmé Squalor) while trying to shoot down Hector's balloon injures one of the village crows. The villagers notice this and turn on her and "Detective Dupin" for breaking the rules.
  • Kick the Morality Pet: By killing Jacques Snicket, Kit's brother, Olaf does this about six books before encountering Kit again, and she has remained up to speed. It's no surprise that she calls him a bad man while he's transporting her to a safe location.
  • Kill All Humans: While not particularly harmful, the insects called snow gnats sting humans just for the fun of it. Klaus does state, though, that they are mildly poisonous and a large enough number of stings could cause severe illness.
  • Kill It with Fire: In the Village of Fowl Devotees, burning at the stake is the designated punishment for breaking any of the town's numerous rules (which includes the biggies like murder, but also trivial and ridiculous offenses like using mechanical devices, reading certain books, and talking out of turn in town meetings). This is because the town was founded by a bunch of people who were interested in/worshiped crows that migrated strangely, and so their first two rules were "no hurting the crows" and "anyone who breaks rules gets burned at the stake." At some point, they presumably started adding other rules. In any case, this doesn't seem to be enforced for minor offenses (as in the case of the sundae with the wrong number of nuts).
  • Kissing Discretion Shot: A very rare literary version. In The Slippery Slope, it's extremely obvious that there is some chemistry between Violet and Quigley, but the moment the two get alone and one starts with the Longing Look, Snicket goes off on one of his signature spiels about Violet has had little to no privacy since the series started and that he will take this chance to give them a little.
  • Know When to Fold 'Em:
    • Violet realizes that their climb to the ascending hot air balloon in The Vile Village is not going to work out and directs her siblings back to the ground so they won't get hurt, even though the Quagmires are on the balloon and it is designed never to return to the ground.
    • The theme of The End is that all stories are interconnected and that the only way to fully understand one of them is to understand all of them.
  • Leave the Two Lovebirds Alone: Snicket does this to the readers in The Slippery Slope, telling us to give Violet and Quigley some privacy when they presumably kiss.
  • Left Field Description: The Lemony Narrator sprinkles details about someone or something's appearance throughout a scene (possibly meant to imply that the Baudelaires are just noticing them).
  • Left Hanging: So many things. In particular:
    • The contents of the Sugar Bowl, why it was stolen, or where the mysterious taxi driver took it.
    • Whether or not Count Olaf orphaned the children in the first place.
    • The fates of the Quagmires, Captain Widdershins, and his stepchildren, and Hector.
  • Lethally Stupid: Any adult who isn't outright abusive to the Baudelaires will instead cause them trouble by being completely useless, or making them doing something way too dangerous for children. Poe is the best example, as he keeps bringing them to more crazy guardians sometimes even worse than the former.
  • The Long List: The Snow Scouts Alphabet Pledge in the tenth book, along with lists of food, disguise items, and books elsewhere. Also, the close to 20,000 rules they had to follow at the Village of Fowl Devotees.
    • Esmé Squalor's library full of books cataloging what was in and out in various months, years, etc.
  • Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: The first thing the Baudelaires see of Kit Snicket in the 13th book is her bare foot sticking out of the raft she built. According to her, it's because a heavy machine was dropped on her foot and she took her shoe off to ease the pain.
  • Lyrical Dissonance: "How Do You Slow This Thing Down?" the original Gothic Archies song for the audiobook of The Slippery Slope, is a song about a runaway caravan speeding down a mountain... sung as slowly and mournfully as possible.

    Tropes M-Z 
  • MacGuffin: The Baudelaire fortune. The sugar bowl becomes an even bigger one once more and more VFD agents appear and orphans' learn more about the organization. Also, a Discussed Trope, as the word "MacGuffin" is spoken in the final book.
  • MacGyvering: As a mechanical genius, Violet does this at least once per book. And Klaus gets his turn in The Miserable Mill.
  • Making a Spectacle of Yourself: Count Olaf disguises himself with some shades at one point. His girlfriend Esmé combines shades with binoculars at another.
  • Malicious Slander: The Daily Punctilio accuses the orphans of murdering Count Olaf and most everyone believes it even though it doesn't even get the names of any of the people involved correct. Fernald uses this to profess his innocence when his name is mentioned as well, though he does admit that he saw the fires burn.
  • Manchurian Agent: A secret command word does this to Klaus. And another word undoes the effects.
  • Meaningful Name: Most character and place names are literary or historical allusions, some relevant and others more like a secular version of What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?.
  • Meaningless Villain Victory: Count Olaf's constant attempts to secure the Baudelaire fortune devolve into this, especially when he frames the Baudelaires for murder and makes them unwanted fugitives, so that even if they wanted to fight for their money and innocence with Mr. Poe's "help," they would find it hard to do so. By that point, the Baudelaires don't care anymore about the money or trusting in adults thanks to Olaf's schemes, and they care less about being the better person as long as no one is hurt. Badly. They manipulate him into setting the last safe place on fire and escaping to the sea, far from civilization, where even if he has them he doesn't have the fortune. He seems to realize this in Book the Thirteenth when he and the Baudelaires end up on a deserted island, far from civilization, and only half-heartedly tries to disguise himself as Kit Snicket.
  • Meanwhile, Back at the…: A Running Gag in The Reptile Room is the usage of this phrase.
  • Metafictional Device: The books are published in the world the orphans live in, though of course not until after all of the adventures had transpired.
  • Milkman Conspiracy: This series isn't keen on giving clear answers, but V.F.D. seems to be nothing more than the Volunteer Fire Department.
  • Mind Screw: The 11th and 13th books featured an incarnation of Mystery and Death, shaped like an enormous question mark, that stalked the seas, its motives unfathomable; the existence and activities of V.F.D. get very close to this in the 12th book, too.
  • Mistaken Identity: Jacques Snicket for Count Olaf, given they are a lot of physical similarities. Before the Baudelaires can prove his innocence, Olaf murders Jacques and frames the siblings for the act.
  • Mockstery Tale: The protagonists are attempting to uncover several mysteries related to their orphanhood and a mysterious organization known as V.F.D. which their parents were members of; the reader is expecting that the ending books will provide the answers. However, the final book called The End has an entirely different focus; eventually, the whole series turns out to be more of a coming-of-age story than mystery fiction, and one of the author's points is that the world is full of unanswered questions.
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Doctor Orwell.
  • Mysterious Past: Nearly every character has a mysterious past, and none are ever fully revealed. For example, Esmé reveals that Beatrice stole the sugar bowl, but Lemony later states that he was involved too. Just HOW he was involved, we do not know.
  • Named After Somebody Famous: Tons and tons of characters. For instance, the main characters are named "Baudelaire" after Charles Baudelaire, and their banker is named "Poe" after Edgar Allan Poe, whom Charles Baudelaire greatly admired. See also Odd Name Out, below.
  • Never Filled Out Official Paperwork: During Count Olaf's play, "The Marvelous Marriage," Violet has to sign the legal marriage document. She does so with her left hand as opposed to her right hand, which invalidates the contract since she didn't sign in her own hand, according to Justice Strauss.
  • Never Found the Body: The Baudelaire parents.
    • What happened to Aunt Josephine (in the books) and the cast left inside the hotel is left in the air.
  • Never Had Toys: When the Baudelaire siblings are adopted by their evil distant cousin Count Olaf, he doesn't give them any toys to play with, only rocks, since he doesn't care about them.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: An official website that revealed the only details about the highly secretive twelfth book made numerous updates implying an elevator-centric plotline which never materialized, going so far as to reveal a chapter picture that referred to a single inconsequential offhand sentence; the On the Next mislead by giving away random details as though they were equally important, and later obscure themselves to become even more incomprehensible; one promised a prop in the following book that never appeared.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • Klaus revealing to Olaf in Book the First that he's figured out the And Now You Must Marry Me plot leads to Olaf revealing I Have Your Wife with Sunny, and the henchmen suspecting the Baudelaires of trying to rescue her. Also, Klaus bragging to Stephano (Count Olaf) about their plans to leave him behind while going to Peru leads to Olaf murdering Monty and planning to impersonate him. By the end of the series, Klaus grows out of this, not revealing his intentions to Olaf at all.
    • Violet having a Not Now, Kiddo moment when the Quagmire siblings try to tell them where they'll be hidden in the auction.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Olaf framing the Baudelaires for murdering "Count Omar" (Jacques who was mistaken for Olaf) means that they're on the lam for the rest of the series, unwilling to go to Mr. Poe to Clear My Name, and even less likely to get access to their fortune as fugitives, making him less likely to get it by proxy. It takes him a long, long time to realize this.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Carmelita Spats's ridiculous "tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian" and "ballplaying cowboy superhero soldier pirate" outfits.
  • No Ending: While the trials of the Baudelaires are concluded in the last book, we don't know what happens next, nor many of the mysteries that were established.
  • Nominal Importance: Count Olaf's assistants are known only as "the hook-handed man," "the bald man with a long nose," "white-faced women," and "the person who looks like neither a man nor a woman." Later, named characters do join the troupe, and the hook-handed man's name turns out to be "Fernald."
  • Nonindicative Name: The Incredibly Deadly Viper has one. It's an extremely friendly and gentle snake and isn't even venomous (which all real-life vipers are).
  • Noodle Incident: It's implied that a lot of the backstory is too tragic to even mention, and Snicket himself frequently alludes to downright absurd situations such as being trapped in a flooded Italian restaurant (which may or may not be hypothetical).
  • Number of the Beast: Close with 667 Dark Avenue, a building with 66 stories (from "The Ersatz Elevator," the 6th book in the series).
  • Numerological Motif: Canon, text, paratexts ... the number thirteen is everywhere. It was once the number of search results for this page on the wiki. The main series consists of thirteen books, each with thirteen chapters. The thirteenth book has a "hidden" fourteenth chapter which serves as an epilogue, bringing the main series total to one hundred seventy chapters rather than one hundred sixty-nine.
  • Obfuscating Postmortem Wounds: In The Reptile Room, Count Olaf kills Uncle Monty by injecting him with venom and then adds a second puncture wound next to the injection site to make it look like a snakebite.
  • Odd Name Out:
    • Sunny, Klaus, and Violet Baudelaire.
      • Violet was the name of Claus von Bülow's lawyer.
    • Isadora, Duncan, and Quigley Quagmire
    • Frank, Ernest, and Dewey Denouement.
    • While the names of the first 12 books are alliterative, the last book is simply called "The End."
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
    • Snicket getting the damn story told in the first place, while presumed dead and following the Baudelaires.
    • Fiona and Fernald escaping from Count Olaf between the eleventh and twelfth book. It's one of the few times Olaf expresses dismay to the orphans without his usual Smug Snake nature.
    • The Baudelaires and Beatrice surviving to The Beatrice Letters and making a new life for themselves.
    • Quigley Quagmire survived the fire that killed his parents. While everyone thought he was dead. He also sends Violet a coded message after getting separated from her and the Baudelaires, without breaking a sweat.
  • Oh, and X Dies: In The Reptile Room, Lemony tells us Uncle Monty will die...
  • The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: V.F.D. is a strong contender for one of the most mysterious organizations in fictional history.
  • Once per Episode:
    • Every book begins with the Baudelaires finding a new guardian. In the second half of the series, they're on the run from the law and don't have a legal guardian, but there will usually be some kind of substitute guardian (although the definition gets stretched very far in some books).
    • Every book features a library of some kind, which is always of critical importance to the plot. These range from the conventional (Justice Strauss' legal library, Uncle Monty's herpetological library) to the less so (Madame Lulu's archival library).
  • Only Sane Man: Frequently the Baudelaires are this, as are other well-read volunteers. The Baudelaires are always the only ones capable of seeing through Olaf's disguises, for example.
  • Only Smart People May Pass: A Vernacularly Fastened Door has three questions that must be answered, usually involving scientific or literary subjects. Oh, and you have to find out what the questions are by yourself. And spelling counts.
  • On the Next: Lemony's letters to his Kind Editor, which include the title of the next book and a few random details from it. As the series goes on, these letters become increasingly obscured, such as by tearing and water-stains, and so the information is increasingly elusive. In the case of the eleventh book, only half the title was known; the twelfth book's title was completely lost; the letter about the thirteenth book was just a single sentence written on a napkin — with the title included, but nobody realized at the time as it deviated from the usual title pattern.
  • Orphan's Ordeal: The entire point of the series, as the Baudelaire orphans are bounced from guardian to guardian, with no adult support. The Quagmire triplets have their own set too, though a good deal of it is offscreen.
  • Our Product Sucks: Again, the books frequently attempt to convince you that you'd be better off reading something else. Several books have the narration cut off in one of the last chapters just to inform you that while the story looks like it's moving in a happy direction, everything will fall apart and be miserable again before the book is over.
  • Page-Turn Surprise: There's a spread in The Ersatz Elevator that is meant to show the reader what the titular elevator's shaft looks like. Both pages of the spread are completely black.
  • Painting the Medium: In The Ersatz Elevator, thrown the Baudelaires down an elevator shaft, and rather than try to describe it, Lemony just prints two pages solid black.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: Count Olaf, over and over again.
    • In the eighth, ninth, and twelfth books, the Baudelaires get disguises of their own. Their disguises in the eighth book are particularly ridiculous: thirteen-year-old Klaus and baby Sunny just don face masks and ill-fitting doctor uniforms and are mistaken as the pale-faced women by the women's cohorts! In the ninth book, their disguises are a bit less paper-thin, but Count Olaf still probably should have recognized them since he's been following them so long (though he does mention that they look familiar).
    • Subverted with Olaf's henchmen. When one of them is in disguise, the Baudelaires "meet" them before Olaf, and never recognize them.
  • Parental Substitute: Dr. Montgomery is one of the only guardians to listen to and support the Baudelaires. In The Penultimate Peril, volunteers Kit Snicket and Dewey Denouement answer some of the Baudelaires' questions, and the latter offers to become their guardian. All three of them die.
    • Justice Strauss and Jerome Squalor both try to play this role towards the children in books 1 and 6, respectively. But each one fails to protect them from Olaf's schemes, and neither one can stay with the children for various reasons.
  • Perilous Play: Count Olaf forces Violet and Klaus to act in his play "The Marvelous Marriage" under threat of harming a kidnapped Sunny. Rather than trying to kill the Baudelaires, this play is meant to forcibly marry Violet to Count Olaf. As such, the majority of the play is horrible.
  • Persona Non Grata: Snicket mentions that he is banned from a certain town, not so far from where you live.
  • Platonic Co-Parenting: In the book "The Vile Village," the Baudelaire orphans are adopted by an entire village at once, thanks to a program that takes the saying "it takes a village to raise a child" rather literally. This series being what it is, it doesn't work out very well. The villagers force the Baudelaires to do all their chores and later threaten to burn them at the stake.
  • Plot-Based Photograph Obfuscation: Lemony 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. The nearest thing we get to an actual image of him is the elusive taxi driver, which is rumored and hinted in the series to be him.
  • Plot Tailored to the Party: In every book, the children are in situations that require inventing skills, research skills, and sharp teeth (or cooking, from the 10th book on); also true to some degree of the Quagmire triplets, although Duncan's journalism interest is rarely useful.
  • Precision F-Strike: In The Reptile Room:
    Count Olaf/Stefano: Get in the damn jeep!
    • This has gotten some controversy over being in a children's book series. Handler says this was meant to be a Kick the Dog moment.
    • A Spanish translation renders that line as "Metanse al jodido jeep!" which translates to "Get in the fucking jeep!"
    • What probably pushed this over the edge was Lemony Snicket himself audaciously lampshading it by apologizing to readers specifically for having Olaf shout for the kids to "get in the damn jeep."
  • Princess Phase: Parodied with Carmelita Spats's "tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian" costume from the eleventh book.
  • Properly Paranoid: The Baudelaires, about Count Olaf's many attempts to infiltrate their lives and snatch them for their fortune; V.F.D., a secret organization which has split into two opposing sides, one noble and one murderous.
  • Public Execution: Fortunately averted in The Vile Village, in which Jacques Snicket and later the Baudelaires are threatened with burning at the stake, but Jacques dies beforehand and the Baudelaires escape. More or less straight in The Carnivorous Carnival, in which Count Olaf sets up a carnival attraction at which people are fed to lions, and two people are ultimately pushed in.
  • Purely Aesthetic Era: The series is a prime example of this. The setting is kept as vague as possible, grabbing the bad and depressing details from a variety of eras to create an atmosphere of pure misery. It includes, but is not limited to: operating theaters, burning at the stake, freak shows, child labor, broken elevators that require you to walk up 66 floors of stairs, mysterious black-and-white photos, and bulky, unreliable computers.
    • On the brighter side, the series is highly reminiscent of the Dark Academia aesthetic. Poetry, theatre, classic literature, and other forms of the arts are featured everywhere. Most characters have a special interest that they like to study/pursue, such as mycology, cartography, the culinary arts, etc.
  • Put on a Bus: Hector with Duncan and Isadora Quagmire; Fernald and Fiona were Put on a Bus offscreen.
  • Pyromaniac: Count Olaf really likes to burn houses down and enjoys it even more if there is someone inside He also doesn't mind the occasional hospital full of children.
  • Raised by the Community: In The Vile Village, the Baudelaires are placed in a program where they will be communally raised by the town of V.F.D., but the residents use it to make the Baudelaires do everybody's chores.
  • Real Fake Wedding: Count Olaf casts his ward Violet as the bride in his play in a bid to gain full control over her inheritance. Olaf plays this trope straight and casts a real officiant in the play, who is very distressed to learn she had been tricked.
  • Recursive Canon: Snicket's books are published within the world of the series.
  • Red Herring: A literal one shows up (but is anything but), and a patient in the Heimlich Hospital has a name that is an anagram of "red herring".
  • Reference Overdosed: If you made a list of every time Snicket makes a Shout-Out to literature and history in one of the later books (especially through Sunny's dialogue), it would be almost as long as the book itself.
  • Refuge in Audacity: As the series is primarily rooted in absurdist fiction, there's not a book that is without such a moment. Count Olaf's schemes often culminate in crimes or attempted murders in the public eye, knowing full well he can trick a public audience into not seeing his evil intentions.
  • Regional Bonus: The UK editions of the first eleven books feature different cover art by Brett Helquist (the UK and US covers for The Vile Village both feature the same scene, but the UK version is a repaint of the original); they also feature an additional picture of the Baudelaires on the back cover (The Penultimate Peril uses the picture of a building on fire from the US covers, and The End uses the same one from The Bad Beginning as a Bookend).
  • Retcon: So heavy that several companion books had to be written to fully explain them; these were themselves retconned. Handler originally thought the series would only last a few books, not the intended 13, and hence the first four books were essentially unconnected; V.F.D. was created as an ongoing plotline when it became clear the series could run 13 books, and details from the first four books were retconned to be part of the backstory to bring the entire series together.
  • Retro Universe: A part of the Schizo Tech of the setting. It should be noted that the text never makes explicit references to the Baudelaire children wearing Victorian clothing, even though they are typically illustrated as wearing such.
  • Riddle for the Ages: There are several, but the most notable is that the series never reveals why Captain Widdershins abandons the Queequeg whilst the Baudelaires and Fiona are in the Gorgonian Grotto, even though this significantly impacts the plot of The Grim Grotto and later books.
  • Rule of Symbolism: The Incredibly Deadly Viper offering the Baudelaires an apple to cure the medusoid mycelium in The End.
  • Rule of Three: Plot-important siblings come in threes: the Baudelaires, the Quagmires, the Snickets, and the Denouements.
  • Sadistic Choice: A variant of this occurs in Book the Seventh, in which Olaf offers the Baudelaires the choice of which one of the three of them won't be burned at the stake the next day; a lampshaded Deus ex machina lets them Take a Third Option.
  • Sadist Teacher:
    • Vice Principal Nero, a Small Name, Big Ego type who mercilessly butchers the violin every night but considers himself to be a genius. He forces the students of Prufrock Preparatory School to attend six-hour concerts, and punishment for not showing up is having to buy him a large bag of candy and watch him eat it. He also loves mimicking the Baudelaire siblings every chance he gets, forces them to leave in a horrible little shack infested with crabs and fungus, and makes Sunny his secretary.
    • Olaf as Coach Genghis, who purposefully makes the Baudelaires run laps all night for them to do poorly in class. Nero praises him as "the greatest gym teacher in the world" after Olaf praises his musical "genius."
    • Subverted with Mr. Remora and Mrs. Bass, who are not evil so much as they are very, very bad teachers. Remora's class consists of him endlessly telling short, boring stories while eating bananas, and Bass is obsessed with measuring things. When they are forced to give the Baudelaires "special exams" for sleeping in class (which they studied for thanks to notes collected by Duncan and Isadora Quagmire), by the third question they realize Violet and Klaus are smart students, and only continue the exam because of Nero. They ask Nero if they can give an extra hard exam to Carmelita Spats instead because she's so awful, and when Nero decides he's going to expel the Baudelaires anyway for skipping gym, Remora and Bass state it's not cheating if you're trying to make sure athletics don't affect your schoolwork. They aren't in a position to do anything since Nero is their boss, so they prove to be just as useless as the rest of the adults in the series.
  • Safe Under Blankets: During the "What Shall We Do, Lemony Snicket?" Q&A section of one of the early books, one submitter is scared of noises in their closet and their username is Blanket Over My Head.
  • Sarcastic Confession: In a column included in the Harper Collins paperback edition of the series, Lemony Snicket says that the best way to keep a secret is to tell it to everyone, but pretend you are lying.
  • Scarpia Ultimatum: Olaf threatens to drop Sunny from a tower if Violet doesn't go through with his wedding scheme.
  • Scenery Gorn: The ruins of the Baudelaire mansion are described in detail in book one.
  • Schizo Tech: Advanced computers, telegrams, blacksmiths, old cars, and more all exist side-by-side.
  • Scrapbook Story: The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The white-faced women fall victim to this in Book the Tenth. So do Fernald and Fiona in Book the Twelfth (albeit off-screen).
  • Secret Societies: The V.F.D. (Volunteer Fire Department)
  • Self-Induced Allergic Reaction: The Baudelaire siblings eat peppermints so they have an excuse to escape from dinner and decode a secret message.
  • Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Often seen in books which Klaus has to read because only he can make sense of them.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: Quite a few of them:
    • The Baudelaires trying to rescue and reunite with Duncan and Isadora. While they manage to get the latter two to safety, they never reunite with the duo. Though their brother Quigley reunites with them
    • Justice Strauss trying to help the Baudelaire siblings after being forced to let them go in the first book. She never loses faith in the justice system despite two of her co-judges letting Count Olaf kidnap her, and refuses to come with the siblings when they leave with Count Olaf from the hotel roof. Sunny has to bite Strauss to make her let go of the siblings' escape boat, and says sadly, "Goodbye".
    • Also in Book the Twelfth, Jerome Squalor trying to make up for his earlier cowardice by writing a book about Count Olaf's crimes. The book ends up being used to decode a secret lock and to start a fire in the hotel.
    • On the villainous side, Olaf stealing the Baudelaires' fortune in due part to Pyrrhic Victory. This leads to him having Villainous BSoD after getting shot by his harpoon gun.
  • Shaming the Mob: Done by Olaf of all people to the audience of the play in the film.
  • Shout-Out: Numerous allusions to literature, history, and mythology, among other things; many are listed here.
    • Why will no one call me Ish?
  • Show Within a Show: The theme song from The Littlest Elf is heard on two characters' car stereos, and Olaf has a bobblehead of the character in his car, implying it's a film within the world of the story. This ties in perfectly with the conceit that Snicket's intended audience is also part of that world when he recommends ditching out and seeing that movie instead.
  • Sigil Spam: Eyes are a frequent sight throughout the series, and one of the identifiers of volunteers.
  • Significant Anagram: Count Olaf's henchmen use anagrams of "Count Olaf" as pseudonyms. In the eighth book, Violet is given an anagrammed name on a hospital patient list. One of the anagrams in the list, when unraveled, reads "Beatrice Baudelaire". Whether this was done deliberately, to state that she's alive at least until the hospital burned down, or not, is unknown. It may just be a red herring.
    • Interestingly, the names on Book 8's patient list are themselves anagrams of an Easter Egg status. Most of them are names associated with the book's production - "Linda Rhaldeen" becomes "Daniel Handler," the author, while "Eriq Bluthetts" becomes "Brett Helquist," the illustrator. There is only one exception: "Ned H. Rirger" is, in fact, an anagram of the phrase "Red Herring".
  • Signature Style: And how.
    • Also discussed in-universe when the Baudelaires recognize a mysterious couplet as Isadora Quagmire's by her "distinctive literary style."
  • Single-Target Law: In "The Bad Beginning or Orphans," the narrator claims that there's a town which has a law that forbids him from entering it.
  • Sinister Suffocation: The Medusoid Mycelium is a parasitic fungus that rapidly grows on the victim's airways, obstructing the throat and causing death by suffocation. Following its introduction, the bioweapon has proven to strike fear into everyone's hearts, and preventing the Big Bad from unleashing it upon civilization is a major plot point in the final three books.
  • Slasher Smile: Count Olaf.
  • Sliding Scale of Continuity: The series is much the same as Harry Potter, with the first four books or so being mostly independent, starting with the Baudelaires being adopted by a new guardian and carefully explaining who the characters are to potential new readers, but later on the continuity creeps and the reader starts to need to have read the previous books to make sense of all this stuff about V.F.D. and Beatrice and so on.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Largely toward the "cynical" end of the scale; many characters seem like they would prefer to be idealistic but have had the optimism crushed out of them, and those who are consistently optimistic come across as foolish.
  • Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Generally very silly but meanders all over the place.
  • Social Services Does Not Exist: Nobody ever notices the misery the Baudelaires go through in their homes. In fact, the closest thing to social services is the useless Mr. Poe, who is a banker. Possibly justified by the time of the setting, before (or after) such things existed.
  • Spoof Aesop: Snicket's narration is peppered with comments like "The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand'"; the Spin-Off Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid compiles a lot of these, some from the main series and some entirely new.
  • Spy Speak: V.F.D., being a secret organization, naturally uses copious quantities of this, so much so that there have been disputes among readers over whether certain phrases are in code or not.
    "The world is quiet here."
    "I didn't realize this was a sad occasion."
    "If there's nothing out there, what was that noise?"
  • Stealth Insult: At the end of his life, Olaf cites Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse," but only the last stanza due to the rest of the poem having profanity inappropriate for a children's novel. Out of context, it sounds like just a cynical message on life and a warning to the Baudelaires not to have kids themselves,note  but knowing the whole poem makes it apparent that he chose it as one last middle finger to V.F.D.
  • Stealth Pun:
    • The Baudelaire children's first guardian after Olaf is called Uncle Monty, And he owns Pythons. You figure it out.
    • The End is thematically and symbolically inspired quite heavily by the Book of Genesis—a subtle ironic joke given how Genesis has the incredibly famous opening words of "In the beginning"!
  • Stop Copying Me: Vice-Principal Nero in The Austere Academy enjoys mimicking people in a mocking voice, even the children he's supposed to be teaching
  • Stopped Reading Too Soon: Parodied twice. Once, in-universe, a vital note is hidden behind chapters and chapters about somebody picking a snack. On another occasion, the author buries us in boring information before writing a note to his sister, hoping no one will be paying attention by that point.
  • Strictly Formula: Books 2-6 followed this basic formula: The Baudelaires are sent to live in a new home, which is usually not super pleasant but does have some redeeming qualities. But then Count Olaf and one of his associates arrive in a Paper-Thin Disguise, trying to get the children into his care and get their money. The children always immediately see through Olaf's disguise (but strangely never the associate's) but are never believed by anyone they tell. The children manage to expose Olaf's disguise at the very last second before his plan works, but then he and his associate run away, and the children have to go to a new home for one reason or another. Book seven followed the formula at first but broke it when he framed the children for killing "Count Olaf" (Jaques Snicket, who shared some characteristics with Olaf) to get two executed and use one to blackmail Mr. Poe to get the fortune. His plan fails and he gets away, but the children are still accused. The rest of the series focuses on the children trying to find out about V.F.D., Count Olaf's past, and the secrets their parents knew all along but never told them.
  • Sub Story: The Grim Grotto takes place largely on the V.F.D. submarine Queequeg, and later Count Olaf's sub Carmelita.
  • Sugar Bowl: The Littlest Elf is probably the most cheerful story ever. Not to be confused with the Vessel For Disaccharides, of course.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Charles, Jerome, and Hector are all good-hearted and well-meaning men whose cowardice causes them to fail the Baudelaires.
  • Synchronized Swarming: The swarm of "snow gnats" can take on forms like hoops and arrows when attacking people.
  • Take a Third Option: A non-positive example. What is Nero's solution for where to put Sunny the baby since Prufrock Preparatory has no preschool class? Have her work for him as his non-paid secretary, answering the phone, stapling, etc.
  • Take That!: Lemony Snicket takes some not-so-subtle jabs at various political figures via Sunny's "baby talk": There's "busheney" for "You're an evil man" in The Slippery Slope and "Scalia" in The Penultimate Peril (both of which have somewhat unkind translations). Then there's his association of poet Edgar Guest with the villains in The Grim Grotto, even stating outright that it's because his poetry sucked in a saccharine way.
  • Taken During the Ending:
    • At the end of "The Austere Academy", Duncan and Isadora Quadmire have been kidnapped by Count Olaf after he sees through their Baudelaire children disguises. Before they are taken away, Duncan and Isadora tells the Baudelaire children to look for the letters "V.F.D." in their notebook, but Count Olaf takes the notebook and drives away with the two children.
    • "The Ersatz Elevator", Duncan and Isadora were in a statue of a red herring. They are taken away by Count Oalf once again.
  • Theme Initials: V.F.D. is the mysterious secret organization at the center of the Myth Arc and many of its technologies, including the Volunteer Feline Detectives.
  • Theme Naming: The teachers at Prufrock Preparatory School are named after fish, and later we discover some families of siblings with alphabetically sequential names.
  • Themed Aliases: Count Olaf and his henchman often use aliases that are anagrams of Count Olaf, such as Al Funcoot or O. Lucafont. The Baudelaires finally pick up on this in the eighth book when they need to solve anagrams to find which patient on the hospital list is their sister and they reflect on anagrams they hadn't realized beforehand.
  • There Are No Therapists: So many children are orphaned in this series, but instead of counseling they get sent to abusive foster homes — or worse.
  • 13 Is Unlucky: Thirteen books in the series, all but the thirteenth with thirteen chapters.
  • This Bear Was Framed: The Mamba du Mal never bit Uncle Monty; the venom was injected via syringe, which Klaus figures out because the snake also constricts and bruises the throats of its victims, while Monty only had two prick marks—the injection from the syringe and a second hole to imitate a fang bite. Of course, he can't convince the other adults that Monty was murdered by a human.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: Every single book, although especially the first, has Snicket begging the reader not to continue because the story is simply that depressing.
  • Title Drop: Happens a few times throughout the series, with perhaps the most notable one in The End:
    In any case, this is how all our stories begin, in darkness with our eyes closed, and all our stories end the same way, too, with all of us uttering some last words - or someone else’s - before slipping back into darkness as our series of unfortunate events comes to an end.
  • Totem Pole Trench: An interesting variant: Violet and Klaus put on the same oversized outfit to disguise themselves as conjoined twins for a freak show.
  • Torches and Pitchforks: Well, torches anyway. In The Vile Village, the townspeople go after the Baudelaires this way when the children are accused of murder.
  • Totally Radical: In-Universe, Count Olaf's disguise as Detective Dupin in Book 7 comes off this way. Mainly he overuses the word "cool" (always accompanied by a finger snap) and wears an over-the-top cool outfit with sequined pants and sunglasses.
  • Translation: "Yes": Judging by the translations in-text, almost everything Sunny says carries a lot of meaning per sound. Complete sentences aren't more than two syllables long until she starts learning a little English in the later books, and she seems to get a lot more across with her Baby Talk.
  • Trigger Phrase: Hypnotism relies on these. For Klaus, the word "lucky" puts him under for commands and "inordinate" undoes the trance.
  • The Trope without a Title: The bald man, the hook-handed man... any accomplice of Olaf's.
  • Two-Teacher School: Prufrock Prep has three teachers, a Vice Principal, and no other visible staff, excepting the lunch ladies who are Olaf's white-faced women who wear masks.
  • Uncertain Doom: At the end of The Penultimate Peril, The Hotel Denouement, which was full of almost every surviving named character from the previous books, was set on fire. The End never clarifies how this turned out or who did or did not survive, and extends this fate to the entire world, as the islanders leave whilst poisoned with the Medusoid Mycelium, with only one apple from the Incredibly Deadly Viper offering a way for them to be treated, but no confirmation as to whether the islanders will take it, refuse and die at sea, or refuse and make it to land and spread infection.
  • Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: Olaf's poor hygiene and dirty house are frequently mentioned.
  • Unconventional Food Usage: In one of the pretend Q&As, Snicket advises deliberately spilling borscht on the tablecloth or the hostess's blouse so that she won't serve it again.
  • The Unintelligible: Sunny (whose speech is a mixture of gibberish, semi-relevant words and phrases (some of them literary or cultural allusions), and sentence fragments), though her older siblings can understand her and certain other people who become close to the Baudelaires begin to get a grasp on Sunny's speech as well.
  • The Unpronounceable: Sir's real name — which is why he makes people call him Sir.
  • Unreliable Expositor: The Daily Punctilio often inaccurately reports on the plight of the Baudelaires, which is lampshaded constantly.
  • Unreliable Narrator: In one of her letters, Beatrice claims that the stories the Baudelaires told her of their troubles in some cases differ wildly from Lemony's accounts.
  • The Un-Reveal: When Sir is in a sauna, he puts down the cigar whose smoke usually covers his face, but he is covered up again by the steam. In the illustration at the end of the fourth book, we can see the back of his head, so he may be bald.
  • Unusual Euphemism: On two occasions, flustered or frightened characters blaspheme the names of divine entities from about five different religions, concluding with "Charles Darwin!" or "Nathaniel Hawthorne!"
  • Verbal Tic: Fauxreigner "Gunther" and "Madame Lulu" say "please" in almost every sentence.
  • Viewers Are Geniuses: See below, but also note that many names (along with the so-called nonsense words that Sunny says) are a Shout-Out to one thing or another.
  • Viewers Are Morons: In a parody of the way children's books try to be educational, Lemony constantly defines words such as "alcove, brummagem, cower, austere, ersatz, denouement," etc. Ironically, many viewers didn't realize this is supposed to be a joke, even though he uses the most bizarre and snarky definitions, and much of the humor comes from assuming the reader already knows the standard definition of the word.
  • Villain Ball: Olaf trying to murder Violet on the operating table in The Hostile Hospital, even though he needs a Baudelaire sibling alive to get his hands on the fortune, and she's the closest to turning eighteen.
  • Villain Decay: Averted for most of the series, as Count Olaf if anything gets increasingly efficient and dangerous up to the second-to-last book. However, it hits him hard in the last one, where he's not only abandoned all his minions, allies, and resources but for the first time in the series completely fails to fool anyone with his latest Paper-Thin Disguise. It's implied that his heart just isn't in it anymore.
  • Villainous Vow: In the first book, Count Olaf says: "I'll get my hands on your fortune even if it's the last thing I do!" It doesn't turn out well for anybody.
  • Visual Pun: In The Ersatz Elevator the Baudelaires come across an auction house where one of the lots is a large Red Herring. Of course, it's not as important as they initially think, because it's a Red Herring...
  • The Walrus Was Paul: Let's face it, the entire series was a deliberate Mind Screw.
  • We Are Not Going Through That Again: After being framed for murder, and chased for several books, the Baudelaires refuse to accept Mr. Poe's help and go to the authorities to Clear My Name because frankly, he hasn't been a help at all and a V.F.D. member sent them a taxi.
  • Webcomic Time: The entire second half of the series takes place in no more than a couple of weeks, if that, but the books were published over a period of over five years; this is most noticeable when the Baudelaires meet Mr. Poe again in The Grim Grotto, and he talks about how they've been missing for "a very long time."
  • Weirdness Magnet: Sort of. The children are more like weirdness iron filings, drawn to bizarre people and places. On the other hand, that might just be because there aren't any normal people in Snicketland.
  • We Sell Everything: Last Chance General Store has everything you could reasonably hope to buy.
  • Wham Episode: The Vile Village comprehensively brings the Strictly Formula nature of the books to an end, ending with the Baudelaires on the run with nobody to care for them after being falsely accused of murder.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?:
    • Phil (Handler forgot he had been in The Grim Grotto while writing The End, so he is not mentioned with the other characters who were taken by "The Great Unknown"). Arguably a lot of minor characters who weren't brought back, in the last couple of books when many one-shot characters returned).
    • In the first book an assistant of Olaf's is mentioned who has warts all over his face. We never hear of him again.
  • "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue Chapter Fourteen; arguably a Subverted Trope because they haven't gone anywhere, although their views have moved on. The Beatrice Letters form part of an epilogue themselves. Even though the scrambled letters reveal that "BEATRICE SANK", the Baudelaires are living out their lives doing what they love. Beatrice II is currently trying to find Lemony Snicket, presumably to ask him what is happening.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Every setting, from "the city" to fictional locations with alliterative names, to an island not on any map; we don't even know where half of them are relative to each other.
    • Complicated further in The Film of the Book, which mixes American and British accents.
    • If examined closely, the package the children receive at the end of the film is postmarked to Boston. The film is non-canon, and if Boston were the location, it'd be a highly fictionalized version of the city.
  • Widely-Spaced Jail Bars: An illustration in The Bad Beginning shows Sunny in a birdcage built this way, though being suspended from a tower makes the escapability of the bars less useful.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Aunt Josephine, for nearly everything, including realtors. Why she hid inside a cave that Lemony says is 'Phantasmagorical, a word which here means "every scary word you can think of mashed together with horror' is because, before her husband Ike died, she was ever so slightly braver and loved swimming in the leech-filled lake.
    • The movie and an offhand line in a later book justify some of her fears.
    • One of V.F.D.'s safe places was a cave a group of treacherous realtors seized, so perhaps that phobia was justified.
  • Wig, Dress, Accent: Most characters' disguises involve some combination of these or similar items, and the three stages of V.F.D.'s disguise training— Veiled Facial Disguises, Various Finery Disguises, and Voice Fakery Disguises — resemble this trope.
  • Wise Beyond Their Years: The Baudelaires know more about many things than most adults in the series: Violet can invent things on the fly as needed, Klaus reads faster and deeper than anyone, and Sunny can bite through just about anything and has an affinity for cooking.
  • World Gone Mad: Once, things were united behind V.F.D. The schism happened, and everything went straight to hell.
  • World of Mysteries: The author's whole point is that "everyone has their own stories, and you cannot know everything." Lampshaded in the seventh chapter of Penultimate Peril, when the author mentions several random people involved in random shady goings-on, and in the ninth chapter of The End, when the protagonists find a lot of different objects brought to the seashore, each of which has its own story and is mysterious in its way.
  • World of No Grandparents: The Baudelaires don't seem to have any close relatives; at one point Mr. Poe attempts to send them to a nineteenth cousin. Granted, the people they know have a habit of dying mysteriously, and the ones still alive refuse to take in the Baudelaires for fear of meeting the same fate.
  • Worst Aid: Invoked; Count Olaf's henchmen trying to kill Violet via "cranioectomy" — not exactly subtle since it means "removing the head."
  • Worst News Judgment Ever: "'Heimlich Hospital Almost Forgets Paperwork!' Wait until the readers of The Daily Punctilio see that!" One of many examples courtesy of Geraldine Julienne, star reporter.
  • Would Hurt a Child: Count Olaf and his henchmen (which is something that Fernald can't deny when Klaus chews him out), as well as Aunt Josephine (abandons them to save her skin), Sir (puts them in dangerous labor conditions), Dr. Orwell (hypnosis to compel minors to commit murders), Vice Principal Nero (letting a coach run three children ragged from midnight until dawn), Esmé Squalor (traps them in elevators and statues), the titular Vile Village (plans to burn them at the stake on flimsy evidence), and Ishmael (will let them die from poisonous mushrooms if it means remaining the leader).
  • Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Unsurprisingly, few adults meet this standard. Justice Strauss, Uncle Monty, Jerome Squalor, Phil, Mr. Remora, and Mrs. Bass and Captain Widdershins are among the minority in that they treat the Baudelaires kindly if remaining inept. In The Slippery Slope, the powder-faced women defect on this principle, having met their breaking point on the villainy they could stomach from Olaf's troupe and being unwilling to harm Sunny when ordered.
  • You Are Too Late: In The Austere Academy, the Baudelaire siblings dash just in time to see Olaf's henchmen carry off Duncan and Isadora for their fortune. This happens again in The Ersatz Elevator with Duncan and Isadora carted away in a statue shaped like an actual Red Herring.

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