Awesome / A Series of Unfortunate Events

Spoilers for every book in the series will follow.

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The Baudelaire Orphans

Usually get at least one per book. God, these guys are good at surviving.

• Collective:
  • The Xanatos Speed Chess they play at the end of The Slippery Slope to rescue Sunny AND learn the location of "the last safe place." Very dangerous, but it pays off. "We know where the sugar bowl is." Oh, these little Chessmasters.
  • After ten books of being manipulated, mistreated, and tossed around from one dangerous situation to the next, the children decide that they're done listening to Mr. Poe at the end of The Grim Grotto. Considering that he's one of the many ignorant adults in the series, this really shines through as a triumphant moment for the trio.
• Violet:
  • In The Bad Beginning:
    • Violet manages to jury rig a grappling hook using only a curtain rod, some wire from a painting, a thirty foot rope hand made from torn straps of cloth, a rock, and a very clever knot. She then proceeds to throw the hook up the side of Olaf's tower, never giving up, no matter how many times she missed and not even when the hook cut open her shoulder on its way down. All for the sake of rescuing her little sister.
    • When she figures out at the last minute how to avoid marrying Olaf — sign the marriage certificate with her left hand; because she's right-handed, she wouldn't have signed in "the bride's own hand", so she wouldn't be legally married.
  • In The Reptile Room, her proving that Stephano murdered Uncle Monty by breaking into his suitcase to find the evidence.
  • Her managing to read an extremely difficult book in The Miserable Mill when Klaus is taken out of action. To give you some idea of how difficult, Violet got stuck on the second word of the first sentence. Yet she powers through, manages to accurately guess the meaning and uses this knowledge to undo Klaus's hypnotism, indirectly saving the day.
  • In The Hostile Hospital, Violet invents a jumping device to escape a burning hospital while locked in a closet. It's just another normal day for her, but you have to remember that she's drugged out of her mind at that particular moment, since she's just had anesthesia.
• Klaus:
  • In The Miserable Mill, Klaus saves Charles by moving a tree trunk, with nothing but a very sticky gun, a stick and the strength of his arms. This would be more than enough to categorize him as a Badass Bookworm.
    • Making this better is that usually this kind of MacGyvering is Violet's specialty, as his narration points out.
  • In The Hostile Hospital, Klaus faces all of Olaf's henchmen who have cornered him in the operation theater. All he's got is a rusty knife to defend himself; he won't even need to use it, and will escape successfully while saving his sister Violet.
    • Please note that he escapes by jumping on Violet's hospital gurney and riding it out.
  • In The Slippery Slope, Klaus breaks a complicated code using resources from a library. The kicker? The library has already burned to the ground, so he's basically relying on ashes.
• Sunny:
  • In The Miserable Mill, Sunny engages in a swordfight with Georgina. As a baby. She doesn't even have a sword, she just uses her sharp teeth to block the sword in mid-air. She eventually loses, but if it wasn't for the very large saw blade, it's implied Sunny would have won otherwise.
  • Climbing up an elevator with her teeth in The Ersatz Elevator.
  • In The Slippery Slope, taking advantage of the fact that Olaf can't understand anything she says to get away with repeatedly insulting him.

Others

• Friday gets one when she orders Olaf to stop misbehaving, while he points a harpoon gun at her. She gets another one when she flatly tells him to go away, being the first person in the series, aside from the Man with Beard but no Hair and the Woman with Hair but no Beard, that he actually obeys. Note that she's only seven years old.
• You may actually feel like cheering for Count Olaf when he calls out Carmelita for being such a horrible brat and dumps Esmé.

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